Modern travelers from “Western Europe,” much previous scholarship has shown, played crucial roles in delimiting and defining “Eastern Europe.” Yet until now there has been little work on the role of “Eastern European” travelers in resisting or enabling these efforts. As the essays collected in Under Eastern Eyes show, the region's travelers were not content to remain mere objects of others' classification efforts. Yet, as the editors point out, these same travelers were often bound by narrative conventions, preconceptions, words, and concepts first created in the “West.” Nearly all of the travelers discussed in this volume, from seventeenth-century Hungarian students of the Reformed Church to Bulgarians who ventured west during the Cold War, seem preoccupied with their own European-ness and where their homelands fit within an imagined geography of Europe.
The volume begins with three introductory essays. Alex Drace-Francis sets out to define the book's subject of study, “eastern European travel writing.” (The insistence on not capitalizing the adjective is meant to reflect a determination to place the region within Europe, and the convention is adopted in this review.) The core of his essay explores the origins of travel writing, whose elements can be traced back to the Bulgarian empire and in the Serbian kingdom, but whose main characteristics took form in the High Renaissance, when travelers from across Europe shared common destinations (such as the Ottoman world) and common reasons for travel (such as religious pilgrimage). Still, Drake-Francis concludes, we lack a strong understanding of the rise of literacy, reading publics, and other developments crucial to the history of eastern European travel writing. David Chirico also begins with a question of how to define the subject of study, here preferring the word “travel narrative”—a genre that, among other things, consists of a “nonfictional first person narrative … ordered in accordance with, and whose plot is determined by, the order of the narrator's act of traveling” (39).
The third introductory essay, written by Wendy Bracewell, moves from origins and definitions of the topic at hand to the volume's main theme: “the ways [eastern European travel writers] located themselves and their societies with reference to Europe” (64). Bracewell offers a wonderfully complex and sweeping essay demonstrating the ways in which travel writing, both western and eastern, contributed to common geographical imaginations, value judgments, and, ultimately, the creation of oppositions that would define eastern Europe. Before the Enlightenment, travel accounts across the continent—whether pilgrimage narratives, embassy reports, or how-to travel accounts—viewed Europe as a “multiplicity of languages, confessions, climates, and political units, but the whole patchwork made up a single, more-or-less harmonious European whole” (72). Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, eastern European travel writers traveled west to “discover” Europe. Reformers used western European notions of progress and civilization to call for economic, political, and cultural change. Others attempted to push back against emerging stereotypes of eastern Europe as backward and semibarbaric, often with little success. Unwittingly nor not, most contributed to a mental division of Europe into East and West and helped create ambivalence about what it meant to be an eastern European, or an eastern European within Europe.
The remainder of the volume consists of nine case studies. As if seeking to add another layer of subtlety to her introductory essay, Bracewell's chapter on early-nineteenth-century travel writing examines various efforts to describe a common Slavic Europe that, like pre-Enlightenment writing about Europe, celebrated a diversity that existed within a common cultural fabric. Efforts to imagine a diverse yet whole Slavic world eventually failed, finally and most significantly because travel writers after 1848 turned away from notions of pan-Slavism to dedicate themselves to nation-building projects. Many of the arguments laid out by Bracewell appear in other essays as well. Graeme Murdock's essay, the only contribution to study the pre-Enlightenment era, follows students in Hungary's Reformed Church as they travelled westward and then returned home. They, too, thought in terms of diversity within a common whole, confident of their place within the continent's Reformed community. In his Europica varietas (1620), Márton Szepsi Csombor expressed disbelief that educated Englishmen could barely speak Latin—a failing that once resulted in Csombor mistakenly traveling to Canterbury instead of Cambridge (‘Cantabrigia’). A new imagined geography, however, had begun to emerge in the eighteenth century. Hungarians writing between 1750 to 1850, Irina V. Popova-Nowak argues, collaborated in situating Hungary between the civilized West and barbaric Asia, while marking peoples and landscapes as peculiarly Hungarian.
It would be impossible to summarize all of the remaining essays, which are, on the whole, insightful and a joy to read. “Europe” is on the minds of all the writers discussed, no doubt, in part, because all but one of the essays looks at travel within Europe. Zoran Milutović's description of Rastko Petrović's adventures in imperial Africa, however, also describes a man grappling with his own identity as a European. Milutović's essay, like the four other essays on late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century travels, picks up where Bracewell's introductory essay left off to see how notions of East and West took different forms after 1848 and to strengthen the conclusion that eastern European travel writers were complicit in maintaining imagined divisions between East and West. Petrović, who traveled through much of Africa with evening clothes in his suitcase, belonged among Europeans who at once discussed Proust and at the same time distanced themselves from the barbaric, often naked, Africans he allegedly saw. But, as Milutović argues, this was an identity to which he could only aspire. An encounter with a Swiss masochist, a character who bears a striking resemblance to Joseph Conrad's Kurtz, reminds Petrović that Serbia, “small and weak,” will never belong to the Europe of empire and world domination.
Travel writers, of course, are not the only people to have struggled with the term “eastern Europe.” Not surprisingly, the editors, seeking to define the scope of their study, felt compelled to define “eastern Europe” for themselves. The forward claims to use the term as “neutral and geographical” (ix). Drace-Francis's essay and the introduction to the accompanying volume, A Bibliography of Eastern European Travel Writing, adds that “eastern European” travel writing includes those works in the major languages of the region but, for the most part, not those in German and Turkish. It would be an easy criticism to fault the editors for excluding works by Joseph Roth from the bibliography or accuse them of reifying the very East-West dichotomies that so many have tried to destabilize. More importantly, however, these choices erase the intimate relations between, for example, Czech- and German-language authors who inhabited the same cities and intellectual milieus. The choice to exclude German- and Turkish-language texts in particular suggests an exclusion of whole populations from the history of “eastern Europe”—millions of people who, until the twentieth century, had been just as much a part of the region's history as anyone else.
These concerns aside, the editors deserve high praise for a volume with a well-defined subject, common research questions, and a coherent argument about imagined geographies and European-ness. The accompanying bibliography and the editors' contributing essays reveal a deep knowledge of eastern European travel writing that has resulted from many, many hours of careful research. (Both volumes grew from a major research project carried out at the University College London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies.) Moreover, the volume suggests ways in which travel writing can contribute to research questions beyond those related to identities and imagined geographies.
As Drace-Francis points out, a careful study of travel writing might prove a starting point for research on publishing practices and the emergence of literary cultures in the eighteenth century. Popova-Nowak provides an intriguing look at how early-nineteenth-century technologies made new travel practices and experiences possible. Both Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and Rossitza Guentcheva suggest new avenues for understanding the possibilities and limits that writers faced under Communism. Students of eastern Europe—as well as Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Southeastern Europe, and Europe—will benefit greatly from this collection of essays as well as the 584-page bibliography, which is organized according to the language of the text and includes several helpful indexes.
