East Is Always Further East

Like most Americans who grew up in the 1980s, I was raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies that portrayed the Eastern bloc as the inaccessible, more-than-slightly menacing home of the geopolitical Other. In the spy thriller Gotcha! (1985), the horror in his mother’s voice when Anthony Edwards tells her he is stuck in East Berlin marked my first awareness that East Berlin (a) existed and (b) was supposedly off-limits. The Soviet Union was then sufficiently far away that any non-American accent could passably signify “Russian,” from Robin Williams’s in Moscow on the Hudson (1984) to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in Red Heat (1988) to Sean Connery’s in The Hunt for Red October (1990), though it helped to have “Moscow” or “red” in the film’s title. “In Soviet Union,” the quip goes, “television watches you!” In that peculiar decade, an entire standup career could be built around antimetabole that shows Eastern Europe as an antiworld to the West.

The same sense of Eastern Europe’s fascinating, yet irremediable, otherness was also—and remains—a significant point of interest in the Western reception of Eastern European writers. This was particularly true in the 1970s and 1980s, when writers and editors from the United States looked to colleagues who had been forced into exile as native informants on a region whose mystery was as outsize as its place in the cultural consciousness. A case in point is the highly influential series “Writers from the Other Europe,” which Philip Roth edited for Penguin from 1974 to 1989, and which introduced a generation of American readers to the works of Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kiš, and others—all of them men, we should note, which both reflected and perpetuated a cultural paradigm regarding who should serve as foreign spokesperson for a silenced Other. ¹ The authors included in Roth’s series, though writing for their own national audiences and within national contexts unfamiliar to the vast majority of Western readers, were here offered as representatives of an alien world, and they were received as such. Even their jokes could not be taken at face value, as Robert Kirsch suggests in his 1975 review of Kundera’s Laughable Loves, which inaugurated Roth’s series: “But it is precisely the freedom to be funny, to be sardonic, to indulge in erotic comedy, which points up the spiritual slavery of writers in a totalitarian setting.” ² That humor was different when written in Eastern Europe from what it might be in the West was given in advance. All the reader could do was to see these native informants as confirming the conclusion about otherness already provided by Western editors and critics.

How we define the geographic and cultural boundaries of this alterity has shifted over time and depending on the aims served by the concept, and in this there has been little difference between those of us in the West looking eastward and those in the East trying to situate themselves—often, it happens, by looking further east. While the very notion of Eastern European otherness may be the product of the Western European Enlightment, as Larry Wolff demonstrates in his indispensable study Inventing Eastern Europe, the economic and political reconfiguration of the whole continent following the Second World War seemed to literalize the ideational. ³ That borders and policies appeared to conform roughly to a preconception of Eastern Europe, however, did not fully neutralize the malleability of the concept itself. What has especially interested me in tracking how émigré “writers from the other Europe” have carved out a place for themselves in Western cultural space is precisely the manner in which they have both embraced their perceived alterity and then redefined Eastern Europe to exclude themselves from it. In other words, the Western fascination with Eastern European literature in the last decades before the collapse of Soviet communism, with writers from Eastern Europe repeatedly invited to commodify their personal experiences for a Western audience, produced a didactic feedback loop wherein Eastern European émigrés expended the cultural capital of their otherness in order to reject that perception outright.

This last point demands clarification. I do not mean to imply that writing in one’s native language, and at least primarily for one’s own compatriots, is the same as writing for a foreign audience, and in fact it is the opposite claim that I wish to make here. At the moment that a text from Eastern Europe was translated and marketed to an Anglophone audience, it was fundamentally a different text, one whose geopolitical context, stripped almost entirely of its particulars, remained in the foreground of the text’s reception. Presumably, no one in communist Czechoslovakia read Kundera because he was from Eastern Europe. In the United States, this was precisely why we were told to read him.

Yet the aura surrounding Eastern European otherness presents an interesting paradox. If the West has looked to writers like Kundera and Czesław Miłosz to explain what life is like in Eastern Europe, then why have these same writers so frequently used this opportunity to tell us that they are not, in fact, from Eastern Europe, or that what we call “Eastern Europe” does not exist in the first place? Why does Western discourse persist in its Romantic illusions of Eastern European history and culture, still a common feature of American writers writing about colleagues from the East, while simultaneously inviting counterclaims from these same colleagues?

The most infamous of these corrections may be Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 commencement address at Harvard, in which he argues that the West’s perception of itself is so grossly distorted that it cannot hope to understand the East. Besides its unflattering portrayal of American culture to a predominantly American audience, Solzhenitsyn’s address is especially striking in its suggestion that terms like “East” and “West” have little to do with geography but refer instead to that very same self-perception, to one’s sense of participating in one historical narrative over another. Thus, Solzhenitsyn tells us, “Japan has increasingly become a distant part of the West,” whereas Russia, given its “special character,” is not entirely of the East. ⁴

Many writers have followed Solzhenitsyn’s lead, with each explaining to a Western readership that Eastern Europe is not what—or where—it appears. Kundera has made a veritable art of these corrections, beginning with his 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” There, Kundera defines Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary as “the eastern border of the West.” ⁵ The West encompasses a particular vision of modernity, Kundera argues, one that is utterly distinct from that of the East. The countries of Central Europe have not adopted the Eastern European vision so much as they have been co-opted by it. This is no longer “a drama of Eastern Europe, of the Soviet bloc, of communism; it is a drama of the West—a West that, kidnapped, displaced, and brainwashed, nevertheless insists on defending its identity.” ⁶ In 1984, when Kundera published this essay, few observers in Washington or London would have thought twice about placing Prague squarely in Eastern Europe. The same was true two years later, when Kundera sharpened his point by describing Central Europe as “a premonitory mirror showing the possible fate of all of Europe.” ⁷ The West needed to be concerned with Eastern Europe more as a phenomenon than as a fixed geopolitical entity. Eastern Europe, a most dire condition, could happen anywhere. And since the collapse of Soviet communism would seem to neutralize the threat, effectively removing the Other, 1991 necessitated still another shift in Kundera’s definitions, this time away from the “Central Europe” designation altogether and favoring the term “small nations,” whose internal diversity the Czech novelist contrasts with a huge, hegemonic, and monolithic Russia. ⁸

If Solzhenitsyn and Kundera best represent the Russian and Czech adjustments to the East–West binary, the most powerful Polish contribution undoubtedly belongs to Miłosz. Tracing the emergence of Central Europe as its own geopolitical category in the 1980s, Maria Todorova has correctly noted that Miłosz’s definition is more inclusive than Kundera’s, now encompassing Ukraine and the Baltics. ⁹ That is, although Kundera’s map already includes Poland in the West and thereby frees Miłosz from the stain of otherness, Miłosz pushes the East further east, beyond the Borderlands, which in Polish literature are nevertheless consistently subject to an orientalist fascination.

Where is Eastern Europe, if not in Prague, Warsaw, Vilnius, or Kiev? The eastward march across the semantic field that we witness in the 1970s and 1980s prefigures the academic struggle ever since, as those of us with a scholarly investment in the region—and therefore a practical investment in its clear definition—attempt to redefine our object of study. The cascade of names for our professional institutions reflects this circumstance. What had been established in the late 1950s and early 1960s as variations on “the Center for Russian Studies” are today called something like “the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies,” to use the example from my own university. Similarly, the professional organization that was once the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies is, as of 2008, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Our rebranding at the organizational level—a nomenklatura nomenklatury, if you will—has been consistently expansive, an instance of “mission creep” that now leaves us with an area of study covering well over the five thousand miles from Prague to Kamchatka—greater than the distance separating Prague from Detroit—and with it dozens of distinct languages, ethnicities, and geopolitical realities. Instead of clarifying our intellectual purpose to ourselves or explaining its relevance to the broader public, whose funds our field requires, the name game has the opposite effect: it calls into question whether the “area” of area studies is geographic at all.

Tempting though it may be to claim that these semantics lose their relevance in post-Soviet space, recent developments in Ukraine demonstrate both their impact on the ground and their enduring currency in Western media. Beyond any specific grievances the Euromaidan protestors had against the Yanukovych administration, the mass demonstrations that began in Kiev in November 2013 were energized by the much broader perception that the government’s unexpected rejection of an association agreement with the European Union constituted a turning away from the West. Likewise, English-language commentators have consistently presented the political crisis as reflecting a choice with regard to where Ukraine itself wants to be located along what is no longer a geographic, but a conceptual, axis.

What makes defining Eastern Europe’s specific geography so difficult, and what is already prefigured in the correctives offered by Kundera, Miłosz, and even Solzhenitsyn, is that “Eastern Europe” is a metaphor that Western discourse has unwittingly conflated with physical space. In geographic terms, east is always east of the observer’s privileged position, but this is not true of “Eastern Europe.” The region is geographically amorphous, merely implying proximity to the centers of Western modernity, such as Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and Rome, while rejecting the project of Western modernity writ large. Within this paradigm, the terms “East” and “West” express little more than their binary opposition. We could easily replace them with terms that serve the same purpose, as then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did when he offered the terms “Old Europe” and “New Europe” to refer to countries that opposed or supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was simply revising an older semantic script.

Typically, then, the term “Eastern Europe” as it appears in Western discourses denotes nothing more than the seam-side of Western modernity, a negation that, in a Foucauldian turn, affirms the West. It partakes of a broader rhetoric of reversal and stepping through the looking-glass. ¹⁰ This rhetoric is inherently spatial, describing a world turned inside-out, with specific images and tropes repeatedly, even obsessively reenacting the same basic opposition. In the West, large crowds mill around enormous, well-stocked shopping malls, though they may not intend to buy anything. In the East, people line up for hours or days to get into a store that has nothing to sell. In the West, writers matter little, whereas in the East they receive monuments and show trials. “Enter and exeunt Western observors salivating over the Russians’ proclivity to read books while riding public transportation,” Joseph Brodsky writes. ¹¹ We might note that the Western fantasy is not so much that Russians read on the bus but that Americans do not.

The extent to which this rhetoric has itself been thematized in post-Soviet literature—the works of Viktor Pelevin in Russia and Dorota Masłowska in Poland come immediately to mind—falls beyond the scope of the present paper and its modest dimensions. But the very fact that it has generated a substantial body of literature over the last two decades attests to its having been internalized even by writers whom this rhetoric is designed to essentialize. This is not to say that cultural production in the region is always in reference to its Western analogues. On the contrary, most of what is written in Russian, Polish, or Czech never circulates outside its national audience. That small share that does reach Western shores, however, is instantly subsumed into a longstanding rhetoric of the Other Europe.

During the Cold War, the Eastern European intellectual in the West would find a cultural role already prepared, that of a native informant on how things look in a separate, generally inaccessible space. It is a role that has not expired entirely with the Cold War—Andrei Codrescu’s relentless on-air references to a mythic Eastern Europe continue to this day—because the purpose that Western literature has long assigned these agents provocateurs is to affirm our own existence back to us by reminding us that our mirror opposite is out there, somewhere. Thus Stanisław Barańczak, in one of his earliest American essays, refers to “the average Eastern European” as “E.E.: the Extraterritorial”—intelligent life, yes, but from another galaxy, and doomed to misunderstand as much as he is inevitably misunderstood, since the “gap between two social systems, two historical traditions, and two collective mentalities proved to be too wide to be bridged by sympathy alone.” ¹²

Joseph Brodsky understood this very well when he suggested to Vaclav Havel that it may be time “to scrub the term ‘Communism’ from the human reality of Eastern Europe so one can recognize that reality for what it was and is: a mirror.” ¹³ More than mere semantic shifts within a semantic field, these quibbles over where the West ends and the East begins have been engineered actively by writers as a means of grappling with and perpetuating their own displacement, which has been at the core of their interest to a welcoming Anglophone marketplace. By “actively,” I do not mean “cynically”; the struggle with the geo-cultural imaginary is a very personal “search for self-definition,” as it had been for Miłosz. ¹⁴ Even when it is unconscious, however, the ways in which these authors switch codes for their new audience merely underscores that there are multiple codes one might employ when speaking of those blank spots “to the east of Germany” bearing the inscription “ubi leones,” as Miłosz suggested to underscore both the region’s marginality and, elsewhere, the tendency among Western intellectuals to fill that space with their own heroic myths. ¹⁵ If those territories require any label at all, I propose that ubi leones works as well as any other.