Does Eastern Europe Still Exist? Did It Ever?

“Eastern Europe is disappearing,” begins Jacob Mikanowski in this provocative essay. What he means is that the cultural imaginary of the region as a cohesive whole is becoming obsolete. Globalization is the main culprit that mainstream news would blame for this, as well as the internal fracturing of a geographical region no longer organized under the same regime or set of cultural symbols.

"But then again, perhaps Eastern Europe never existed in the first place. Maybe it was only a figment of the Cold War imagination. If the fall of the Iron Curtain removed the geopolitical rationale for studying the region, it also removed the main thing binding it together."

If you want to find what "Eastern Europe" once looked like (and still does), you can drive deep into the remote regions of the countryside of Romania and Albania, where little has changed on the surface in the last 40 years. Yet Mikanowski deconstructs this idea of a hidden authenticity lurking in Eastern forests and villages, which he argues are just more stereotypes retroactively conveying cohesion on the area.

He moves into and beyond those stereotypes through a survey of Eastern European literature, which "has been about the capriciousness of fate, the inescapability of history, and the general absurdity of life." He seeks out latent tropes in fiction from various countries to find throughlines and try to identify a character of a place (or set of places) and let them write their own history rather than being on the receiving end of a set of imaginary constructions we have about what life was, and is, like.