Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative History of East European Travel Writing on Europe 9786155211539

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Foreword
1. Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing
2. The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre
3. The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing
4. ‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and Early Modern European Identity
5. Travels Through the Slav World
6. The Odyssey of National Discovery: Hungarians in Hungary and Abroad, 1750–1850
7. European Identity and Romantic Irony: Juliusz Słowacki’s Journey to Greece
8. Metaphor and Monumentality: The Travels of Nicolae Iorga
9. Oh, to Be a European! What Rastko PetroviΔ Learnt in Africa
10. Excursions into National Specifi city and European Identity: Mihail Sebastian’s Interwar Travel Reportage
11. The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze: Jan Lenica’s 1954 Sketchbook of London
12. Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism (1945–1989)
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

UNDER EASTERN EYES

iBracewell_A_book.indb i

4/14/08 2:51:20 PM

East Looks West Volume 2

iBracewell_A_book.indb ii

4/14/08 2:51:23 PM

UNDER EASTERN EYES



A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe

Edited by Wendy Bracewell & Alex Drace-Francis

Central European University Press Budapest New York

iBracewell_A_book.indb iii

4/14/08 2:51:23 PM

©2008 by Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis Published in 2008 by CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of the Central European University Share Company Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 Fax: +36-1-327-3183 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.hu 400 West 59th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Tel: +1-212-547-6932 Fax: +1-646-557-2416 E-mail: [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-9776-09-8 ö (East Looks West) ISBN 978-963-9776-11-1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Under Eastern eyes : a comparative introduction to East European travel writing on Europe / edited by Wendy Bracewell & Alex Drace-Francis.—1st ed. p. cm.—(East looks West) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-9639776111 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Travelers’ writings, East European—History and criticism. 2. East Europeans —Travel—Europe —History. 3. Europe—Description and travel. I. Bracewell, Wendy. II. Drace-Francis, Alex. III. Title. IV. Series. PN849.E9U538 2008 809’.935914—dc22 2008001270

Printed in Hungary by Akadémia Nyomda, Martonvásár

iBracewell_A_book.indb iv

4/14/08 2:51:23 PM

Table of Contents

Foreword Wendy Bracewell, Alex Drace-Francis 1.

2.

3.

...............................

vii

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing Alex Drace-Francis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre David Chirico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing Wendy Bracewell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

61

4.

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and Early Modern European Identity Graeme Murdock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

5.

Travels Through the Slav World Wendy Bracewell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

6.

The Odyssey of National Discovery: Hungarians in Hungary and Abroad, 1750–1850 Irina V. Popova-Nowak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

7.

European Identity and Romantic Irony: Juliusz Słowacki’s Journey to Greece Maria Kalinowska . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

8.

Metaphor and Monumentality: The Travels of Nicolae Iorga Andi Mihalache . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

iBracewell_A_book.indb v

4/14/08 2:51:24 PM

9. Oh, to Be a European! What Rastko PetroviΔ Learnt in Africa Zoran Milutinović . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 10. Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity: Mihail Sebastian’s Interwar Travel Reportage Diana Georgescu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 11. The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze: Jan Lenica’s 1954 Sketchbook of London Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 12. Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism (1945–1989) Rossitza Guentcheva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 Notes on Contributors Index

iBracewell_A_book.indb vi

...............................................

379

..................................................................

381

4/14/08 2:51:24 PM

Foreword

There are several difficulties. In the first place, the enormous number of things I can remember; in the second, the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written. As a great memoir reader, I know many different ways. But if I begin to go through them and to analyse them and their merits and their faults, the mornings—I cannot take more than two or three at the most—will be gone. Virginia Woolf, ‘A sketch of the past’ (1939–40)

This book aims to provide readers with an introduction to the phenomenon of east European travel writing about Europe. To our knowledge, it is the first book to analyse the phenomenon of east European travel writing in a systematic fashion.1 There are good and obvious reasons for taking an interest in this subject. Travel texts from eastern Europe offer information and opinions about places and experiences all over Europe. They give innumerable insights into the development of personal and collective identities. Some of them are not just instructive but even quite entertaining. They do not necessarily need to be read as ‘reverse travel’, or ‘writing back’ against ‘European’ discourse, but emerge from and contribute to a series of interrelated but as yet insufficiently understood cultural traditions.

1 This book constitutes one of the main outcomes of a larger research project, East looks West: East European travel writing, 1550–2000, carried out at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. It accompanies our simultaneously published A bibliography of east European travel writing in Europe, ed. Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007) which lists over 4,400 travel accounts published in book form between ca. 1550 and 2000.

iBracewell_A_book.indb vii

4/14/08 2:51:24 PM

VIII

Under Eastern Eyes

East Europeans didn’t confine their travels to Europe: they often went further afield, and accounts of such journeys play an important role in defining and locating themselves and their societies. (The piece by Zoran MilutinoviΔ here gives a fascinating insight into a Serb’s African voyage in the early twentieth century.) So why do we concentrate on Europe? Because Europe has been more than just a travel destination. Perhaps more than anything else, it has become a sign which, regardless of the specific definition of Europe being advanced, has served as a means of exclusion and drawing boundaries. The very concept of Europe emerged in a long process of repudiation and ‘mirroring’, directed not only against the Orient, America, and overseas colonies, but also against nearer or internal others.2 This process of self-definition, not solely west European in origin, rested on a long-standing symbolic geography. As modernity became associated with its point of origin in a few Atlantic states and taken for a fundamentally ‘European’ attribute,3 so Europe was often equated with the West, leaving the Europeanness of the East to be actively established. ‘Eastern Europe’ has often been defined in terms of its relationship to such a core Europe. Scholars have placed the origins of the concept both in Western projects of enlightened civilisational mapping,4 and in the idea that for the east European intellectual, Europe is in some sense elsewhere.5 Here we have chosen to emphasize and to explore the problem of European identity as one key aspect according to which these societies and literatures could be compared. Our working definition of eastern Europe has included the languages and cultural traditions of the lands that lie between present-day Russia and Germany, Turkey and Italy, though not all the region’s literary traditions are represented equally in what follows here. The selection is provisional and heuristic. We could quite plausibly have also included the territories of present-day Austria, the Baltic states, Russia or even Turkey, on the basis of shared historical experience. (While Russian travel accounts are discussed here to some degree, the connections and parallels with other cultural traditions, in Europe and beyond, deserve further inves2 Josep Fontana, The distorted past (Oxford: 1995). 3 James Blaut, The colonizer’s model of the world (New York: 1993). 4 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford: 1994). 5 The Everyman companion to East European literature, ed. R.B. Pynsent and S.I. Kanikova (London: 1993), vii.

iBracewell_A_book.indb viii

4/14/08 2:51:24 PM

Foreword

IX

tigation.) However, at the same time, we recognize that the region is marked by significant internal differentiations (marked not least by its societies’ own internal, infinitely receding and self-defining Orientalisms). In general, our use of the term ‘eastern Europe’ is intended as neutral and geographical; and we have attempted to indicate this by insisting on the lower-case, except when quoting directly or highlighting attempts to attribute unity and coherence to this ‘Eastern Europe’. The titles of many east European travel accounts announce the authors’ concerns: so a Hungarian offers us a European variety in 1620, a Pole publishes his Sketches by a traveller passing through Europe in 1842, a Bulgarian tells us How I glimpsed Europe in 1939; in 1946 a Romanian writes of The last days of Europe, only for another to speak of Phoenix Europe in 1979. By 2004 we were in a position to hear about an Albanian’s Africa.6 Given their contested place in Europe, the writers discussed here have often had to engage with others’ assumptions and assertions about their Europeanness (or lack of it) and their travel accounts frequently bear the mark of their reactions—amused, frustrated or ironic. (This too emerges in their titles: consider the 1962 account of travels through France and Italy by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, Barbarian in the Garden.) Ambiguities in the travellers’ attitudes have also arisen from the fact that ideas of European modernity have been inseparable from projects of nationbuilding in the east; but Europe, while guaranteeing ‘modernity’, also compromised national ‘authenticity’. And finally, eastern Europe’s encounters with political Europe (particularly its powerful states, or wider associations such as the Concert of Europe or the European Union) have often stood in stark contrast to the idea of Europe as a system of values (particularly rationality, the rule of law, or civilization). The partitions of Poland, the Eastern Question, the Munich Agreement and Yugoslavia’s wars of succession have all posed the question of what Europe means in eastern Europe. To many, Europe could mean both Self and Other. Hence, perhaps, the need to insist upon its limits and divisions, and a reason for the salience of notions of East and West, not least in travel writing. 6 Naim Zoto, A-FRIKA ime (Tirana: 2004). There is no record of the Pole Conrad having learnt Albanian, but he might have appreciated the pun in Zoto’s title: ‘A-Frika ime’ means not only ‘my Africa’ but also ‘my A-frika’, (Albanian frikë = ‘fear, horror’, from Greek φρικη, cf. Romanian ‘frică’).

iBracewell_A_book.indb ix

4/14/08 2:51:25 PM

X

Under Eastern Eyes

However, while we have chosen here to concentrate on issues of Europe and of East and West, we do not want to reduce travel writing to being merely one of many sites where more or less coherent messages about East and West are generated, without considering whether the genre itself might have any specific function in the creation and circulation of images of self and other. The challenge is to find an approach that can balance content and technique on one hand, and context and function on the other. The volume’s purpose is not, then, to fillet travel texts as sources for an ‘automatic sociology’ of east European idées fixes,7 but to explore the way different writing modes, contexts and not least publishing strategies contributed to east European travellers’ representations of Europe and of their relations to it. The book’s structure and content is easily summarized: there are three comparative introductory studies and nine case studies. Alex Drace-Francis considers definitions, and attempts to account for the appearance of travel writing in eastern Europe, particularly from the angle of the social history of literary culture: origins and development of writing, availability of forms and models, spread and institutionalization of literary languages, newspapers, publication networks. David Chirico analyses aspects of travel writing as a literary genre. Wendy Bracewell examines the conceptions of Europe that both determine and emerge from these texts; their history, their politics. The case studies focus on several areas, chosen as much for their differences as for what they might have in common. Graeme Murdock explores seventeenth-century Hungarian Protestant travellers and considers how their experiences led them to reflect on their cultural and geographical identity. Wendy Bracewell gives an account of writings that took journeys through the Slav world as both pretext and authority for promoting a Slavic identity and ideology in the nineteenth century. Irina Popova-Nowak reconstructs both the social and intellectual context of travel in early nineteenth-century Hungary and the attitudes towards Europe and the homeland that they fostered. Maria Kalinowska interprets the Romantic paradigm of the traveller—as pilgrim, exile and martyr—in nineteenth-century Polish literature. Andi Mihalache discovers the projections of Romanian history, art and architecture implicit in the European travel texts of Nicolae Iorga. Diana Georgescu 7 On automatic sociology and its pitfalls, John Hall, The sociology of literature (London & New York: 1979), 33–8.

iBracewell_A_book.indb x

4/14/08 2:51:25 PM

Foreword

XI

looks at a different kind of Romanian writer, the novelist, dramatist and diarist Mihail Sebastian, through an analysis of his travel journalism about Paris, Geneva and Vienna in the early 1930s. Zoran MilutinoviΔ chronicles the Serb writer Rastko PetroviΔ’s African travels in terms of what they tell us about conceptions of Europeanness. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius tells us and shows us how a Polish graphic artist, Jan Lenica, depicted England in magazines of the early 1950s. And Rossitza Guentcheva analyses Bulgarian socialist encounters and confrontations with the capitalist West from the 1940s to the 1980s. While we hope these studies will inform and perhaps even amuse readers, we cannot pretend that they constitute more than an outline map and a few incursions into the vast interior of the subject. Our selection here is in many ways too narrow to do justice to the full range of types of texts and authors that could be considered under the title of this book. The travellers considered here were also necessarily, perhaps primarily, writers: this means that they represent a very narrow social spectrum. Traditions of writing, as well as the institutions of publishing and education, meant that historically, most east European travel writing was the work of an educated elite, produced for a reading public that was also an elite. And a primarily male elite, at that: though there were some east European women who wrote and published travel accounts from at least the eighteenth century, this genre does not seem to have been as attractive as it was to women in the Anglophone world, for instance. The questions of how doubly-marginal east European non-elite men or women might have seen and represented Europe (and in doing so, themselves) remain to be answered. These, and other lacunae in this initial survey, indicate some of the potential of this new field of study. The editors have incurred many scholarly and unscholarly debts in bringing this study to completion. Our first word of thanks is to the main funder of our project, the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Significant additional funding was provided by the Modern Humanities Research Association, the British Academy and the British Council. As members of the original team which conceived this project, Karin Friedrich and David Chirico made essential contributions which have shaped the making of this book. Many of the articles included here were first presented as papers at a series of workshops and seminars organized by the East looks West project. Two workshops

iBracewell_A_book.indb xi

4/14/08 2:51:25 PM

XII

Under Eastern Eyes

were held in London in January 2003 and March 2004, and a third in Sofia in March 2005: we would like to thank the many people who attended and commented on papers presented. In particular, Michael Harbsmeier’s intellectual engagement with our work has been an inspiration to the editors. In Sofia, the British Council offered us not just financial support but truly outstanding organizational back-up: special thanks to Ian Stewart and Krassimira Tantcheva. In the academic year 2003–2004, the Centre for South-East European Studies and the Centre for the Study of Central Europe generously gave over some of their scheduled seminar slots to hosting papers on our theme, and we are grateful to the convenors, Peter Siani-Davies and Rebecca Haynes, for those opportunities. The cover photograph is reproduced from the archives of ‘NOI media print SRL’ (Bucharest), by the kind permission of Árpád Harangozó; we thank Anca Oroveanu of the New Europe College for facilitating this. Wendy Bracewell’s greatest debts are to David Chirico and, especially, Alex Drace-Francis: she has learnt a lot from both of them. Others have provided much expert assistance: Dessislava Dragneva, Rigels Halili, Radovan Haluzík, Gwen Jones, Maria Kostaridou, Vladislava Reznik, Zsuzsa Varga, Kate Wilson. Much of the research took shape at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, a place where colleagues have been able to answer any number of perplexing questions, often in the course of brief discussions on the steps or in the lift. Daniel Abondolo, Tim Beasley-Murray, Richard Butterwick, Aniela Grundy, Egbert Klautke, Susan Morrissey, Robert Pynsent, Peter Sherwood and David Short have all been both knowledgeable and patient. And finally: Tim Hitchcock, who is not only a ‘projector’ on the eighteenth-century model, but has the gift of inspiring others to give it a go too; and Bob Shoemaker, who knows more than anyone what this project has entailed. Alex Drace-Francis would like to thank his co-editor Wendy Bracewell for her consistent encouragement of his work. He is grateful to his family for all kinds of affection and support during times of work (and, not least, times of travel). He has enjoyed talking to and corresponding with all the contributors about various aspects of travel writing, and looks forward to seeing them again soon, with a view to continuing these and other conversations. Wendy Bracewell Alex Drace-Francis

iBracewell_A_book.indb xii

4/14/08 2:51:26 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing Alex Drace-Francis

INTRODUCTION Histories of individual literatures commonly considered east European exist in their hundreds, and there have been a few attempts to gather together in one place information about the literatures of eastern Europe as a whole.1 In addition, a number of works attempt general accounts of non-fictional prose, and some of these make admirable efforts to describe the salient features of the east European variants of the phenomenon.2 But whether by accident or design, it appears that neither east European literary historians nor specialists in prose as a genre have given serious space or thought to the problems raised by east European travel texts.3 So we really have no idea about what such things are, or how they began to appear on the face of the earth. How, when and why did texts about journeys get composed by east Europeans? In what conditions did they thrive? What did people think they were for? What sort of lives did they lead? * For their judicious observations on an earlier draft of this article, I thank Wendy Bracewell and Michael Harbsmeier; for not acting on all of their suggestions for improving it, I apologise to the reader. 1 The Everyman companion to East European literature, ed. R.B. Pynsent and S.I. Kanikova (London: 1993); Histoire littéraire de l’Europe médiane: des origines à nos jours, ed. M. Delaperrière (Paris: 1998); Zoran KonstantinoviΔ and Fridrun Rinner, Eine Literaturgeschichte Mitteleuropas (Innsbruck: 2003); History of the literary cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries, ed. M. Cornis-Pope and J. Neubauer, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: 2004–2006). 2 E.g., Encyclopedia of the essay, ed. T. Chevalier (London – Chicago: 1997); Encyclopedia of the novel, ed. P. Schellinger (Chicago: 1998); Encyclopedia of life writing, ed. M. Jolly, 2 vols. (London: 2001). 3 So the absence of talk about travel writing in the works cited in note 1 is matched by a lack of discussion about eastern Europe in, for instance, The Cambridge companion to travel writing, ed. P. Hulme and T. Youngs (Cambridge: 2002), or in Literature of travel and exploration: an encyclopedia, ed. J. Speake, 3 vols. (London & New York: 2003).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 1

4/14/08 2:51:26 PM

2

Under Eastern Eyes

In an attempt not so much to answer these questions, as to provide a framework in which they could be discussed, I propose here to set out a few ideas first about the nature of travel and travel writing, and then about the nature of eastern Europe, and finally about the conditions in which something called east European travel writing may be said to have emerged.

WHAT IS ‘TRAVEL’? A widespread opinion attributes the appearance of travel texts to the practice of travel. It is asserted that travel writing was the obvious consequence of the interesting nature of unfamiliar experience, which sooner or later caused interesting people to use writing to record it. Moreover, the resulting written records are taken by many to be not only reasonably accurate in respect of individual journeys, but also reasonably representative of the travel experience of the entire community, or group that uses the relevant language of representation. This could be called the veni, vidi, scripsi model of travel writing history. Travel writing in this model is not only posterior to travel but results from it, as if ‘writing would be travel’s daughter’.4 A further widespread opinion considers travel to be a useful term to describe all forms of human movement. ‘Voyager, c’est se déplacer’, notes a 1998 essay, while at the same time bemoaning the conceptual limitations of such an equation.5 In fact, defining travel is no easy task, and scholars have been remarkably successful in shirking it. Recently, however, the critic James Buzard expressed awareness of the need to answer some ‘ridiculously basic’ questions about the nature of travel.6 He asks what happens when the term is applied to groups 4 Salah Stétie, ‘Géographie et théologie du voyage’, in Travel writing and cultural memory, ed. M.A. Seixo (Amsterdam & Atlanta, Georgia: 2000), 7–21 @ 8. 5 Maria Luísa Leal, ‘Récit, voyage et typologie’, in Les récits de voyage. Typologies, historicité, ed. M.A. Seixo and G. Abreu (Lisbon: 1998), 157–72 @ 158. 6 James M. Buzard, ‘What isn’t travel?’, in Unravelling civilisation: European travel and travel writing, ed. H. Schulz-Forberg (Brussels: 2005), 43–61; cf. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The journey and its narratives’, in Transports, ed. C. Chard and H. Langdon (New Haven & London: 1996), 287–96; Chris Rojek and John Urry, ‘Transformations of travel and tourism’, in Touring cultures, ed. C. Rojek and J. Urry (London & New York: 1997), 1–19; Defining travel, ed. S.L. Roberson (Jackson, Massachusetts: 2001); Jan Borm, ‘De-

iBracewell_A_book.indb 2

4/14/08 2:51:26 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

3

other than bourgeois, literate, text-producing travellers: examples include animals or involuntary human migrants. This, at least, represents an advance on the formerly popular but basically sterile exercise of attempting to establish or to criticise normative distinctions between travellers and tourists.7 However, Buzard’s own elaborations on how to define travel suffer from the same weaknesses as previous ones—it is in the final instance only his arbitrary judgment that puts mice or migrants inside or outside the category ‘traveller’. Whether ‘travel’ need be considered as a human attribute depends heavily on circumstances. Like most complex concepts, travel takes on different meanings in different cultures. The English word derives from travail, implying labour, or ordeal, some painful but exemplary ritual, presumably limited to humans.8 Some definitions of ‘travel’ correspondingly stress the experiential element of ‘transit’, ‘transport’, ‘translation’, ‘alteration’.9 Other European languages prefer words derived from that for ‘road’: Latin via, for instance, giving viaggio, voyage, viaje, viajem in Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. In like fashion, Polish droga, Czech and Slovak cesta, Hungarian út, Romanian drum, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian put and Bulgarian pŭt can refer equally to the road, the route or itinerary, or the journey. In some languages the word is then expanded to indicate a more performative meaning: droga becomes podróż; út—utazás; put—putovanje; pŭt—pŭteshestvie; cale—călătorie. This certainly suggests some kind of process, if not rite, associated with the passage. fining travel’, in Perspectives on travel writing, ed. G. Hooper and T. Youngs (Aldershot: 2004), 13–26; Mohamed Hafizi, Toward a general economy of travel (PhD thesis, University of Florida, 2004). 7 In an earlier work (The beaten track [Oxford & New York: 1993], 3–5), Buzard criticised the ‘traveller/tourist’ dichotomy built up by Paul Fussell, Abroad (New York: 1980), 37–50. 8 Some today find it ‘obscene’ to apply the term ‘travel’ to experience involving suffering: Buzard, ‘What isn’t travel?’, cites the objections of bell hooks, Black looks (Boston, Massachusetts: 1992), 173, via Caren Kaplan, Questions of travel (Durham, North Carolina & London: 1996), 131. 9 E.g., C.K. Steedman, preface to The British migrant experience 1700–2000, ed. P.J. Leese, B. Piatek and I. Curyllo-Klag (New York & London: 2002); K.D.S. Murray, ‘The construction of identity in the narratives of romance and comedy’, in Texts of identity, ed. J. Shotter and K.J. Gergen (London: 1989), 176–205, adopts a socio-psychological approach (travel as a way of separating oneself from the established society in order to assert sense of self).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 3

4/14/08 2:51:27 PM

4

Under Eastern Eyes

But is such road-bound activity necessarily something peculiarly human?10 A clearer distinction can be made, I suggest, not between travel and tourism, or between displacement undertaken by perceivedly superior, or inferior performers (from aristocrat to animal), but between movement as a physical phenomenon, and travel as its culturalised form. Movement is an intrinsic, rather than an exceptional aspect of the human condition—we come out of our mothers’ bellies and go down into the ground, usually in two different places. It is also something humans share not only with animals but with inanimate objects. Travel, on the other hand, constitutes organised, methodised movement.11 Travel is to movement rather as costume is to clothing, cuisine to food, habitat to shelter, or culture to nature. This distinction itself of course can only be heuristic and not prescriptive. The Oxford English Dictionary in fact also documents usages of the term ‘travel’ to indicate movement of inanimate objects.12 On the other hand, there is much ‘methodical’ animate movement (whether ritual, mechanical or seasonal) which clearly has cultural implications, but for which the term ‘travel’ is not customarily used: examples might include military campaigns, or bird migration. Perhaps more profitable than the question ‘What is travel?’ is that of ‘When is travel?’. When does a term come to be used frequently to signify a commonly understood set of cultural practices? Or, as Buzard puts it: ‘What is the historical landscape of material and discursive conditions in which something recognised as “travel” emerges?’13 10 Eric Leed, The mind of the traveler (New York: 1991), 217–30, considers ways in which travel has been seen as characteristic of the male of the species; cf. Karen R. Lawrence, Penelope voyages (Ithaca, New Jersey: 1994), 1–15. 11 Classic study by Justin Stagl, ‘The methodising of travel in the sixteenth century’, History and anthropology 4 (1990), 303–38, reprint in idem, A history of curiosity (Chur, Switzerland: 1994). Under the heading ‘methodising’, Stagl really only considers the problems of observation and recording, whereas a larger framework of conditioning is surely present: Buzard, ‘What isn’t travel?’ usefully draws attention to host cultures’ reception of travellers, and other ‘technologies for the management of difference’. 12 See ‘travel’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 20 vols. (Oxford: 1989), 18: 443–5, especially senses 2d, 3 and 4 of the noun and 3b, c and d of the verb. 13 Buzard, ‘What isn’t travel?’, 59.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 4

4/14/08 2:51:27 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

5

But before dealing with a historical landscape, we need to consider the historical constitution of the geographical landscape that we propose to focus on.

WHAT IS ‘EAST EUROPEAN’? The term ‘eastern Europe’ is, as not a few commentators have remarked, an unstable and imprecise one. (In case anyone thinks it has any legal or constitutional value, we are spelling ‘eastern’ with a small ‘e’.) The most widely cited opinion is that of Larry Wolff, who attributes the invention of the concept to eighteenth-century west European philosophes.14 I am happy to agree ‘eighteenth century’, but have doubts about ‘West European’. The first usage of the term in a book title appears to be by the Swedish linguist Johann Erich Thunmann, in his Untersuchungen über die Geschichte der östlichen europäischen Völker [Researches on the history of the east European peoples] (1774).15 But it has also been shown fairly clearly that many east Europeans participated in the elaboration both of the concept and of the image of an undifferentiated, ‘barbarous’ space.16 The image depended quite heavily on older traditions. The actual terminology, however, did not really become current until the nineteenth century, and was rarely institutionalised until the twentieth.17 14 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford: 1994). 15 Hans Lemberg, ‘Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffe im 19. Jahrhundert. Vom “Norden” zum “Osten” Europas’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Ost-Europas 33 (1985), 48–81; see the discussion thread ‘Origin of “Eastern Europe”’ on H-Habsburg (March 2003). Available at http://h-net.msu.edu/ cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=lx&list=habsburg&user=&pw=&month=0303. 16 See Csaba Dupcsik, ‘Postcolonial studies and the inventing of Eastern Europe’, East Central Europe 26 (1999), 1–14; Alex Drace-Francis, ‘A provincial imperialist and a Curious Account of Wallachia: Ignaz von Born’, European History Quarterly 36:1 (2006), 61–89, where I ought also to have cited R.J.W. Evans, review of Wolff, International History Review 17 (1995), 785–7; Wendy Bracewell in her piece on Europe in this volume presents many more instances. 17 Wendy Bracewell and I have drawn on the work of Hans Lemberg and Ezequiel Adamovsky. The latter’s new book Euro-Orientalism (Oxford: 2006), while treating the specific case of French views of Russia, is important for understanding the development of the idea of Eastern Europe as a whole and modifies many of Wolff’s conclusions.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 5

4/14/08 2:51:27 PM

6

Under Eastern Eyes

Today the term is intensely scrutinised and often avoided. The scholarly community is increasingly using the terms ‘central’ and ‘south-eastern’ Europe, either in conjunction or denoting separate regions.18 Some scholars and officials even refer to ‘the former eastern Europe’, as if the territories themselves had somehow been physically moved. But where to? Whatever the answer to this question, and whatever the general formal limitations on defining eastern Europe, the term may still function as a useful vehicle for introducing new problematics and new material, above all in a comparative framework. For the purposes of the bibliography that we are publishing together with this volume, we formulated a necessarily provisional, but none the less necessary definition: geographically, ‘from the region between Russia and Germany, Turkey and Italy’; and linguistically, ‘in Albanian; Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Serbo-Croatian; Bulgarian; Czech; Greek; Hebrew and Yiddish; Hungarian; Macedonian; Romanian; Polish; Slovak; Slovene; and Ukrainian’. We also included a separate section listing travel books by ‘east Europeans’ who used languages of international circulation but may be considered to have originated from or identified with one of the above cultural/linguistic traditions.19 Reference is made here to Greek, Latin, Slavonic and German literary traditions, to the extent that east Europeans participated in them, or were influenced by them. Ottoman Turkish traditions are mentioned: a fuller account would have to incorporate more detailed study of this aspect, as well as of the influence of Russian and several other travel writing forms and traditions on East European literatures. 18 Discussion of ‘Central Europe’ in R.J.W. Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Central Europe, 1683–1867 (Oxford: 2006), 293–304; on southeastern Europe and the Balkans, see Stefan Troebst, ‘What’s in a historical region? A Teutonic perspective’, European Review of History 10:2 (2003), 173–88; and the pieces by Vesna Goldsworthy, Maria Todorova and me in the Wieser Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens, 11: Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf, ed. K. Kaser, D. Gramshammer-Hohl and R. Pichler (Klagenfurt: 2003). 19 For a more extensive discussion of terminology and rationale, see Wendy Bracewell, David Chirico, Alex Drace-Francis, ‘Introduction’ to A bibliography of east European travel writing on Europe, ed. W. Bracewell and A. Drace-Francis (Budapest: 2007). Under ‘languages of international circulation’ we have grouped principally Latin, German, French, Italian and Russian, although in reality most east European languages also functioned at various times as instruments of inter- or supra-ethnic communication.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 6

4/14/08 2:51:28 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

7

WHAT ‘EAST EUROPEAN TRAVEL WRITING’ MIGHT BE People learnt to travel—to methodise their movement—before learning to write. ‘East Europeans’ have been travelling in Europe since at least the time of Attila the Hun. Much of the history of western Europe from antiquity to feudalism is conditioned by what are described as ‘invasions’ from the north and the east, and the impact of these travels on the development of feudal society has been evaluated,20 as has the importance of medieval western ‘travels’ to (invasions of) the east for the institutional development of modern western Europe.21 On the other hand, our knowledge of past travel depends almost exclusively on past travellers’ knowledge of writing. What have not been evaluated in broad terms are the general outlines of the development of writing by east Europeans, the first condition for the recording of their own travel experiences. This is quite surprising: for while—to cite an analogous field of cultural history—historians of food usually pay at least some attention to ingredients, travel literature has been much less analysed in terms of its status as a product made with writing. Yet is it possible to assert with some confidence that in order to prepare the dish ‘travel writing’, the essential ingredient is writing, not travel. Perhaps the epithet ‘travel’ functions in the phrase ‘travel writing’ rather as geocultural modifiers do in food labelling, as a stylistic indicator rather than an assertion of authentic provenance: ‘Irish stew’ or ‘French tarragon’ need not necessarily come from Ireland or France respectively, but can merely pretend to resemble stew or tarragon from those regions, or, more platonically, general ideas of what a stew or tarragon from those regions might be like. Likewise, ‘travel writing’ need only conform to the most general ideas of ‘travel’ to achieve that status, and it is only if it were shown never to have been written, that it may be denied the name of ‘travel writing’, or (in the case of plagiarism or authorial imposture) have its status contested legally.22

20 See, e.g., Marc Bloch, La société féodale, 2 vols. (Paris: 1939), 1:9–94. 21 John Life La Monte, Feudal monarchy in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, 1100 to 1291 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1932), 281; Robert Bartlett, The making of Europe: Conquest, colonisation, and cultural change, 950–1350 (Princeton, New Jersey: 1993). 22 See Percy Adams, Travellers and travel liars (Berkeley, California: 1962); M.K. Ruthven, Faking literature (Cambridge: 2001).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 7

4/14/08 2:51:28 PM

8

Under Eastern Eyes

Again like narratives about food, histories of writing are often themselves potentially constitutive of conceptions of east and west, influenced as the latter are by such factors as usage of Roman, Greek, Hebrew and Cyrillic alphabets, Latin, Greek or Slavonic liturgy, extent of ‘Germanic’ influence, etc. But we do nevertheless want to consider: what verbal ingredients and alphabetic moulds were available for writing in eastern Europe? To which institutions were writing and printing entrusted: who invested in them; who administered them; what was the place of travel writing; how was it structured by these systems; and how if at all it did structure them? To be anything like comprehensive, the answers would have to offer a detailed and documented account of the relationship between the deployment of written words about travel and the changing political and intellectual formations in the region, over four centuries. Measured against such a desideratum, what follows may appear almost risibly schematic.23 Nevertheless, I hope that, for all its shortcomings, this text will provide a framework in which we can begin to ask when, why and in whose name travel was described, and how and why texts describing it were reproduced.

WHAT LANGUAGES WERE USED The question may seem odd, given that we have defined east European as ‘written in east European languages’ and listed those languages. For each of them, a separate understanding of their literary traditions could be reconstructed either starting from histories of the respective languages,24 or more specifically by studying specialist historical, liter23 For a more specific enquiry into which particular textual forms may or may not be considered travel writing, see David Chirico’s piece in this volume. 24 Latest scholarship in Encyclopedia of language & linguistics, ed. K. Brown, 2nd edition, 14 vols. (Amsterdam & London: 2006), and Roland Sussex and Paul Cubberley, The Slavic languages (Cambridge: 2006), especially 60–109 for the socio-history. Still useful are Sprachen und Nationen im Balkanraum, ed. C. Hannick (Cologne: 1987), and Bernard Comrie, ‘Languages of eastern and southern Europe’, in The world’s writing systems, ed. P. T. Daniels and W. Bright (New York: 1996), 663–89. On individual languages, chronologically: Al. Graur, A bird’s-eye view of the evolution of the Rumanian language, trans. L. Leviţchi (Bucharest: 1963); Otto Duchá∑ek, Langue tchèque; histoire et norme actuelle (Louvain: 1971); Salomo Birn-

iBracewell_A_book.indb 8

4/14/08 2:51:28 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

9

ary and bibliographical works on travel texts.25 It is necessary, however, to make at least summary mention of certain traditions which have been in various ways crucial to most east European literary cultures, either because they were used as supra-national languages of communication, or because they directly influenced east European writers. Before the development and strengthening of vernacular languages, the following literary traditions were present in or known to eastern Europe: a) Greek, in its Attic-Ionian version became the major language of commerce and government in many parts of the Mediterranean world before the Christian era, and continued to be the major instrument of literary, political and administrative expression in the eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire (330–1453 C.E.). Many early South Slavic and Romanian written texts were modelled on Greek prototypes, which also exercised a considerable influence over early Russian literature, particularly through the institutions of the eastern Church. After the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, the importance of Greek as a literary and administrative language declined, although its prestige in church life continued, and vernacular and written usage was maintained in a wide variety of forms from southern Italy to Asia Minor. It retained a role

baum, Die yiddische Sprache (Hamburg: 1974); Rado L. Lencek, The structure and history of the Slovene language (Columbus, Ohio: 1982); Branko FranoliΔ, An historical survey of literary Croatian (Paris: 1984); Problems of the formation of the Albanian people, their language, and culture (Tirana: 1984); Roger Gyllin, The genesis of the modern Bulgarian literary language (Uppsala: 1991); Jan Mazur, Geschichte der polnischen Sprache (Frankfurt & New York: 1993); Géza Balázs, The story of Hungarian, trans. T.J. De Kornfeld (Budapest: 1997); Geoffrey Horrocks, Greek: A history of the language and its speakers (London: 1997); Géza Bárczi, Geschichte der ungarischen Sprache, trans. A. Friedrich (Innsbruck: 2001); Victor Friedman, ‘The modern Macedonian standard language and its relation to modern Macedonian identity’, in The Macedonian question, ed. V. Roudometof (Boulder, Colorado: 2000), 173–206. 25 Material on each of the literary traditions can be found in the introductions to the individual bibliographies published in A bibliography of east European travel writing on Europe, ed. Bracewell and Drace-Francis.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 9

4/14/08 2:51:29 PM

10

Under Eastern Eyes as a commercial lingua franca not only in the Balkans, but also in Orthodox merchant communities in central Europe and the Mediterranean, until the nineteenth century, when it was gradually replaced outside Greece by the developing vernaculars (Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Italian, Turkish). Publication of Greek books developed from the seventeenth century in Constantinople, Venice, Vienna, Buda, Bucharest and Iaşi. While ancient Greek-language writers like Herodotus and Homer have exercised an enormous influence over conceptions of geography and travel in western Europe, and while geographers and cartographers of the Roman Empire, like Ptolemy and Strabo, used Greek to record their ideas, these were surprisingly little disseminated in eastern Europe. There were few Byzantine travel texts and they exercised a minor role in developing a tradition of travel writing either in modern Greek or in other eastern European traditions.26 Some recent work, however, offers a more generous assessment of Byzantine travel representations.27 Their reception and influence on Russian and Balkan travel literature remains a subject for further research. b) With the expansion of the Roman Empire throughout Mediterranean and western Europe in the early years of the Christian era, the use of Latin spread in an unprecedented fashion. As well as furnishing the basic vocabulary of modern Romance vernaculars, and exercising a great influence on the lexicon and structure of English and German, Latin was also used as an ecclesiastical

26 Catia Galatariotou, ‘Travel and perception in Byzantium’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 47 (1993), 221–41; Voyages et voyageurs à Byzance et en Occident du VIe au XIe siècle, ed. A. Dierkens, J.L. Kupper, J.M. Sansterre (Liège & Geneva: 2000), especially the pieces by Elisabeth Malamut, ‘Des voyages et de la littérature voyageuse à Byzance’, 189–213; and Nicolas Oikonomidès, ‘Les marchands qui voyagent, ceux qui ne voyagent pas et la pénurie de textes géographiques byzantins’, 307–19. 27 Cyril Mango, ‘A journey round the coast of the Black Sea in the ninth century’, Paleoslavica 10 (2002), 255–64; and especially Margaret Mullett, ‘In peril on the sea: Travel genres and the unexpected’, in Travel in the Byzantine world, ed. R. Macrides (Aldershot: 2002), 259–84, bringing valuable additional insights by considering epistolary, autobiographical, novelistic and other material.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 10

4/14/08 2:51:29 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

11

and literary language throughout Catholic Europe, often identified with ‘the West’ (Occidens) from early medieval times.28 In Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, Latin gesta or chronicles were composed from the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries respectively, often by western-educated natives or immigrants. Latin was therefore the dominant literary language in these countries until the sixteenth century, and continued to be important until the nineteenth. Latin was also the language of liturgy, and the standard language of writing in the universities established at Prague in 1348, at Krakow in 1364 and at Trnava in 1635. The vernacular Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Croatian and Slovenian languages begin to be recorded in this period, and took off as vehicles for literary expression in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but Latin dominated administrative and literary life up to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It has been said that the Romans were a more curious people than the Greeks. But travel writing as such did not constitute a distinct genre in Latin literature. However, texts such as Livy’s Histories, Pliny the Younger’s Letters from Bithynia and ethnographies embedded in the histories and geographies of Caesar, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus and others have exercised a fundamental influence on writing about foreign peoples and places in all European cultures, such was the prestige of the language over two thousand years. On the other hand, for the specific problem of the formation of genres in the east European literary cultures it is quite possible to argue that the medieval, domestically developed Latin traditions described in the previous paragraph were just as important as ancient models. c) It is believed that the eleven modern languages with an established literary tradition which scholars today label as Slavic or Slavonic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, Polish, Sorbian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Macedonian, Bul-

28 For this identification: Jürgen Fischer, Oriens-Occidens-Europa. Begriff und Gedanke ‘Europa’ in der späten Antike und im frühen Mittelalter (Mainz: 1957).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 11

4/14/08 2:51:29 PM

12

Under Eastern Eyes garian), derive from a common prototype: proto-Slavic.29 The first recorded form of Slavic is to be found in texts written in ninthcentury Moravia by Constantine and Methodius, Orthodox missionaries from around Thessaloniki. This language (designated Old Slavonic, or Old Church Slavonic, closer to Macedonian and Bulgarian than to the other modern Slavonic languages) spread with eastern Christianity to Serbia, Bulgaria, Wallachia, Moldavia, Ukraine and Russia. A later version, known as Church Slavonic, was rarely used for lay communication; its replacement as a liturgical and administrative language by modern vernaculars took place gradually from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. There are a considerable number of printed books in Slavonic from this period, almost exclusively produced for religious worship.30 The most extensive tradition of Slavonic ‘travel writing’ consists of a relatively small number of short texts produced in Russian monasteries and describing pilgrimages to eastern religious sites, notably Constantinople and Jerusalem.31 However, none of these were printed until the end of the eighteenth century. A still smaller number of texts were composed in vernacular Old Russian, perhaps the most notable of which is the late fifteenth-century monk Afanasii Nikitin’s account of his journey to central and south Asia. This too was never printed until its rediscovery at the end of the

29 ‘Slavic’ and ‘Slavonic’ do not denote different languages or language groups: the former is common US usage, the latter British. On the question ‘how many languages today?’, Sussex and Cubberley (The Slavic languages, ed. cit., 2) count thirteen, with Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian as distinct; Montenegrin, Rusyn, Kashubian and Lachian as ‘sub-national’; and Old Church Slavonic, Polabian and Slovincian as ‘extinct’. I have counted Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian as one: on the unification and disintegration of this language/these languages, Robert D. Greenberg, Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its Disintegration (Oxford: 2004). 30 Synoptic analysis by Robert Mathiesen, ‘Cyrillic and Glagolitic printing and the Eisenstein thesis’, Solanus: International Journal for Russian and East European Bibliographic, Library and Publishing Studies, n.s., 6 (1992), 3–26. 31 Theofanis G. Stavrou and Peter R. Weisensel, Russian travelers to the Christian East from the twelfth to the twentieth century (Columbus, Ohio: 1986) offer an excellent analytical description. They list 32 texts produced between 1100 and 1700, few of which exceed 20 pages.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 12

4/14/08 2:51:30 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

13

eighteenth century.32 Few other texts in Slavonic conform to our definition of ‘travel writing’, although some traditions such as hagiography, or prayers to be uttered before setting out in a journey, can be considered relevant to our discussion here. d) Westward migrations followed by eastward settlements from the end of antiquity to the late Middle Ages, resulted in stable German-speaking communities becoming widespread throughout eastern Europe from Bohemia to the Baltic and Black Seas. Germans were thus inextricably intermingled with Slavic, Baltic, Hungarian, Romance and other populations. The rise of major German states (Prussia, Austria) and their territorial expansion at the expense of the former kingdoms of Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Sweden and Turkey from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, gave German a dominant position in bureaucratic and technical apparatuses.33 This process was accompanied by ongoing eastward settlement. Most large towns in eastern Europe had significant German populations participating in administrative, infrastructural and craft activities; processes of active separation from the so-called ‘native’ populations did not begin in earnest until the twentieth century. Major migrations back westward (estimated at 10 million people) occurred in 1945, with much of the remaining German-speaking population (notably from the Soviet Union and Romania) leaving between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s. However, for all its prestige in the sphere of learning and administration, German was not adopted by heterogeneous local populations to anything like the degree to which French and English became dominant in France and the British Isles, or Castilian in Spain.

32 A recent analysis is Mary Jane Maxwell, ‘Afanasii Nikitin: An Orthodox Russian’s spiritual voyage in the Dar al-Islam, 1468–1475’, Journal of World History 17:3 (2006), 243–66. 33 On the rise of Austria, Prussia and Russia, H.M. Scott, The rise of the eastern states (Cambridge: 2001); detailed study of the socio-linguistic effects is lagging, but see R.J.W. Evans, ‘Language and state-building: The case of the Habsburg Monarchy’, Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2004), 1–23, for some stimulating hypotheses on the Habsburg situation.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 13

4/14/08 2:51:30 PM

14

Under Eastern Eyes German travel writing, alongside autobiography, emerged in the sixteenth century and exercised, as we shall see, a profound influence on most East European traditions.34 e) In the Balkans from the fourteenth century to the twentieth, and in Hungary from the mid-sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth, Ottoman Turkish was widely used as a language of military and civil administration. Extent of usage varied from place to place, and the language is not to be confused with the colloquial spoken by the formerly substantial but largely illiterate Turkish populations of the Balkans. According to the early nineteenth-century Ottoman traveller Mustafa Sami, ‘In Europe, reading and writing are easy things because the writings are in a single style. It’s not like in Turkish (türkçe) where the written language is one thing and the spoken language another.’35 There are numerous interesting Ottoman Turkish travel texts about both the Balkans and the rest of Europe. To my knowledge, however, there are no substantial literary studies documenting the influence these may have had on east European cultures: and this is just one of the many aspects of the Ottoman heritage in eastern Europe that have been ignored.36

Traces of written vernacular languages appear in the early Middle Ages in Slovene (10th century), Croatian (c. 1100), Polish (1136), Serbian

34 For the rise of travel writing in German see especially Michael Harbsmeier, ‘Elementary structures of otherness: An analysis of sixteenth-century German travel accounts’, in Voyager à la Renaissance, ed. J. Ceard and J. C. Margolin (Paris: 1987), 337–55; and idem, Wilde Völkerkunde. Andere Welten in deutschen Reiseberichten der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt & New York: 1994). Harbsmeier divides German travel into diplomatic missions (official and private), merchant-adventurers, wandering students and scholars, and Kavalierstouren of young nobles. 35 Mustafa Sami, Avrupa risalesi (1837), cited by Johann Strauss, ‘Diglossie dans le domaine ottoman’, Revue du monde mussulman et de la Mediterranée 75–76 (1996), 221–55 @ 233. On the making of modern Turkish see Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish language reforms: A catastrophic success (Oxford: 2000). 36 An introduction to the problem is Maria Todorova, ‘The Ottoman legacy in the Balkans’, in Imperial legacy. The Ottoman imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East, ed. L.C. Brown (New York: 1996), 40–77.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 14

4/14/08 2:51:30 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

15

(1189), Hungarian and Czech (c. 1200), in Slovak in the fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth century in Romanian (1521), Sorbian (1543), and Albanian (1555). All these languages were almost certainly used before these dates, but in most cases the actual consolidation of a continuous and autonomous literary tradition took place some time afterwards. Various criteria are used to distinguish Modern Greek from Ancient, although convention tends to place the appearance of writing in the modern language in the seventeenth century.

HOW LITERARY TRADITIONS DEVELOPED The development of literary traditions, whether in vernacular or classical languages, is often associated with the development of stable political structures.37 In south-eastern Europe there was Byzantium, whose major literary traditions nevertheless evince a paucity, if not a complete dearth of any tradition that could be called ‘travel writing’.38 Rivals to Byzantium sprang up in the Balkans with the first (860–1018) and second (1185–1330) Bulgarian empires, and the Serbian kingdom (1166– 1389).39 These made some attempts to cultivate writing, albeit not in the vernacular but in various forms of Old Church Slavonic: but such genres as Saints’ lives and martyrologies included elements of narrative that account for the world in terms of a journey, albeit in the third person and centred on biography and event, not on self or place. Similar elements can be traced in the early Latin-language literature that appeared in the Hungarian kingdom: Stephen’s De morum institutione (1015), St. Gerard’s Deliberatio, the Saints’ lives and Gesta of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The kingdom of Poland, testified to from 963, extended its frontiers and its authority in the years to come, and was acknowledged as a kingdom of the Holy Roman Empire from 1197: here too, chronicles, hagiographies and legends flourished first in Latin, with the national language gaining strength in the fourteenth century.

37 R.H. Boutier, ‘Chancellerie et culture au moyen âge’, in Cancelleria e cultura nel Medio Evo (Vatican City: 1990), 1–75; Sussex and Cubberley, 61–2. 38 See notes 26 and 27 above. 39 On writing in early medieval south-eastern Europe, see Florin Curta, Southeastern Europe in the early Middle Ages (Cambridge: 2006), 5–16, with references.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 15

4/14/08 2:51:31 PM

16

Under Eastern Eyes

Writing was entrusted to the churches, and to their holy men.40 Due to the efforts of Cyril and Methodius, Christianity and writing spread to Bulgaria and Bohemia early on. Hungary and Croatia, too, owed some of their early ecclesiastical traditions to Byzantium, others to France and northern Italy. The first Polish archbishopric, on the other hand, was set up by the German Emperor Otto, and most early literary activity in Poland leant heavily on the assistance of German or German-educated monks. From the twelfth century, native Bohemian and Polish literati travelled to Bologna, Liège and Paris; in the fifteenth, professors from Krakow went to Basel and offered their opinion on theological matters, but not on what the city looked like, or on how the journey felt to them.41 Czech was certainly the most developed written vernacular in eastern Europe before 1600; and it was in this language and in Polish that the earliest printed east European travel accounts appear. This has been attributed to various causes: proximity to the printing revolution taking place in Germany (over thirty Czech-language books appeared before 1500); the process of vernacularisation in political life (e.g., the switch from Latin to Polish as the language for the Sejm records in

40 General studies confirming the close relationship between ecclesiastical authorities and establishment of writing include: J. Bujnoch, ‘Kirche und lateinische Literatur im Mittelalter’, in Bohemia sacra. Das Christentum in Böhmen, 973–1973 (Düsseldorf: 1979); E. Potkowski, ‘Ecriture et société en Pologne du bas moyen-âge (XIV-XV siècles)’, Acta Poloniae historica 39 (1979), 47–100; E. Fügedi, ‘Les intellectuels et la société dans la Hongrie mediévale’, in Intellectuels français/intellectuels hongrois, ed. J. Le Goff and B. Köpeczi (Paris & Budapest: 1985); Early christianity in central and east Europe, ed. P. Urba≈czyk (Warsaw: 1997); I. Jónás, ‘Les débuts de l’organisation de l’Eglise en Hongrie’, in Gerbert l’Européen, ed. N. Charbonnel and J.E. Iung (Aurillac: 1997), 263–72; Die Anfänge des Schrifttums in Oberschlesien bis zum Frühhumanismus, ed. G. Kosellek (Frankfurt: 1997); A. Adamska, ‘The introduction of writing in Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, Bohemia)’, in New approaches to medieval communication, ed. M. Mostert (Turnhout: 1999), 165–90; Simon Franklin, Writing, society and culture in early Rus, c. 950–1300 (Cambridge: 2002). 41 S. Kot, Le relazioni scolari della Polonia con Bologna (Bologna: 1949); Jacques Le Goff, ‘Un étudiant tchèque à l’Université de Paris au XIVe siècle’, Revue des études slaves 24 (1948), 143–70; Z. Koztowska-Budkowa, ‘La formation de l’Université de la Cracovie en 1364’, in Les universités européennes du XIV au XVIII siècles (Geneva: 1967), 13–25.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 16

4/14/08 2:51:31 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

17

1545); and particularly the effects of the Reformation.42 But vernacularisation need not necessarily be associated solely with ‘outside’ forces, and Hussitism may without retrospective magnification be considered as an authentic domestic motor driving the growth of writing in both Czech and Hungarian.43 Furthermore, the spread of Protestant doctrines to eastern Europe would not have happened had not local cultures already forged links with Swiss, German, French and northern Italian educational establishments.44 In terms of accounting for the appearance in print of other languages, like Romanian, Bulgarian and Albanian, the external catalytic influence of ‘western’ religious movements seems more clear-cut, although hotly debated nonetheless.45 Vernacularisation and the rise of print were, moreover, part of a range of intellectual and communicational developments likewise unattributable to Protestant proselytism, such as some quite sophisticated cartographical productions;46 as well as, it is sometimes alleged, the first 42 R.J.W. Evans, The making of the Habsburg Monarchy (Oxford: 1979); idem, in International Calvinism 1541–1715, ed. M. Prestwich (Oxford: 1985); Richard C. Lewanski, The role of the Reformation in the development of Polish culture (London: 1990). In the absence of recent synopses on early East European printing, a useful older summary is Colin Clair, A history of European printing (London, New York & San Francisco: 1976), 232–51; on Polish printing see now More precious than gold: Treasures of the Polish National Library, ed. H. Tchórzewska-Kabata and M. Dabrowski (Warsaw: 2000); on early Hungarian printing, I.G. Tóth, ‘Books and readers’, in A cultural history of Hungary, ed. L. Kósa, 2 vols. (Budapest: 1999), 1:215–25. 43 František Šmahel, La Révolution hussite (Paris: 1985); idem, ‘Literacy and heresy in Hussite Bohemia’, in Heresy and literacy, ed. P. Biller and A. Hudson (Cambridge: 1994), 237–54; Robin Baker, ‘The Hungarianspeaking Hussites of Moldavia and two English episodes in their history’, Central Europe 4:2 (2006), 3–24. 44 Evans underlines this point (Making, preface; ‘Calvinism’). 45 On the influence of Roman Catholicism on Albanian written culture, see Robert Elsie, History of Albanian literature, 2 vols. (Boulder, Colorado: 1995), 1:71–7, 143–58; cf. Dennis P. Hupchick, The Bulgarians in the seventeenth century (Jefferson, North Carolina: 1993), 73–83; Cesare Alzati, Terra romena tra Oriente e Occidente (Milan: 1982); Dean J. Kostantaras, Infamy and revolt: The rise of the national problem in early modern Greek thought (Boulder, Colorado: 2006, 53–5). 46 Lazarus Secretarius: the first Hungarian map-maker and his work, ed. L. Stegena, trans. J. Boris et al. (Budapest: 1982); the appearance of Polish maps is not ignored by John Hale, The civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance (London: 1993), 22–24. Wider problems of cosmology, science, etc., in Evans, Making, 311–446.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 17

4/14/08 2:51:31 PM

18

Under Eastern Eyes

newspapers.47 More generally, this is an important period for the development of vernacular diaries and autobiographical texts in German, with significant contributions from the Habsburg lands.48 Looking at the first printed east European travel texts—even if looking only at printed texts does not tell the whole story—we can see them fitting into the patterns which are relatively familiar to students of European travel in the High Renaissance: Oriental travels or pilgrimages (Curipeschitz, Georgevits, Verantius, Harant, Kabátník z Litomyšle, Vratislav z Mitrovic, Prefát z Vlkanova, Paulus Rubigallus);49 relations or compendia of embassies (Namossius, Górkowski, Twardowski);50 topographies of cities or countries (Stryjkowski, Wargocki, Deidrich, Huniadi, Kecskeméti);51 learned peregrinations (Szepsi Csombor).52 47 The notion that the 1481 pamphlet Dracola Wajda deserves this title is entertained briefly by Antony Smith, The newspaper: An international history (London: 1979), 9. Johannes Weber, ‘Strassburg 1605: The origins of the newspaper in Europe’, German History 24:3 (2006), 387–411 has a different view. 48 See especially Harald Tersch, ‘Frühneuzeitliche Selbstzeugnisse’, in Quellenkunde der Habsburgermonarchie (16.–18. Jhdt.). Ein exemplarisches Handbuch, ed. J. Pauser, M. Scheutz and T. Winkelbauer (Munich: 2004), 727–40, with references. 49 Studiable in comparative context thanks to Stéphane Yérasimos, Voyageurs dans l’Empire Ottoman (Ankara: 1991); and R.J.W. Evans, ‘Bohemia, the Emperor and the Porte’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s., 3 (1970), 85–106. 50 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, ‘Polish embassies in Istanbul, Or how to sponge off your host without losing your self-esteem’, in The illuminated table, the prosperous house, ed. S. Faroqhi and C. Neumann (Istanbul & Würzburg: 2003), 51–58; wider context in idem, Ottoman-Polish diplomatic relations (15th–18th century) (Leiden: 2000); cf. Joel Raba, ‘Russische Gesandte und polnische Reisende im Heiligen Lande’, in Russland, Polen und Österreich in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. C. Augustynowicz et al. (Vienna: 2003), 181–9. 51 On Wargocki’s interesting book, see Bronisław Bili≈ski, Figure e momenti Polacchi a Roma (Rome: 1992), 33–144, although it should be noted that he did not actually visit Rome in person; on topographical traditions, with special reference to Latin verse compositions, H. Wiegand, Hodeporica. Studien zur neulateinischen Reisedichtung des deutschen Kulturraums im 16. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden: 1984). Other aspects of early Polish travel in Hanna Dziechcinska, ‘La noblesse polonaise aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles face aux voyages’, in Voyager à la Renaissance, 193–201. 52 Notes in Evans, Making, 29–31; on Szepsi Csombor, see Graeme Murdock in this volume; Stagl, ‘Methodising’, includes him in the context of European apodemic traditions.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 18

4/14/08 2:51:32 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

19

The vernaculars were not, however, the only vehicle: travel accounts were also composed in the two principal linguæ francæ of central Europe, Latin and German. The east European travellers Curipeschitz, Dernschwam, Georgevits and Verantius chose these languages and not a Slavonic or Magyar vernacular to acquaint their domestic readerships with their observations of the Ottoman Empire. This was also the case for the topographies produced over the years by the Polish cosmographer Maciej z Miechowa (1517), the Hungarian Frölich (1639, 1644), the Carinthian Valvasor (1683), the Moldavian Cantemir (1715).53 The preponderance of ‘Eastern’ destinations in early east European travel writing is particularly striking. It is true that the rise of print and vernacular languages coincided temporally with the encounter with the ‘Turkish menace’, and this may perhaps tempt us to mistake a timely fascination with the Eastern other54 for a permanent characteristic of east European cultures. But curiosity about the Ottoman world was certainly higher on the agenda in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than fascination with Western culture. Rome, as one might expect, featured as a destination of great significance for Catholic writers (but also generally for nobleman wishing to instruct themselves).55 There were some notable early journeys to England and France but much fewer, and not published until much

53 Maciej z Miechowa, Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis, Asiana et Europiana (Krakow: 1517); David Frölich, Medulla geographiae practicæ. Peregrinantium inprimis usui (Bardejov, 1639); idem, Bibliotheca, seu Cynosura Peregrinantium (Ulm, 1644); J.W. v. Valvasor, Ehre des Herzogtums Krain (Ljubljana: 1689); Demetrii Kantemirs, …historisch-, geographisch- und politische Beschreibung der Moldau (Leipzig: 1771), this last composed originally in Latin about 1715. 54 Discussion in Almut Höfert, ‘The order of things and the discourse of the Turkish threat’, in Between Europe and Islam, ed. A. Höfert and A. Salvatore (Brussels: 2000), 39–69; cf. eadem, Den Feind beschreiben: “Türkengefahr” und europäisches Wissen über das Osmanische Reich 1450–1600 (Frankfurt: 2003); Alexandra Merle, Le miroir ottoman. Une image politique des hommes dans la littérature géographique espagnole et française (XVI–XVII siècles) (Paris: 2003); Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: 2004); and Wendy Bracewell in this volume. 55 See, e.g., Bili≈ski, Figure e momenti Polacchi a Roma.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 19

4/14/08 2:51:32 PM

20

Under Eastern Eyes

later.56 Iberia was largely off the map, as was Scandinavia. The Czech Daniel Vetter’s account of Iceland was an interesting, but sadly unique phenomenon.57 But again, in their preference of orientation towards Mediterranean and Levantine sources of aura and authority, ‘east European’ writers were maybe not unlike the other learned Europeans whom Pierre Chaunu has judged to have been unwilling to detach themselves from their traditional leanings southwards and eastwards.58 So what happened next? Literary historians have posited major schisms occurring in the cultural developments of nearly all the nations: conquest by the Ottomans (1526) of Hungary (including the lands of modern-day Croatia and Slovakia); by the Habsburgs of Bohemia (1621); Hungary (1686); Transylvania (1688); the Banat of Temesvár (1718); Galicia (1772); Bukovina (1775); Dalmatia (1815); Bosnia (1878/1908); anarchy and decline for the Poles in the seventeenth century, followed by partition in the eighteenth; Ukraine caught between Poland and the three empires (Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian) to be dominated eventually by the latter; imposition of ‘Phanariot’ rule for Moldavia (1711) and Wallachia (1716); Albanians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Greeks languishing under Ottoman rule; Slovenes silent under the Habsburgs; Dalmatians under Venice, then Napoleon, then the Habsburgs. This alleged decrescence then allows a sharp contrast to be made with the cultural revivals supposed to have ‘caused’ the establishment of national states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Greece (1833); Serbia; Montenegro and Romania (1878); Bulgaria (1908); Albania (1913); Poland; Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (1918); and finally the states resulting from the dissolutions of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR in the 1990s. 56 On the Greek Noukios, see Maria Kostaridou, ‘Nikandros Noukios, a Greek traveller in mid-sixteenth century Europe’, Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, 6:1–2 (2005), 3–23; on the Czech Brtnický z Valdštejna, see The diary of Baron Waldstein: a traveller in Elizabethan England, trans. G.W. Groos (London: 1981). 57 Daniel Vetter, Islandia aneb krátké vypsání ostrovu Islandu (Prague: 1673), discussed in David Chirico’s piece in this volume. 58 Pierre Chaunu, La civilisation de l’Europe des Lumières, 2nd edition (Paris: 1993), 47–67; cf. Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, discussed by Max Okenfuss, preface to his translation of The travel diary of Peter Tolstoi (De Kalb, Illinois: 1987), xii.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 20

4/14/08 2:51:32 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

21

Scholars in recent years have done much to alter this picture, finding signs of vigour and even innovation in seventeenth-century Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Greek cultures,59 noting early impulses to vernacularisation in the Romanian lands,60 or studying intellectual networks developed through travel in the eighteenthcentury Balkans.61 It is true that some of the literary and most of the few travel-literary traditions which flourished early in the vernacular did so sporadically, and that some of the above-listed geopolitical debacles caused them to dry up. It is true too that institutions of sociability and intellectual enquiry developed considerably more in western than in eastern Europe.62 It is especially relevant that the crucial practice of gathering and editing travel texts into compendia constitutive of some kind of repertoire of ‘global knowledge’ seems hardly to have caught on at all in eastern Europe.63 But other aspects of travel-knowl59 Milada Sou∑ková, Baroque in Bohemia (Ann Arbor, Michigan: 1980); Karin Friedrich, The other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and liberty, 1569–1772 (Cambridge: 2000); Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the frontier, 1600–1660 (New York & Oxford: 2000); Liudmila V. Charipova, Latin books and the Eastern Orthodox clerical elite in Kiev, 1632–1780 (Manchester: 2005); Hupchick, The Bulgarians in the seventeenth century; Kostantaras, Infamy and revolt. The new book by R.J.W. Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs (cit. supra.) presents two decades’ worth of contributions, and contains many insights, references and suggestions for further investigation, not least in respect of periodisation. 60 Alex Drace-Francis, in Solanus, n.s., 17 (2003), 64–80. 61 Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ‘Balkan mentality: History, legend, imagination’, Nations and Nationalism 2:2 (1996), 163–91. 62 On the mapping of scientific knowledge in eighteenth-century Europe, see Hans Bots and Francoise Waquet, La République des Lettres (Paris: 1997), 63–90, according to whom Enlightenment space is ‘universal’ but also ‘hierarchised’ (often in an East–West fashion) and ‘in flux’. In contrast Patrick Jager, ‘Les limites orientales de l’espace européen’, Dix-huitième siècle 25 (1993), 21, argues that the East–West division is of little importance to eighteenth-century writers. 63 Joan Pau Rubiés, ‘Travel writing and humanistic culture’, Journal of Early Modern History 10:1–2 (2006), 131–68, has shown the importance of the compilation and editing process to a humanist conception of knowledge, but also that the process took place in some places (Venice, Germany, England, later France) but not in others (Spain). But see at least the early Polish anthology by Jan z Ocieszyna Ocieski, Orbis Polonicus (Kraków: 1641), and Kroniki polskiej, litewskiej, żmodzkiej i wszystkiej Rusi (Königsberg: 1582).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 21

4/14/08 2:51:33 PM

22

Under Eastern Eyes

edge continued to develop. For example, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Hungarian culture in Transylvania is usually periodised as ending with the Habsburg conquest and concomitant Catholicisation at the end of the seventeenth century, but the tradition of prose letters and autobiography continued uninterrupted into the eighteenth.64 Czech culture, long seen as having been ‘suppressed’ and replaced by a Catholicising tradition of visual piety, kept going in interesting ways in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.65 We need in the first place more detail about the kinds of social environments that are conducive to the writing impulse and to the development of a public culture where texts about travel could be received. For example, for the western Middle Ages, the French historian Jacques Le Goff has established clear links between the development of towns and urban cultural networks, and the rise of a class of ‘intellectuals’.66 Might this be at all true for eastern Europe? Although it is clear that the more urbanised cultures of central Europe also developed writing, printing and travel at an earlier era than those of the south-east, can we point to anything specific about these towns and cities that promoted travel and writing? Was it urbanisation itself, or the establishment of more general intellectual constructs of centre and periphery (for instance through activities like pilgrimage, diplomatic missions, study), that stimulated the impulse not just to go and to see but also to write and to transmit? This is just one of many questions awaiting an answer.67 However, it is clear that, emerging slowly either 64 In English, see Kelemen Mikes, Letters from Turkey, ed. and trans. B. Adams (London & New York: 2000); Peter Apor, Metamorphosis Transylvaniae, trans. B. Adams (London: 2003). 65 James Van Horn Melton, ‘From image to word: Cultural reform and the rise of literate culture in eighteenth-century Austria’, Journal of Modern History 58:1 (1986), 95–134; Marie-Elizabeth Ducreux, ‘Reading unto death: Books and readers in eighteenth-century Bohemia’, in The culture of print, ed. R. Chartier, trans. L.G. Cochrane (Cambridge: 1989, 191–229). 66 Jacques Le Goff, Les intellectuels au moyen âge (Paris: 1957). 67 Wojcech Kalinowski, City development in Poland up to mid-19th century, trans. A. Glimka (Warsaw: 1963); studies on Polish and Bohemian towns by Andrzej Janeczek, Markus German and Herbert Kittler in Town and country in Europe 1300–1800, ed. S.R. Epstein (Cambridge: 2001). Some excellent studies on individual cities (Philip Mansel on Istanbul, Mark Mazower on Salonica, Robin Harris on Dubrovnik, Robert Donia on Sarajevo, Robert Nemes on Budapest, Norman Davies on Wrocław, Robert

iBracewell_A_book.indb 22

4/14/08 2:51:33 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

23

out of, or in opposition to the courtly or monastic centres that had formed the natural focus for the composition and reading of literary texts and narratives, was a public culture of newspapers, scholarly, commercial and political information-sharing. The general importance of these developments both for group identity and for the growth of travel writing has been asserted many times by scholars: suffice it to note here the claim of the Slovene philologist and editor Jernej Kopitar at the beginning of the nineteenth century that ‘we have the newspapers to thank, that we Europeans have become European’.68 There is still nothing like a comparative history of such developments in eastern Europe. The otherwise excellent recent surveys by James Van Horn Melton and T.C.W. Blanning manage to use a central European focus to refine the pioneering hypotheses of sociologists of public culture like Habermas and Elias, but not, unfortunately, to examine cultures beyond the German, or beyond 1800.69 It is also obvious that studying the general development of public culture will not enable us to develop sociological ‘laws’ concerning the origin and spread of travel writing in the region. In most cases, the particularities both of local cultures and of individual figures within them counted for a lot more. But one or two remarks about the rise of newspapers and their relation to travel writing may be of some use here. Firstly, a ‘public sphere’ did not emerge in opposition to, or as a break from the earlier courtly culture, but as a natural extension of it. Peter in Russia, Frederick in Prussia, Stanislaw-August in Poland, and Joseph in Austria and Hungary all patronised newspaper, print culture, and educational travel abroad, as would, in the nineteenth century, the Alvis on Poznan, Gary Cohen and Cathleen Giustino on Prague, Jeremy King on Budweis/Budwar) tend to focus much more on ethnic relations than on intellectual dynamics. Studies on modern literary representations of cities in History of the literary cultures, 2:9–212 address interesting questions but not this one. 68 Jernej Kopitar, review of NovakoviΔ’s Vienna Novine srbske [1813] repr. in his Kleinere Schriften (Vienna: 1857), 257. 69 James Van Horn Melton, The rise of the public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: 2001); T.C.W. Blanning, The culture of power and the power of culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford: 2002). Donald Sassoon, The culture of the Europeans (London: 2006) has much interesting analysis of post-1800 material, but a narrow approach to culture as commodity and to East Europeans as passive recipients of West European manifestations thereof.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 23

4/14/08 2:51:33 PM

24

Under Eastern Eyes

rulers of the Balkan states and principalities.70 In the most dramatic and highly influential example, Russia, an autonomous socio-cultural sphere (obshchestvo) seemed at times to be an entirely top-down creation.71 Secondly, there was a gradual diffusion not so much from east to west as from north to south, as St. Petersburg, Danzig and Warsaw began for eastern Europe what Amsterdam, Strassburg, Venice and London had done for the west. Only gradually did newspaper culture move southwards, first to Vienna, Pressburg (Bratislava) and Buda, then to Transylvania, and finally in the nineteenth century to Zadar, Zagreb, Belgrade, Timişoara, Bucharest, Iaşi, Athens and Istanbul, still later to Sofia, Sarajevo and other provincial centres.72 70 On East European enlightened despots’ support for travel, see (for Russia), Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the age of Peter the Great (London: 1998); Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the age of Catherine the Great (London: 1981); (for Poland) Jean-Marcel Fabre, Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et l’Europe des lumières (Paris: 1952); (for Habsburg Lands) Ratio Educationis [1777], trans. and ed. I. Mészáros (Budapest: 1981), 198, drawn to my attention by Levente Szabó, ‘Travel writing in Hungarian culture’, paper to workshop Out of Ruritania (London: March 2004); (for Romanian lands) N. Iorga, ‘Le despotisme éclairé dans les pays roumains au XVIIIe siècle’, Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences 9 (1937) referring to some short lived initiatives of Constantin Mavrocordat in the 1740s. 71 On the concept of obshchestvo in Russia, see Isabel de Madariaga, Politics and culture in eighteenth-century Russia (London & New York: 1998); Douglas W. Smith, Working the rough stone: Freemasonry and society in eighteenthcentury Russia (De Kalb, Illinois: 1999); on the press in particular, Gary Marker, ‘The creation of journals and the profession of letters in the eighteenth century’, in Literary journals in imperial Russia, ed. D.A. Martinsen (Cambridge: 1997), 17–26. 72 Stanislaw Salmonowicz, ‘La presse et la diffusion des Lumières en Pologne dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, Annales historiques de la Révolution Française 197 (1964); Zeitschriften und Zeitungen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts in Mittel- und Osteuropa, ed. I. Friedl, H. Lemberg and E. RosenstrauchKönigsberg (Berlin: 1986); Domokos Kosáry, The press during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–49 (Boulder, Colorado: 1986), ch. 1; Andrea Seidler and Wolfram Seidler, Das Zeitschriftenwesen im Donauraum zwischen 1740 und 1809 (Vienna: 1988); Die Habsburger Monarchie 1848–1918, Bd. 8: Politische Öffentlichkeit und Zivilgesellschaft, 2. Teilband: Die Presse als Faktor der politischen Modernisierung (Vienna: 2006); Demetrios Kalopothakis, A short history of the Greek press (Athens: 1928); Alex Drace-Francis, The making of modern Romanian culture (London & New York: 2006), 124–8.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 24

4/14/08 2:51:34 PM

Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing

25

Thirdly, while many of the projects to establish newspapers or cultural societies in vernacular languages had ‘national’ aims, seeking to englobe and unify potentially large ‘reading nations’, most publishing projects remained provincial affairs, and books and newspapers circulated with difficulty beyond local readerships, usually comprised of members of the clerical and administrative class. One of the more curious things shown by our bibliographical work was the diversity of publishing locations, even within one linguistic tradition. Fourthly, within these emerging literary cultures, the discursive essay in particular developed as a dominant mode of expression—with researchers into various different traditions noting a significant symbolic position occupied by this type of text, sometimes in compensation for the absence of a developed tradition of the novel, or maybe rather as an alternative to it.73 This of course enabled an interesting symbiosis between the generalised national discourse and a particular genre like travel writing, with its multiple affinities with the essay.74 East European novels themselves often evolved with assistance from the narrative models offered by domestic or imported travel literature.75 One scholar has even ventured to suggest that in one particular national cultural configuration, the Croatian, travel writing bears the significance assigned by Benedict Anderson to the novel.76 73 Miroslav Sicel, ‘Aspects of the Croatian moderna’, in Comparative studies in Croatian literature, ed. M. Beker (Zagreb: 1981), 320; Virgil Nemoianu, ‘Displaced images: Travel literature as conversational essay in the early nineteenth century’, Synthesis 19 (1992), 3–11; Stanisław Eile, Modernist trends in twentieth-century Polish fiction (London: 1996); Diana Kuprel, ‘Literary reportage: Between and beyond art and fact’, in History of the literary cultures of East-Central Europe, ed. Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, 2:371–85. 74 On the novel-essay relationship generally, see Nemoianu, ‘Displaced images’; Roman et récit de voyage, ed. P. Antoine and M. C. Gomez-Géraud (Paris: 2001); on travel writing and the essay, Fussell, Abroad, 202–6. 75 The material is too diverse to offer a thesis comparable to that developed for English literature by Percy Adams, Travel literature and the evolution of the novel (Lexington, Kentucky: 1983). But see István Friedl, ‘On the formation of the East-Central European novel’, Acta Litteraria Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 27 (1985), 173–88. The importance of translations of Fénelon’s Télémaque and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is widely acknowledged for many east European travel cultures. 76 Dean Duda, ‘Towards a modernist travel culture’, Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 6:1–2 (2005), 69–86.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 25

4/14/08 2:51:34 PM

26

Under Eastern Eyes

By these and other basic conditions the appearance of travel writing was enabled in eastern Europe; the above are a series of propositions which can be considered as starting points for a discussion but which of course require further nuancing. And texts multiplied exponentially from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. Not just the numbers but also the number of different kinds of texts increased: new categories such as reportage, leisure travel, intimate diaries, exile narratives, scholarly research reports and so forth appeared, each with their own cultural, political and literary contexts. And then there are the lesser-asked questions. Will the output of east European travel writing continue to increase in quantity? We might be tempted to assume that it will, but in fact there is no reason for this to continue indefinitely. American travel writing to Europe witnessed massive surges in the period 1820–1850 when American literary identity was establishing itself; but then it tailed off in the twentieth century and is a relatively insignificant part of US literary culture today.77 A sociology of these developments which would account for all of the 4,400 texts we have tracked down and listed is impossible at the present state of research, particularly if it has to account not only for the production and dissemination of travel writing but also for its reception and questions of its influence. But by starting from definitions of texts and by situating their appearance in the long-term context of the evolution of writing and printing in the vernacular languages of eastern Europe, I hope at least to have provided an introduction to the problem and indicated its scope and importance.

77 Harold F. Smith, American travellers abroad. A bibliography of accounts published before 1900, 2nd edition. (Lanham, Maryland: 1999).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 26

4/14/08 2:51:34 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre David Chirico

The study of travel narratives reveals the lack of grounding theory and analytical tools. […] The reason for this is doubtless that the travel narrative has often been seen essentially as a document (informing us about reality) or as a fragment of an autobiography (informing us about its author). Its status as a literary artefact is rarely brought to the forefront.1

ASSUMPTIONS, QUESTIONS AND STUDIES Each of the essays in this volume looks at east Europeans who travelled within Europe. They came from different cultural traditions, travelled in different centuries and to different destinations, and had different aims, or no aim at all, in travelling. What all have in common is that they wrote texts about their travels. The texts themselves are widely different: some long and some very short; some intended for publication, some private; some polemical, some descriptive, some lyrical, some driven by a narrative plot; some of high aesthetic value and some of none; some interesting and some astonishingly dull. It is implicit, however, in the decision to publish a collection of essays on east European travel writing, and indeed to publish bibliographies and anthologies of travel writing texts, that there is something in common, a set of features which enable a more or less clearly defined category to be drawn up, however provisionally, within which some texts can be included and from which some, just as importantly, can be excluded. One aim of this essay is to frame, and begin to answer, some questions about the significance of the formal, thematic and social/histori-

1 Jean Viviès, English travel narratives in the eighteenth century: Exploring genres, trans. C. Davison (Aldershot: 2002).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 27

4/14/08 2:51:35 PM

28

Under Eastern Eyes

cal factors which unite these texts. I would argue that there is much to be gained from a literary-theoretical approach to individual travel narrative texts, and that the conventions which make up the travel narrative genre can be used to provide the starting points for analysis both of individual texts and of the different functions of the travel narrative in different periods and literatures. The essay has two further aims: first, to give some signposts through the basis of, and controversies within, genre theory, for those readers whose own specialities lie outside literary theory; and secondly, I hope polemically, to defend the idea of genre against those criticisms which suggest that the very concept is outmoded, or even oppressive. I would like to raise four interrelated types of question. First, what is ‘genre’ (and what is a ‘literary’ genre)? Is the concept still relevant, or is it an irrelevant relic from an era of prescriptive literary criticism? Does it have any relevance to the study of travel writing in general and the travel narrative in particular? Secondly, what, if any, are the specific conventional features which define the travel narrative as a literary genre? Is there any point in trying to define ‘travel narrative’ and, if so, how should it be defined? Thirdly, to what extent can an awareness of genre—of generic conventions—assist in locating travel-writing texts within their own national literary traditions, within literary movements and so on? To what extent can an awareness of literary genre assist in—open out into—historical, literary-historical, sociological or anthropological analysis of the functions and meanings of our texts and groups of texts? Fourthly, to what extent can an analysis of generic conventions contribute to the analysis of individual texts? Does it help to examine how a text is ‘regulated by’, and how it may transgress, generic conventions within which it is written? Information about the conventions which determine the travel narrative genre may be found in secondary texts. These in turn take many forms: some are extended monographic studies,2 or essays3 on

2 See particularly, in the context of the present essay, the important monographic work by the Slovak theorist and literary historian Zlatko Klátik, Vývin slovenského cestopis [The Development of the Slovak Travelogue] (Bratislava: 1969); and Dejan Duda, Pri∑a i putovanje: hrvatski romanti∑arski putopis kao pripovjedni žanr [Tale and Travel: the Croatian Romantic travel text as a narrative genre] (Zagreb: 2002). 3 I refer below in particular to Jan Borm, ‘Defining travel: on the travel book,

iBracewell_A_book.indb 28

4/14/08 2:51:35 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

29

travel writing from a literary critical or historical viewpoint. Others are introductions to anthologies of travel writing, often drawing from a single national literary tradition.4 Secondary texts about travel writing make explicit or implicit assumptions about the nature of ‘travel writing’ as a genre, often drawing lines around the subject matter by defining generic conventions. They often go on to evaluate the genre, and do so in varied ways: as a genre falling between literature and historical/topographic writings; as a mixed, or problematic genre, occupying boundaries between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ styles, fictional and non-fictional discourses, plot-driven and episodic narratives; and often as a genre arising at a crucial moment in (national?) literary history. An example is the frequent reference to, and use by critics, of Goethe’s accounts of his travels in Italy. Klátik, for instance, presents Goethe’s different reworkings of texts about his travels in Italy as crossing the frontier from objective Enlightenment descriptiveness to internalised and subjective Romantic narrative.5 There are elements of formal, literary-historical and discourse-based approaches in such an analysis. Many secondary texts treat the travel narrative in terms of its relationship to the novel, acting crucially in some periods as an impulse for the evolution of the modern novel, but acting at other times as a non-fictional genre reflecting the innovations of the ‘superior’ fictional novel. Such texts may seem to deal with travel writing primarily as an intertext for ‘proper’ literature, a non-fictional ‘research’ stage in the production of a completed fictional work. But however much the interest in travel texts is ultimately directed outwards from them—towards what they tell literary critics about other, more prestigious literary texts, or towards the information they provide about historical personages, or about historical and geographical facts, or about the history of discourses and ideologies—the analyst will miss out a crucial step, and will miss important features of the texts he/she is considering, if he/she forgets their literary existence.

travel writing and terminology’, in Perspectives on travel writing, ed. G. Hooper and T. Youngs (Aldershot: 2004), 13–26; and Vladimír Macura, ‘Básnický cestopis’, in Poetika ∑eské mezivál∑né literatury (Prague: 1987), 33–55. 4 These texts are referenced, for east European literatures, in the individual sections of A bibliography of east European travel writing in Europe, published alongside this set of essays. 5 Klátik, Vývin slovenského cestopis, 29.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 29

4/14/08 2:51:35 PM

30

Under Eastern Eyes

The examples of travel texts used in this essay are drawn from Czech and Slovak literature, and I have found the Klátik monograph and the Macura essay particularly useful.6 An invaluable anthology of twentieth-century theoretical texts on genre theory is David Duff’s Modern genre theory, which also contains an excellent introduction and notes and which includes a good selection of work by east European writers.7 As for general theoretical works on genre, I still find the most helpful to be those of Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov.8

WHAT IS A GENRE? Genres, says Tsvetan Todorov, are ‘classes of texts’.9 Immediately recognising the circularity of this definition, he elaborates: ‘I believe we will have a useful and operative notion that remains in keeping with the prevailing usage of the word if we agree to call genres only the classes of texts that have been historically perceived as such.’10 As Todorov continues: Genres are thus entities that can be described from two different viewpoints, that of empirical observation and that of abstract analysis. In a given society, the recurrence of certain discursive properties is institutionalised, and individual texts are produced and perceived in relation to the norm constituted by that codification. A genre, wheth6 Klátik, Vývin slovenského cestopis and Macura, ‘Básnický cestopis’. These Czechoslovak texts are strongly influenced in turn by the Russian Formalists and by Polish theorists, including Ireneusz Opacki, an extract from whose Problemy teorii literatury appears in Modern genre theory, ed. D. Duff (Harlow: 2000). 7 Duff, Modern genre theory. As this easily available volume draws together many of the most useful texts on genre (including texts by Tynianov, Bakhtin, Propp, Opacki and Todorov), I will take my references from it where possible. 8 Todorov’s essays on genre are collected in Genres in discourse, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge: 1990), originally Les genres du discours (Paris: 1978). The essay ‘The origin of genres’ is in Duff, Modern genre theory, 193–209. Genette’s main essay on genre is the extended The architext: an introduction, trans. J.E. Lewin (Berkeley, California: 1992), originally Introduction à l’architexte (Paris: 1979); an extract appears in the Duff anthology. 9 Todorov, ‘The origin of genres’, 197. 10 Ibid., 198.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 30

4/14/08 2:51:36 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

31

er literary or not, is nothing other than the codification of discursive properties.11

There are, therefore two sides to genre: first, the features (‘discursive properties’) which the texts belonging to a particular genre have in common; secondly, the historical fact that certain groups of texts have been designated as belonging to a genre. Genres are not, emphasises Todorov, a ‘natural’ property of discourse or the world.12 The fact that they are historically determined, however, does not mean that they have no formal, discursive basis. In other words, the fact that they can be recognised in history does not mean that this is the limit of their reality: The historical existence of genres is signalled by discourse on genres; however, that does not mean that genres are simply metadiscursive notions and not discursive ones. As one example, we can attest to the historical existence of the genre known as tragedy in seventeenth-century France by pointing to discourse on tragedy (which begins with the existence of this word itself); but that does not mean that the tragedies themselves lack common features and that they could therefore not be described in other than historical terms. As we know, any class of objects may be converted into a series of properties by a passage from extension to comprehension. The study of genres, which has at its starting point the historical evidence of the existence of genres, must have as its ultimate objective precisely the establishment of these properties.13

A genre is therefore redefined as ‘a codification of discursive properties’.14 So what is a ‘discursive property’? Todorov defines it as any 11 Ibid., 198. 12 The history of the ‘naturalisation’ by critics and theorists of genres which should always have been recognised as historically determined, and the analytical confusion to which this led, is the starting-point for Genette’s The Architext. 13 Ibid., 197. 14 Duff, Modern genre theory, xiii, defines genre as ‘a recurring type or category of text, as defined by structural, thematic and/or functional criteria’. This is helpful in its breakdown of the defining properties or criteria, but I prefer Todorov’s emphasis on the conventionality or institutionalisation of genre—its codification—which seems more analytically productive than the reference to ‘recurrence’.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 31

4/14/08 2:51:36 PM

32

Under Eastern Eyes

feature of discourse which can be made obligatory. He gives a number of examples: such features may be narratological (such as the structuring of a plot in a detective story, as compared to a thriller or romance, for example); they may be pragmatic (such as claims of authenticity in an autobiography, as opposed to the convention of suspended disbelief which underlies the fictionality of the Bildungsroman); they may be thematic (such as those distinguishing comedy from tragedy); they may be phonological, or metrical (such as the different metrical norms distinguishing a sonnet from an ode). Others could be added: choice of medium, or choice of language (Latin or vernacular, which may be an obligatory discursive property in many Renaissance and Baroque literatures). While the different features may, in turn, be categorised, and while analyses have often historically attempted to place them in a hierarchy, deciding which are more ‘fundamental’, the important point to Todorov is that each of these features is capable of becoming obligatory, and therefore determinative of generic differences. One of the benefits of Todorov’s analysis is that it helps to explain the different ways in which different analyses of genre have been conducted. Some concentrate on discursive properties, whether formal, thematic, or pragmatic. Others concentrate more on the existence of a genre as a historical, or sociological fact; as a type of writing produced by certain member of a certain society at a certain time; or as a way of organising and marketing textual products (in libraries or bookshops, for example). Todorov advocates a dialectical approach, setting it out in an important passage from ‘The origin of genres’: We might establish the place of the notion of genre even more precisely by making two symmetrical distinctions. Since a genre is the historically attested codification of discursive properties, it is easy to imagine the absence of either of the two components of the definition: historical reality and discursive reality. In the absence of historical reality, we would be dealing with the categories of general poetics that are called—depending upon textual level—modes, registers, styles, or even forms, manners and so on. The ‘noble style’ or ‘first person narration’ are indeed discursive realities; but they cannot be pinned down to a certain moment in time: they are always possible. By the same token, in the absence of discursive reality, we would be dealing with notions that belong to literary history in the broad sense, such as

iBracewell_A_book.indb 32

4/14/08 2:51:36 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

33

trend, school, movement, or, in another sense of the word, style. It is certain that the literary movement we know as symbolism existed historically; but that does not prove that the works of authors identified with symbolism have discursive properties in common (apart from trivial ones); the unity of the movement may be centred on friendships, common manifestations, and so on. Let us allow that this may be the case; we would then have an example of a historical phenomenon that has no precise discursive reality. This does not make it inappropriate for study, but distinguishes it from Genres, and even more from Modes, and so on. Genres are the meeting place between general poetics and event-based literary history; as such, they constitute a privileged object that may well deserve to be the principal figure in literary studies.15

The dialectical approach championed by Todorov avoids both the potential circularity of a falsely ahistorical, purely formal, descriptive method, and the risk that the historical approach will overlook the textual/literary nature of the products it analyses. In his Travel literature and the evolution of the novel, Percy G. Adams seeks to demonstrate the high level of differentiation within the larger group of travel texts: he differentiates subtypes in terms of objective, ‘neutral’ description vs. subjectivity and personalised description, in terms of form (letters, diary, dialogue, narrative, etc.), in terms of historical period and destination, in terms of the type of traveller and the purpose of travel. As will be seen below, the present essay does not take any of these distinctions to be determinative of the travel narrative—in other words, texts can vary widely in their objectivity, form, purpose, and still be ‘travel narratives’. Adams’s analysis leads him to conclude that there is no point talking of ‘genre’ in connection with such a variegated body of texts.16 In fact, there has long been a movement within the philosophical and literary-historical community against talking of genre at all. One line of criticism stems from an objection to the prescriptive nature of genre which, it is said, unnecessarily restricts the freedom of the creative imagination or (in a more sophisticated formulation developed 15 Todorov, ‘The origin of genres’, 200–1. 16 Percy G. Adams, Travel literature and the evolution of the novel, (Lexington, Kentucky: 1983).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 33

4/14/08 2:51:36 PM

34

Under Eastern Eyes

by Jacques Derrida in ‘The law of genre’ [1980])17 unnecessarily and oppressively seeks to impose marks of exclusion, or belonging. The uselessness of ‘genre’ is further shown by the fact that great works are ones which defy generic norms. It would be possible to meet the accusation of prescriptiveness by pointing out that it is the very convention-driven notion of literature—the way in which norms of writing and reading are imposed—which can be laid bare by generic studies: the study of genres exposes, rather than reinforces, prescription. To the suggestion that genre studies are useless because great works defy generic law, the answer might be two-fold: first, it is legitimate and important to study the social construction of literary conventions, even if the best illustrators of this—the texts which best ‘obey the law’—may not be the ones to which we ascribe the greatest aesthetic value; secondly, as Todorov points out, the very emphasis on freedom from purity of genre is, in itself, a historical convention (a culture-specific modernist or post-modernist norm) creating a new genre (the ‘genre-free text’) in its own right. Other criticisms of the concept of genre are more pragmatic. Firstly, it is sometimes suggested that generic divisions are objectionable because they hide the continuity of discourse across different types of text: if we become over-anxious about the difference between the novel, the travel text, the epic poem and the official record, we will distract ourselves from the continuity of discourse which may exist between them. This argument may arise in part from the methodological importance in colonial and post-colonial studies of the comparative analysis of very different sources, including ‘non-literary’ ones. In reality, however, there seems to be no principled reason why the existence of, or recognition of, a generic boundary should impede comparative studies. On the contrary, a genre-based analysis may be particularly well-suited to trace the mystificatory process by which ideologically-driven discursive norms are displaced and institutionalised as apparently ‘neutral’ literary conventions. A slightly different form of objection to genre is that it prevents an analysis of intertextual relations between different texts. In an interest-

17 Originally published in 1980; see Duff, Modern genre theory, 219–31 for a translation of the most relevant sections of the essay, together with notes.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 34

4/14/08 2:51:37 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

35

ing essay on Karl May, a writer of fictional adventures, Theo Harden makes the following observation: The intertextuality of travel literature today seems to be an undisputed fact, which does not need any further comment. But even though this position is generally established and widely accepted, there seems to be a vague, but nevertheless vivid, notion that certain types of literature do not merit the label travel literature, i.e. those which are exclusively based on second-hand information, where the author has only consulted already recorded geographical, ethnological or any other type of source material to create the spirit of otherness, of something foreign and exotic. Large quantities of so called adventure literature fall into this category and the argument normally used to disqualify it as not meriting research is that the author is not processing his or her own experience but is using the exotic setting mainly as a means and not as an end.18

The references to ‘qualifying’, and the concern that interesting points of intertextual comparison will simply be shut out of the literary critical process by rigid application of a hierarchy of genres, no doubt have serious justification in the context of the institutionalisation of literary studies. The very origin of intertextual research, however, lies in its recognition of the ways in which textual elements are transformed as they pass across boundaries between one context and another. A transfer across the boundaries drawn by literary conventions is, like a transfer from one author to another, or between two national literatures, precisely the kind of phenomenon to which intertextual analysis should be suited. By recognising the generic differences between the adventure novel and the travel narrative, and without placing the genres in any kind of aesthetic hierarchy, the critic can examine the ways in which similar thematic elements—information about places visited, for example—are preserved or deformed as they pass from one genre to another. Such comparative analysis belongs to the synchronic dimension of genre studies.

18 Theo Harden, ‘How real is real? Karl May’s virtual travels’, in Cross-cultural travel, ed. J. Conroy (New York: 2003), 283–4.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 35

4/14/08 2:51:37 PM

36

Under Eastern Eyes

At the same time, it follows from the recognition that genres are socially constructed—both in terms of the discursive properties which define them and in terms of their ideological and social function—that both their nature and their function will change over time. The awareness of those processes of change underlies the diachronic dimension of genre studies. Analysts have looked, for example, at: a) The ways in which genres replace or complete with each other, and the ‘canonisation of the younger genres’.19 b) The relation between ‘pure’ genres, ‘hybrids’ and ‘variants’.20 c) The concrete processes by which genres evolve, for example by mixing, thematic change, parody and so on.21 Once such generic histories—the history of travel narrative, for example—have been postulated in analysis of different national literatures, they can be subjected to comparative analysis. What of the prestige accorded to the travel narrative genre: is it a ‘literary’ genre? Are its texts considered to have an aesthetic function?22 Secondary texts on travel writing are often concerned—maybe overly concerned—with whether it belongs to literature or non-literary writing (‘subliterature’). If the question is reformulated as: ‘has travel writing ever been treated as a literary form?’, the answer will be seen to be historically contingent. In Genette’s Fiction and Diction, he seeks markers of literariness under two headings: fiction (saying something in whose truth there

19 See, for example, Tynianov, ‘The literary fact’, in Duff, Modern genre theory, 33. 20 See, for example, the extract from Ireneusz Opacki’s Problemy teorii literatury in Duff, Modern genre theory, 118–26. 21 See, e.g., Tynianov, ‘The literary fact’; Todorov, ‘The origin of genres’. 22 The Russian Formalists famously hunted for the mark of literariness and believed that they had found it in defamiliarisation—doing the unexpected, or breaching the code. Genette is more straightforward: a ‘literary text’ is ‘a (verbal) object with an aesthetic function—a genre whose works constitute a particular species defined by the fact, among others, that the aesthetic function is intentional in nature (and perceived as such), (Fiction and Diction, vii).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 36

4/14/08 2:51:37 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

37

is an agreement to suspend disbelief); and diction (the use of stylistic markers to emphasise the superfluity of the text to what it seeks to represent). As will emerge below, fictionality is not a marker available to the travel narrative. A text which is non-fictional will, in order to be read as ‘literature’, have to establish its literariness by some other means: either by using a formal, or stylistic marker of the type characterised by Genette as ‘diction’ (maybe the use of a literary stylistic register, or linguistic innovation,23 or the frequency of references to and citations of other literary texts); or by the use of some paratextual/extratextual marker (such as the known identity of the author as a literary figure). An important part of any history of the travel narrative as a genre is likely to be an analysis of which of these texts were received as ‘literary’, and when, and why.24

TRAVEL NARRATIVE—TOWARDS A DEFINITION So what are the discursive properties which are obligatory for the travel narrative? In his major study, Le pacte autobiographique, Philippe Lejeune devised the following definition of the autobiography: ‘Retrospective narrative in prose which a real person gives, about his/her own existence, in which he/she emphasises his/her individual life, and in particular the story of his/her personality.’25 Lejeune then shows how his definition can be broken down into elements—discursive properties, to follow Todorov’s terminology— which he arranges in four different categories. He lists them: (1) Linguistic form: (a) narrative; (b) in prose; (2) Subject dealt with: individual life, story of a personality; 23 This was particularly the case with nineteenth-century literary revivals, where one function of the travel text was to act as a conduit by which foreign words entered the vernacular. 24 This comment also, I hope, explains the placing of ‘literary’ in parantheses in the title of this essay. Unlike the fictional novel, which is ‘literary’ by its generic nature, the travel narrative may or may not be; its ‘literariness’ is not preordained. Travel narrative, which by its form does not contain any necessary marker of literariness, is likely to straddle the literary/non-literary divide. 25 Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: 1975), 14 (my translation).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 37

4/14/08 2:51:38 PM

38

Under Eastern Eyes (3) Situation of the author: identity of the author (whose name refers to a real person) with the narrator;26 (4) Position of the narrator: (a) identity of the narrator with the principal character; (b) retrospective perspective of the narrative.27

It will be easiest to characterise feature (3), the identity of the author with the narrator, as ‘non-fiction’. Lejeune’s starting thesis is that these categories form the basis of a pact, or contract, between the writer and the reader of the autobiography. He stresses that, apart from elements (3) and (4a), which he considers to be all-or-nothing features of the autobiography, the other elements are relative. Lejeune’s definition is a good place to start in an examination of the travel narrative: empirically, there are obvious links between autobiographical and travel narrative texts. Here, by way of comparison, are some working definitions of the travel narrative. The first two were devised by different years of a taught course in travel writing at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies: a) An allegedly real and autobiographical account, presenting a place foreign to the projected reader and/or author. b) A non-fictional first-person narrative describing travel to or residence in a place and explicitly or implicitly comparing it with a place of departure. It will be noted that both of these definitions highlight a Self/Other semiotic opposition, a discourse of difference. If nothing else, this shows the way in which such provisional definitions are influenced by the 26 It will be helful to refer to this property as ‘first-person narrative’. In Discours du récit (Paris: 1972), Gérard Genette argues persuasively that this terminology is inadequate: many narratives have a first-person narrator who is not a principal character at all but simply an observer. I will assume for this essay that ‘first-person narrative’ includes the gloss that the narrator of such a narrative is the principal character. 27 Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, 14. Note that category (3) of Lejeune’s breakdown belongs to what I have called the ‘pragmatic’ class of discursive properties; (1a) and (4) to what I have called the ‘narratological’ class; (1b) to the phonological; (2) to the thematic.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 38

4/14/08 2:51:38 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

39

context in which they arise—in this case, a travel-writing undergraduate course which was, initially at least, much driven by ideas of otherness (before it became clear that there were other elements to the texts which were at least as interesting). I would propose a further provisional definition as follows: c) A non-fictional first-person prose narrative describing a person’s travel(s) and the spaces passed through or visited, which is ordered in accordance with, and whose plot is determined by, the order of the narrator’s act of travelling.28 The next step is to break this definition down into its constitutive elements. Following a rather different order from that of Lejeune, the breakdown might run: (1) Pragmatic function: non-fiction. (2) Narratological functions: (a) narrative; (b) first-person; (c) which is ordered in accordance with, and whose plot is determined by, the order of the narrator’s act of travelling. (3) Thematic function: describes a person’s travel(s) and the spaces passed through and visited. (4) Phonological function: prose. As with Lejeune’s study of the autobiography, the elements are neither unchanging nor unproblematic—hence the need for such a definition to be provisional. For example, I had originally included within it a further thematic function: ‘explicitly or implicitly compares the spaces described with a place of departure’. Ultimately, however, this does

28 This is the definition I will use for the remainder of this essay. It may be helpful to compare Jan Borm’s definition: ‘any narrative characterized by a non-fiction dominant that relates (almost always) in the first person a journey or journeys that the reader supposes to have taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that author, narrator and principal character are but one and identical’, ‘Defining travel’, 17.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 39

4/14/08 2:51:38 PM

40

Under Eastern Eyes

not seem to add anything materially to the definition. It follows on to a greater or lesser extent from elements (2) and (3), and it is hard to imagine how a text which did not meet such a requirement would belong to a different genre. It may also be noted that our definitions of travel writing contain no equivalent to Lejeune’s requirement of narrative retrospectivity. It follows that there is no obligatory generic distinction between the retrospective travel account, written in the past tense and from a narrative standpoint which entirely post-dates the events narrated, and the travel journal, written on a day-to-day basis, and therefore from a constantly shifting temporal position. The fact that our definitions differ in this way from Lejeune’s is illustrative of the ultimately empirical nature of such definitions: it does not seem to me that there is a material, or interesting, distinction to make, in terms of theme, function or historical/social significance, between the retrospective travel narrative and the travel journal (which would be a subcategory of the travel narrative genre). Again, others may disagree, or, more significantly, may find within a particular national tradition or period that such a distinction was either relevant to function (the two classes of text ‘doing’ something different), or was connected with some other kind of historical/sociological difference (journals perceived as a non-literary precursor to ‘reworked’ literary narratives, for example, or journals being associated with subjectivism or femininity). So what of the discursive functions that we have chosen to class as obligatory? The following is a list of neighbouring genres, together with the discursive functions which distinguish them from the travel narrative: Guidebook: (2a) and (c). Guidebooks are non-narrative, and are not ordered in accordance with a particular act of travelling. Elements (2b) and the ‘travel’ part of the thematic element may or may not be present. Novel with a travel theme: (1). A novel does not follow the non-fictional convention. Biography of a traveller; account of a travel: (2b). The narrator is not the principal character. Autobiography: (3). The principal theme of an autobiography is not a person’s travels and the spaces visited.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 40

4/14/08 2:51:39 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

41

Verse travelogue: (4). A verse travelogue is not in prose. It also likely that the narratological elements in (2) will be greatly attenuated. Journalistic essay: (2c). Not ordered in accordance with a specific act of travelling. It may or may not comply with (2a) and (b). If it does not comply with (3), it is likely to be what Lejeune described as a self-portrait. It may seem that, going down this list (and the list could go on), the distinctions become ever vaguer, more problematic. This is not surprising: we have found certain distinctions to be most historically significant and pragmatically useful (for instance, in deciding what to include in a bibliography). So, for example, the distinction has seemed most important between the travel narrative on the one hand and travel fiction, the guidebook and the travel biography on the other.29 Before considering the elements of the definition of the travel narrative in slightly greater detail, two digressions. First, a note on terminology. The genre which this essay seeks to define and discuss is the ‘travel narrative’. I have chosen not to use ‘travel writing’ in this particular context, despite the great advantage of its being the popular term which is generally used to characterise such texts. The problem with the term ‘travel writing’ is its capacity to designate any writing with a travel theme, whether it be a guidebook, a novel, and so on. ‘Travel text’ has the benefit of making clear its reference to texts, rather than the writer or the event, but otherwise faces similar difficulties to ‘travel writing’. It was tempting to use the term ‘travelogue’: it is generally now used to refer to written records of specific travels; it is a single word; and it works well as a translation for terms in use in some of the literatures studied—cestopis or putopis, for example. I have ultimately chosen ‘travel narrative’ because it appears to mean what it says, is the best translation of the French récit de voyage, and is useful in explaining the fact that other secondary works, which are more

29 Indeed, as the reader of A bibliography of east European travel writing will realise, we have been very flexible in our approach to the inclusion of autobiographies and journalistic essays, which may contain long and important passages of travel narrative within them.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 41

4/14/08 2:51:39 PM

42

Under Eastern Eyes

inclined to deal generally with travel-themed texts, reach different conclusions about genre.30 Secondly, it is important to note that many studies of travel writing, including particularly Percy G. Adams’s detailed and influential study, reach the conclusion that it is not a literary genre at all. Adams sees it as essentially too fluid (although it might be argued that, despite his use of the term récit de voyage, he is really describing a wide variety of travel writings which, in accordance with the definition above, could more realistically be divided between different genres). The explanation for the different conclusion may lie in the nature of Adams’s enterprise. As his title, Travel literature and the rise of the novel, suggests, his overriding concern is with the ways in which ‘travel literature’ (a very broad term) has affected the development of the novel. In those circumstances, it may be difficult to trace any unifying form (just as one might expect a study entitled ‘Fictional literature and the evolution of the travel narrative’ to be reluctant to pin down the generic norms of ‘fiction’). At least two important monographs on the travel writing of specific Slavonic literatures—Zlatko Klátik’s Vývin slovenského cestopisu [Development of the Slovak travelogue] and Dejan Duda’s Pri∑a i putovanje [Tale and travel]—treat travel narrative as a literary genre, base their comparative studies on their genre-based view of the travel narrative, and use definitions similar to ours.31 30 Jan Borm makes a similar distinction to mine. Gently rejecting the argument that, because travel writing is simply too varied to amount to a genre, the very notion of genre is irrelevant, he distinguishes between, on the one hand, ‘travel writing or travel literature (the literature of travel)’, an ‘overall heading for texts whose main theme is travel’ and, on the other, the genre of ‘travel book or travelogue’ which he defines in terms similar to our definition of the travel narrative. Needless to say, his own choice of terminology, which he bases on the German Reisebuch, is different from that used here; however, the principle is the same. See Borm, ‘Defining travel’, 18–9. 31 Klátik, in particular, distinguishes between texts with a travel theme and the literary genre of the travel narrative (cestopis): ‘a broad conception of the travelogue, in which works about real and invented travels is included, along with various reports, scientific information and subjective-fictional works, novels or short stories, and even epic compositions in verse, are included, is the result of the fact that its defining and almost exclusive determinant of the term is taken to be its noetic-semantic component—travelling as a form of human relationship to reality. However, a literary genre which is formed in a literary-historical process, presents a poetic structure.’ Klátik, Vývin slovenského cestopisu, 24–5.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 42

4/14/08 2:51:39 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

43

THE ELEMENTS OF THE TRAVEL NARRATIVE How does our provisional definition of the travel narrative relate to specific texts? This section will draw in part on the reading of three Czech travel texts of comparable length, each of which has been received as a literary text, and each of which comes from a different period in Czech literary history. I begin, therefore, with a short description of these texts. Daniel Vetter, a Moravian studying in Bremen, travelled to Iceland in 1613. He wrote an account of his journey which he published in Polish, Czech and German between 1638 and 1640.32 The full title of the Czech edition is: ‘Iceland, or a short description of the island of Iceland, in which are wild and peculiar things unseen in our own lands, but observed by our own eyes, and some heard from trustworthy inhabitants of that island and truthfully recorded’.33 The contrast between the ‘wild and peculiar’ things of Iceland and their absence in ‘our lands’ is eased, even in the title, by the lengthy reference to sources of authority. There are two sections of Vetter’s short account (it takes up only 16 pages in Polišenský’s edition): first a narrative of the narrator’s travels; secondly (and, following on from the narrative as a separate section the text), a ‘description’ of Iceland. The narrative is divided into three parts. a) Journey to Iceland is structured around a division between: (1) good things (the fact that they arrived at all); and (2) bad things (which take up most of this section, and include being pursued by pirates, seasickness and the death of crew members, and storms at sea). b) Sojourn in Iceland is divided into: (1) a liminal section describing the dangers of getting out of and into the ship in Iceland; (2) the journey overland to the meeting of the parliament; (3) the stay at the parliament, which includes a very short intrigue, in which 32 Daniel Vetter, ‘Islandia’, in ∂eská touha cestovatelská: Cestopisy, deníky a listy ze 17. století, ed. J. Polišenský (Prague: 1989). 33 Ibid., 129.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 43

4/14/08 2:51:39 PM

44

Under Eastern Eyes one local judge attempts unsuccessfully to incite the hejtman against the narrator and his companion; (4) a further stay with a bishop of the island; (5) the exchange of gifts; and (6) the journey overland back to the port. c) Journey back home is divided into: (1) the delays experienced in finding a ship; and (2) a great storm between Scotland and the Shetland Islands.

The narrative text very closely follows the sequence of events represented; it is, in turn followed by a descriptive essay of roughly equal length. The entirety of the account of the stay on the island, however, is dominated by the heroes’ disgust at the food they are given there; the main narrative function of the subsidiary characters (the hejtman and the bishop) is to be concerned at what the heroes were eating, and to ensure that they did not have to consume the local dried fish, saltless meat and sour milk. The very small subplot, the local judge’s hostility to the heroes, is resolved when the hejtman, ‘astonished at how we could eat and endure these [local] foodstuffs, immediately ordered his cook, who had accompanied him, to prepare and give to us a good breakfast’.34 Even better, when the hejtman sees how much they like the food, he tells them they can come back every day. This is expressly portrayed as being the final resolution of the plot with the local judge: ‘[T]he hejtman gave us the right, for as long as we were staying there, always to come to him for food. When the judge, who had initially incited the hejtman against us, heard about this kindness and generosity, he was very angry that everything had gone against, rather than according to, his will. God’s providence was in these things too.’35 Emanuel Arnold was a radical and patriot who was caught up in the events of Prague 1848, and was wanted by the Habsburg authorities. His travel narrative36 tells of his escape, in May 1849, from Prague and, mainly on foot, through the Bohemian countryside and into what he believed was safety in Saxony. He published his account in July 34 Ibid.,133. 35 Ibid., 134. 36 Emanuel Arnold, Popsání cesty mé, ed. J. Wolf (Prague: 1920). The original pamphlet version was published in Leipzig in 1849.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 44

4/14/08 2:51:40 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

45

1849 and had 300 copies smuggled back into Bohemia. He was arrested later that month, taken back to Prague, tried for treason (with his travel narrative cited among the evidence of treacherous acts) and imprisoned until his release on amnesty in 1857. His narrative very closely follows the order of his travels, beginning with his chance avoidance of capture in Prague, then organised around the days and nights of his journey. The nights bring him into contact with inns, innkeepers and travellers (all of which are described in their extreme variety of quality and honourableness). The days include the landscapes of Bohemia, both rural landscapes (which contained ‘such beauty as [his] eyes had never seen’) and landscapes inscribed with Czech history and legends (the legendary mountain Říp, for example, and a ruined castle). The days also bring him into contact with locals: the socially liberal rich Czech woman, the Bohemian nationalist living at the ruined castle, the various faces of officialdom). Small subplots resolve themselves quickly in Arnold’s text. The unexpectedly gracious, poor but free-thinking German-Czech innkeeper assists the narrator on his way; the nasty Czech innkeeper nearly brings disaster by requiring an official pass from the narrator, until the narrator persuades him, with the help of his fellow-guests, that a gentleman such as he should not be asked for such things. Meanwhile, the overarching plot is built around the question: ‘How will the narrator escape to safety?’ The text is tied at all times to the direct experiences, knowledge and rhetoric of the narrator; his centrality is emphasised by the frequent references to the narrator’s reactions (to food, friendship, hostility) and his emotions (gratitude, fear, disgust, exhaustion). At various points in the text, the narrative is interrupted by either rhetorical passages (diatribes against the Habsburg authorities, for example, or critical commentary on Czech rural patriotism), or passages of historical description outside the direct physical experience of the narrator (but within his prior knowledge). The third text, ‘A pity we didn’t burn to death instead’, is a travel narrative by the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, describing a journey to the United Kingdom in 1990.37 It is written in the form of an epistle 37 Bohumil Hrabal, ‘A pity we didn’t burn to death instead (Anglo-Epidiascope)’, in Total fears, trans. J. Naughton (Prague: 1998, 126–55); Czech text in Dopisy Dubence (Prague: 1995).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 45

4/14/08 2:51:40 PM

46

Under Eastern Eyes

(it opens ‘Dear Dubenka’), and was one of a long sequence of such pseudo-letters written by Hrabal for publication in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The text is written in Hrabal’s famous digressive style, with short first-person narrative episodes, anecdotes and essayistic passages alternating in a semblance of free association. The text opens with the question: ‘Where does Eastern Europe really begin?’38 and then goes on to recount an episode in which the narrator is asked by the head of Czech Studies at Glasgow University to cut a cake in the shape of Europe. ‘If only Moscow could have seen this’, he writes, as he cuts the cake in half ‘right across the Urals’,39 less than a year after the fall of the Soviet-based government in Prague. After further reflections on the divisions of Europe, he continues: Dear Dubenka, I’m going to try to write you a few fresh memories of my English trip, acting on Roland Barthes’ principle of… lernen-verlernen, apprendre-désapprendre… I didn’t keep any notes, I merely apprehended what I saw… I can only write whatever has stuck in my mind, whatever has bubbled up to the surface.40

Hrabal’s text then follows a rather more sequential narrative: Glasgow (university, docks), Scottish lochs, London, Oxford, London again (T.S. Eliot’s house, Shakespeare sites, sites named in Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Czech Club [where he meets émigrés], Trafalgar Square [which leads to disjointed memories of Moravia and the Jan Hus memorial in Prague], the Freud Museum); and finally Bristol where he is ‘so incredibly cold, that during the afternoon [he] totally lost track of [his] genitals’,41 and where he sells copies of his own books. The different places visited are linked by explicit references to and citations from literature and high culture (Barthes, Eliot, Freud, Baudelaire, Impressionism, Joyce, the Czech émigré poet Ivan Jelínek). Meanwhile, the narrator makes express reference to his informants—academics and Czech émigrés—who are the source of the anecdotes which interweave with the essayistic and first-person narrative sections. Over38 Hrabal, ‘A pity we didn’t burn to death instead’, 126. 39 Ibid., 127. 40 Ibid., 128. 41 Ibid., 151.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 46

4/14/08 2:51:40 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

47

arching this episodic structure is a theme of incessant cold, hunting him down in pubs, universities, hotel beds and the countryside. The title (‘A pity we didn’t burn to death instead’) alludes obliquely but portentously to the choice offered to Czech intellectuals: to burn to death (like Jan Hus, Jan Palach) or to freeze to death in the newly accessible West.

PRAGMATIC FUNCTION Each of the texts above is written to be read as a true account by a known or identifiable author. The most controversial decision, when discussing the genre of travel texts, is to distinguish between those which are fictional and those which are non-fictional.42 Dealing with the distinction between the first-person novel and the autobiography, Lejeune finds the non-fictional nature of the latter in ‘the affirmation in the text of the identity of the name (author/narrator/character) leading on ultimately to the name of the author on the cover’.43 In other words, the narrator is the ‘real’ author narrating his/her own self. There are two important points to note: first, the word ‘affirmation’, which makes clear that non-fiction can be distinguished from fiction ‘not because one is truthful and the other imaginary, but because one offers itself up as truthful and the other as imaginary’.44 The second 42 Genette prefers to avoid the term non-fiction which reinforces what he sees as an unjustifiable tendency to define non-fictional works in terms of what they are not, rather than what they are (see Genette, Fiction and diction, ch. 3). Genette’s use of ‘factual’ however, raises more problems than it solves: a novel, after all, is full of fictional facts. Zlatko Klátik uses the term dokumentárnosť, which would translate awkwardly as ‘documentariness’ and carries too strong a connotation in English of written documents (so that an oral narrative would be seen to be less ‘documentary’ than a legal report, for instance). I retain the term ‘non-fiction’ throughout. 43 Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, 26. 44 Georges May, L’autobiographie (Paris: 1979), 180 (citied by Viviès, English travel narratives, 104), my emphasis. Lejeune offers a compelling characterisation of the different approaches required of readers of non-fiction and fiction: ‘[…] one sees the importance of the contract in the way it determines the attitude of the reader: if the identity [between author and narrator] is not affirmed (which is the case of fiction), the reader will seek to establish similarities, despite the author; if it is affirmed (which is the case of [non-fiction]), he will tend to want to look for differences (errors, deformations and so on)’. Op. cit., 26.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 47

4/14/08 2:51:41 PM

48

Under Eastern Eyes

point is that the ultimate decision as to whether a work is fictional or not will refer to matters outside the text itself, establishing the extratextual identity and intentions of the author and reader. Two examples will serve to illustrate the ways in which a non-fictional contract is established, and used in turn to guarantee the authenticity of a travel narrative. The narrative section of Daniel Vetter’s text begins: Since I have […] to bring to light this short description of the island of Iceland, I have judged it appropriate firstly to make some mention of our travel to the island of Iceland, our sojourn there, and our return. I will make a short reference to [those things] and then I will get to the point.45

So the ‘point’ of the text is said to be the descriptive, essay section, which follows on, separately, from the ‘mention’ section, which is in fact the narrative. During the narrative itself, while describing the heroes’ travels across Iceland, the narrator says: ‘we travelled through horrible hills, rocky and burnt, from which even some kind of steam rose at times, so that your hair stood on end, and then through horrible places which were charred and burnt, and through great bogs which could scarcely be believed, and about which more in the tract below’.46 The eye-witness narrative, expressly marked as non-fictional, gives authenticity to what would otherwise be horrible, hair-raising fantasy, incapable of belief: the narrative is there because is authenticates the information in the ‘tract’, or essay section. The essay section itself is divided into short chapters. Its overall heading is ‘SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE ISLAND OF ICELAND AND SOME PECULIAR THINGS WHICH CAN BE SEEN THERE’.47 The narrator’s experience of what has been ‘observed’ authenticates the essayist’s description of what ‘can be seen’. So, talking about the astonishing iciness of Iceland, the author concludes with a brief account of a heavy snowfall which he, as narrator, witnessed on Midsummer’s Day. 45 Vetter, ‘Islandia’, 129. 46 Ibid., 133. 47 Ibid., 136.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 48

4/14/08 2:51:41 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

49

The essay ends with a justification of what it does not contain: I have omitted much, and that for good reasons. Firstly, it was not possible to see everything perfectly in the short time, and, if something were to be written incompletely, or even wrongly, I prefer to leave it out. If anyone wishes to know and see more, he can go there himself. Then for the further reason that, if everything had to be written down which was told [to us] by the inhabitants of the island, some people might be found who would not wish to accept this as true; for many people are inclined to judge other lands and countries according to their own land, in which they were born, thinking that every place operates in the same way, and when they hear something strange, they habitually reject it.48

The ultimate test of the non-fictional account is its falsifiability: a person can in principle ‘go and see’ for himself/herself whether its contents are, or were, true. A non-fictional narrator must give primacy to what he/she has experienced; the chance contents of that experience limit the contents of the text. The authenticity given by non-fiction includes, but is not limited to, authentic information about the places visited. So Vetter’s account also provides evidence—eye-witness evidence, indeed—of Divine providence (saving the heroes from the pirates, the storm and disgusting Icelandic food). Despite the evident dangers of publishing his own text, Arnold’s name appeared in it. According to the editor of the 1920 edition of the text, ‘it was originally to be published […] without any mention of the author, but that idea was later abandoned for tactical reasons. Arnold was afraid that his friends in Bohemia […] would not believe that the pamphlet was written by him, and would then not buy it, which would defeat his aims in writing it.’49 Arnold’s account is required to authenticate not only the description of the different qualities of Bohemian villages (and of village food) in that post-revolutionary period, but also the truth of narrator’s own experience of escape; its non-fictionality must therefore be clearly signalled. This non-fictionality serves, not 48 Ibid., 143. 49 J. Volf, introduction to Arnold, Popsání cesty mé.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 49

4/14/08 2:51:41 PM

50

Under Eastern Eyes

as with Vetter to prove the truth of the unknown, but to provide the authentic evidential basis for a polemic viewpoint, from a well-known figure, on the very well-known, local landscape.

NARRATOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS I have suggested above that the narratological functions which define the travel narrative are that it is a text which is: (a) narrative; (b) first-person; and (c) ordered in accordance with, and whose plot is determined by, the order of the narrator’s act of travelling. A narrative is simply the textual representation of a series of events. It is apparent from the discussion of non-fictionality above that the authenticity which comes from non-fictionality overlaps with that which comes from the nature of the narrative: it is the first-person narrator, giving his/her account, who requires of the reader the non-fictional response; and it is that narrator’s non-fictional eye-witness account, the narrative of things which have happened to a narrator on a singular, non-fictional journey, which establishes the link between those events and the extratextual author. The fact that the text is built around a narrative, and that the narrative is limited by a single experience of a journey, is what distinguishes the travel narrative from the guidebook. A guidebook would be unlikely to contain Vetter’s sentence: ‘It was not possible to see everything perfectly in the short time […] If anyone wishes to know and see more, he can go there himself’;50 it would be still less likely to contain Hrabal’s suggestion of the complete arbitrariness of his choice of elements described. The authenticity of a guidebook comes from its ability to stand independently of any individual travel, to act as a template for an unlimited number of single acts of travel. Another function of narrativity, and one which distinguishes the travel narrative from the guidebook or essay, is that it may dramatise semiotic oppositions within a text. Consider, for example, an opposition between ‘Christian’ and ‘Turk’ in a Czech text of the later sixteenth century. An essay might posit an opposition between the two, set out the ways in which they differ, and evaluate them (perhaps inevitably coming down on the side of the Christian in every material aspect). A text narrating a journey through Turkish lands offers dif50 Vetter, ‘Islandia’, 143.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 50

4/14/08 2:51:42 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

51

ferent possibilities. The opposition between Christian and Turkish is likely to be narrativised in terms of order (travel from Christian into Turkish lands) and in terms of plot/subplot (encounters with individual Turks and Christians, for example). The results can be surprising. So Václav Vratislav z Mitrovic, who travelled to the Ottoman Empire in 1591 with an Imperial delegation, was able to describe how a Christian fellow traveller had turned Turk almost as soon as he arrived in the Ottoman lands, by the simple expedient, it seems, of changing his headgear.51 The effect is to dramatise a dangerous porosity in the oppositional barrier between Turks and Christians. As the narrative continues, however, the porosity is emphasised, but the attendant danger is called into question. The narrator is imprisoned in Constantinople, before being released; interwoven with complaints about his treatment by the Turks are constant references to loyal, humane Turkish individuals and despicable and corrupt Christians. Narrativisation permits the deferral of judgment as to the true nature of the opposition, in a way which might be scandalous in an essay. Similarly, in Arnold’s narrative, the potentially scandalous positive valorisation of German Czechs as against Czech farmers is authorised in part through the short appearance in the plot of the poor but helpful German Czech innkeeper. In a long series of Czech texts describing travels to Italy, the simple opposition between the different places can be subjectivised by its incorporation into a narrative order: the opposition between the Italian south and the Czech Lands is dramatised, in a long series of texts describing travels to Italy, by the narration of a first view of the Adriatic, or of the crossing of the Alps, experienced with 51 ‘On returning to the boats we learnt that one of our company, an Italian named Nicholas de Bello, a native of the island of Crete or Candia, had turned Turk. […] While we were at the audience, this Italian left the boat in which he was and went to the janissaries, who had been assigned us as a guard, and whose tents were pitched on a hill near the Danube. There he drank and made acquaintance with them, and gave them to understand that he wanted to become a Turk, by taking his hat from his hand, treading it underfoot, cutting it to pieces, and finally throwing it into the Danube; he also tore his collar to pieces. As soon as he had done this, the janissaries brought him a turban or round Turkish cap, placed it upon his head, and conducted him into the town. This Italian had started most devoutly upon the journey […]’.Václav Vratislav z Mitrovic, Příhody Václava Vratislava svobodného pána z Mitrovic, kteréž v Tureckém hlavné městě Constantinopoli viděl (Prague: 1777).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 51

4/14/08 2:51:42 PM

52

Under Eastern Eyes

wonder, bored irony, relief, and so on. More interestingly, perhaps, the most striking thing about the two-part schema of Vetter’s text—the narrative followed by the essay—is the fact that their thematic interests are so different. The essay deals solemnly with important themes under five headings, referring to etymology, religious practice, political customs, trades and professions, and wondrous creatures respectively. The narrative can hardly be bothered with these, returning over and again to the themes of individual escape from danger and, particularly, escape from tasteless food. The fact that the narrative is expressly justified in terms of its ability to authenticate the information provided in the essay, and the fact that it seems to strain against doing so, calls into question the validity of the classical information-gathering exercise itself. We have required, in our description, that a travel narrative be in the first person. Arnold and Hrabal write theirs in a first-person singular; Vetter, mainly, in a first-person plural ‘we’, although he slips from this on a couple of occasions, and appears to explain that it refers to himself and a fellow-student travelling with him. In each of these texts, the experiences of the first-person are ostentatiously dramatised: not only is the travel described clearly their own, but the opinions they form, their inner life (hatred of Icelandic food, fear of capture, fear of the cold) form one of the organising motifs of their narratives. So what if, for example, Arnold’s text were rewritten with every first-person pronoun changed for a third, every ‘I’ for an ‘Arnold’ or a ‘he’? Functionally, the situation of the hero in the text would not be changed— every experience and impression would still pass through him, and every descriptive and polemic episode would still be perceived as emanating from him—he would still be the ‘focaliser’, to use the narratological term coined by Mieke Bal.52 It is a matter of historical convention rather than functional necessity that the grammatical first-person is normally used to emphasise the identity of the focalising hero and the author; it may be of interest to literary historians to analyse the origins of the convention in the travel narrative.53

52 Mieke Bal, Narratology (Toronto: 1985). 53 For the purposes of the bibliography published alongside this volume, we have adopted a ‘liberal’ approach to the inclusion of third-person narratives, where it is clear that the focalizer is intended to be identified with the author.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 52

4/14/08 2:51:42 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

53

A more significant aspect of the nature of the narrating hero is the degree to which he/she is implicated in the events narrated. Narrators have widely varying degrees of closeness to the events narrated; other episodes (such as description or rhetoric) may emanate more or less explicitly from the narrating character. Narrators may be more or less interested in their own inner experiences. So Zlatko Klátik, tracing the trajectory of the Slovak travel narrative in the nineteenth century,54 finds it passing through classical, Romantic and realist phases (I will call them ‘modes’, as their formal nature can be described independently of their literary-historical context). These modes are distinguishable by the relation of the narrator to the places described. The classical mode emphasises the cultural significance of the places travelled through: the function of the travel text, notwithstanding the intrusions of authorial experience, is primarily educational, and is intended to provide general truths about, particularly, the places visited; this period is particularly associated with a period of national literary revival, in which the travel narrative’s function was to enrich Slovak vernacular culture. The Romantic mode foregrounds the individual, lyrical experiences of the narrator: it is the narrator’s experience (and particularly his/her experience of personal growth or enlightenment though travel) which is most important. In the realist mode, the narrator is characterised as more objective; the narrator’s external, rather than inner, experiences are highlighted. Unlike the classical mode, however, the narrator concentrates on recording: day-to-day experiences; interactions which cast light on social or national oppositions; the account (placed in a critical, rather than universal, context) of informants. The distinctions between these modes should not be taken to be sharp (and the summary of Klátik’s detailed work into a few paragraphs is violently reductive of his sophisticated and careful analysis).55 What they should illustrate is the fact that a history of the travel nar54 Klátik, Vývin slovenského cestopis. This is the overriding theme of Klátik’s study. 55 In fact, it is likely that most travel texts will partake to some extent of each of these modes. So Vetter’s text foregrounds what might be called a classical mode, expressly justifying the narrative only in terms of the general truths it may authenticate; the validity of that classical mode is problematised within the text itself, however, by the narrative concentration on personal experience.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 53

4/14/08 2:51:42 PM

54

Under Eastern Eyes

rative genre is likely to have as one of its central subjects the variation in the relations between the narrator and the events he/she narrates: the degree of distance between narrator and events; the choices of events to be narrated (and the reasons for those choices); the ways in which the narrator’s internal life intrudes explicitly or implicitly in the narrative. Klátik’s thesis is that the travel narrative, for most of the nineteenth century, mirrored similar modal variations in the novel. By first setting out a theoretical basis for the recognition of these variations, then examining them synchronically against contemporary literary genres, Klátik provides an antidote to the ahistorical evaluation of these texts, and provides the cultural historian with the tools for assessing the extent to which their discursive features are determined by their relation to other literary genres and movements. One point which emerges clearly from the analysis of individual travel narratives is the degree to which they contain non-narrative episodes. These take two main forms: description (including essayistic description of social historical and geographical facts);56 and rhetoric— often polemical expressions of opinion. In Vetter’s text, the narrative and the descriptive are separated into two sections, the first authenticating the other. In Arnold’s and Hrabal’s texts, the different elements of the text alternate, often without explicit articulation: in Arnold’s text it is the dominant narrative structure of the text which constrains the reader to read the descriptive and rhetorical sections as emanating from the narrating voice; in Hrabal’s text, the meta-narrative comments I have cited above, the reference to ‘whatever has bubbled up to the surface’, constrain the reader to treat all elements of the text as emanating, by a process of free association, from the remembering narrator. In the Slovak tradition, Klátik traces a general suppression of narrative to around the beginning of the twentieth century. The period in which travel narrative exists in Slovak literature as a prestigious literary form comes to an end, and its function is replaced by the essentially non-narrative, essayistic form of reportage.

56 Duda terms the use, by travel writers, of elements of description, which are not directly produced by the narrator’s experience of travelling, as dotematizacija [thematic infilling]; such elements are used to fill in the gaps left by experience, to provide a ‘fuller’ description than that which a single traveller could generate. Duda, Pri∑a i putovanje, 134–9.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 54

4/14/08 2:51:43 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

55

One further remark about the narratological functions in travel narrative: in comparison with the fictional novel, the organising plot in a travel narrative is normally rudimentary, and can be summarised as ‘I set out, I travelled, I returned’ (as in Vetter), or ‘I set out, and I managed to reach my destination’ (as in Arnold), or ‘I travelled, and had a number of experiences’ (as in Hrabal). Most travel narratives will have short episodes which take the form of: ‘obstacle in the way, obstacle overcome’ (as in Vetter’s storm, Arnold’s exhaustion) or ‘intrigue, intrigue resolved’ (as in Vetter’s judge, Arnold’s nasty landlord). The overriding structure of the narrative, however, is likely to follow the order of the travel, with individual episodes being left behind: the narrative continuity is provided by the narrator’s travel and, in many cases, by the recurrence of thematic/semiotic features (bad food, and the operation of divine providence, in Vetter; the oppositions between Czech/German, patriot/traitor, fragmented Czech populace/whole and abundant Czech nature in Arnold; literature and cold in Hrabal). All three texts selected for analysis here closely follow the order of events represented (although Hrabal’s visits to Trafalgar Square give rise to narrative flashbacks). There is a generic pressure towards this straightforward relationship between the order of events in the signifying narrative and the order of events signified; where the order differs, either because the narrative begins in media res and flashes back, or because the narrative is organised according to other principles (theme, for example), this is likely to be structurally significant.57

57 A critical awareness of the linear plot in the travel narrative may also be relevant to intertextual/intergeneric analysis. To what extent, for example, does the travel narrative partake of the conventions of, or historically replace, the quest narrative, with its conventions of ‘the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures’ and with its ‘children of nature’ who remain outside the plot but can be persuaded to help the hero (like innkeepers, or hejtman’s cooks)? The quotations are from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of criticism (Princeton: 1957), whose quirky chapter ‘The mythos of summer: Romance’, which throws up a number of interesting parallels between the quest narrative and the travel narrative, is included in Duff, Modern genre theory, 98–117 (quotations at 100, 108).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 55

4/14/08 2:51:43 PM

56

Under Eastern Eyes

PHONOLOGICAL FUNCTION Our provisional definition of the travel narrative limits it to those texts written in prose. This excludes a significant category of texts: travelogues written in verse. In his essay ‘Básnický cestopis’ [The poetic travelogue or The travelogue in verse],58 Vladimír Macura sets out the ways in which verse travelogues differ generically from travel narratives in prose and, in so doing, gives a helpful analysis of the importance of the narrator in the travel narrative. Pointing out that the travelogue in verse shares with the travel narrative its thematics of travel, Macura continues: If we consider literature with a travel theme, in the broadest sense of the word, from the viewpoint of the completeness of information about the geographical space and its contents, as a continuous sequence, at one end of which will be entirely functional non-artistic texts of the guidebook type, the verse travelogue will place itself naturally towards the opposite end of that sequence. Even in comparison with the literary prose travelogue […] its record of the external world is only fragmentary and incomplete.59

Where the guidebook depersonalises and anonymises the narrative subject, removing it from the thematics of the text (the guidebook is not ‘about’ the traveller(s) who wrote it), in the travel narrative, by contrast, ‘the [narrating] subject is always already made concrete—it is directly identified with the author—it has the textual appearance of the authorial narrator’. In the verse travelogue, by a further extension, ‘the subject obviously stands even more in the foreground, and reality unambiguously and entirely passes through the filter of his senses, emotions and thoughts’.60 The travel narrative is further distinguished from the guidebook by its organisation around ‘the trajectory of the narrator’s movement’; if the guidebook is like a ‘langue’ (Macura uses the term derived from 58 Vladimír Macura, ‘Básnický cestopis’, in Poetika ∑eské mezivále∑né literatury (Prague: 1987), 33–55. 59 Ibid., 33–34. 60 Ibid., 34.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 56

4/14/08 2:51:43 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

57

Saussure), the travel narrative is a concrete utterance. But the poemcycle (and, for Macura, the travelogue in verse always takes the form of a cycle of lyric poems) gives up both the systematic completeness of the Baedeker and the (prose) travelogue’s ‘relative completeness, comprehensiveness of the information in the frame of a single journey, [its] fundamentally explicit linked-up-ness.’61 As Macura points out, the explicitness of the subject of travel is markedly decreased in the verse travelogue. I refer in some detail to Macura’s analysis in part because it may be the general case (as it is in Czech literature) that there are clear intertextual relations between verse travelogues and travel narratives (both sets of texts emerging from the same literary movements and, often, sharing the same authors). Further, if Zlatko Klátik’s observations about the decline of the Slovak travel narrative as a prestigious literary genre at about the time of the onset of the avant-garde are generally correct, then it may be useful to consider the extent to which the travel narrative’s literary function is replaced by the verse travelogue (and the extent to which that transition mirrors a more general literary tendency toward the fragmentation of the narrating/perceiving subject). For Macura, the literary-historical significance of the verse travelogue is derived from the fact that it counterposes the sphere of the ‘foreign’ with the sphere of ‘home’, thereby foregrounding the act of perception, and that by thematising fleeting moments, with ‘no yesterday, no tomorrow’, it becomes a motif for sensual purging.62 As a result: From the viewpoint of literary history, we can affirm that we come across the verse travelogue in those sections of literary development— whether of individuals or of whole societies—when the ossification of social and literary structures is particularly keenly felt, along with the exhaustion of earlier literary vehicles and the bankruptcy of ideological conceptions.63

Such, according to Macura, are the literary-historical and ideological functions of the verse travelogue. Can an analogous evaluation be 61 Ibid., 34. 62 Ibid., 35. 63 Ibid., 41.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 57

4/14/08 2:51:44 PM

58

Under Eastern Eyes

made of the function of the travel narrative? In which ‘sections of literary development’ does it appear, and in which sections is it given the prestigious status of being generally recognised as literary? If the verse travelogue appears at times when ‘the bankruptcy of ideological conceptions’ is particularly felt, is it possible that the travel narrative acquires its keenest literary importance at times when ideological conceptions are being established and when literary languages are being renewed or invented?

THEMATIC FUNCTION Each of the travel narratives selected for analysis here is dominated thematically by the events and impressions of a single journey. What none of them seeks primarily to do—and in this they differ from Lejeune’s definition of autobiography—is to provide a totalising history of their narrators. As should be clear from the provisional definition of the travel narrative set out above, a dominant theme of travel is a necessary, but not a sufficient, factor in placing a text within a travel genre; it is the concentration by some critics on the thematic element at the expense of other discursive factors which has led them to conclude that travel writing is too varied to constitute a coherent or definable genre. There is no space here to deal more than cursorily with the different ways in which the set of travel narratives may be broken down by theme. Travel may be to a completely unknown place (Vetter), a defamiliarised homeland (Arnold), or a place overdetermined by earlier literary representation (Hrabal). The traveller may be a young student (Vetter), a middle-aged fugitive (Arnold), or an elderly and well-known literary figure (Hrabal). The primary interests may be religious-political-culinary (Vetter), political-geographical (Arnold), or literary (Hrabal). The list could go on, and the simple enumeration of a potentially limitless list of similarities or differences between particular texts is likely to be sterile. I suggest that there are three potentially interesting types of question to be asked in relation to thematics within the travel narrative genre. a) To what extent do particular literatures and/or periods give rise to particular subgenres defined thematically (the Czech trip to

iBracewell_A_book.indb 58

4/14/08 2:51:44 PM

The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre

59

Italy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, for example, or ‘fellow-travellers’’ trips to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s)? b) How are thematic elements distributed within a particular text: are they thrown up unexpectedly by the narrative as contrapuntal voices to allegedly dominant themes (Vetter’s food, or Hrabal’s cold, for instance), or is the narrative predicated on them (treachery and kindness in Bohemia, in Arnold’s narrative)? c) Where else, within other genres of the literary tradition, or in other literatures, do these thematic elements appear? Do they have the same structural/semiotic significance? If not, what discursive/ ideological force causes the deformation? The remaining essays in this collection will go on to deal with these and similar questions, will ask why travel texts were written and what their historical, ideological and literary functions were. I hope that this overview has helped to demonstrate some of the ways in which such analysis is enriched by an awareness of literary genre, by keeping one eye on the way in which the relations between these texts are mediated by generic, as well as other social, conventions.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 59

4/14/08 2:51:44 PM

iBracewell_A_book.indb 60

4/14/08 2:51:44 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing Wendy Bracewell

Travelling across the Polish Ukraine on his way to St. Petersburg in 1762, the mathematician and astronomer Ruggiero Boscovich fell and hurt his leg while on an inspection tour of Stanisław Poniatowski’s model estate, Zaleszczyki. The fall aggravated an injury he had already sustained from slipping on a flight of stairs in a village in Bulgaria, at the start of his journey. In consequence, Boscovich had to abandon his Russian travel plans and recuperate in Warsaw before returning home to Rome. The abortive end to his journey didn’t prevent him from writing up an account of his tour, and publishing it in 1784.1 In spite of Boscovich’s western education and eastern itinerary, his account did not describe a trajectory from Western civilisation to Eastern backwardness. Instead it traced a periphery of Europe: from Constantinople north towards Poland and St. Petersburg, Peter the Great’s laboratory of civilisational experimentation, where Boscovich had originally intended to visit the Russian Academy of Sciences. In Boscovich’s account of his itinerary, ‘Europe’ is associated with ‘cultivation’, Ottoman rule with barbarism, all the way from Constantinople’s ‘barbarous Metropolis’ to Poland, where he rediscovered ‘the usage of the cultivated lands of Europe, where we entered and breathed freely again, after such a long stretch of uncultivated barbarism’.2 Boscovich notes the distance between ‘the cultivated regions of Europe’ and the darkness and ignorance of the ‘unhappy lands’ he passes though, but he also no* Alex Drace-Francis read several drafts; his references and suggestions made this better. 1 Giornale di un viaggio da Constantinopoli in Polonia dell’Abate R.G. Boscovich, con una sua Relazione delle rovine di Troia (Bassano: 1784), xvii. Two earlier editions, in French and German, had been published from his manuscript notes without his authorisation. 2 Giornale di un viaggio, 156. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 61

4/14/08 2:51:45 PM

62

Under Eastern Eyes

tices things that connect Bulgaria, Moldavia and Poland to the rest of Europe: children flying kites just as elsewhere in the Christian world, or French-manufactured playing cards on sale in a Bulgarian marketplace. In Iaşi he was surprised and pleased to get a distinguished reception ‘in a land of ignorance and barbarism’ due to Prince Grigorios Kallimachis’ interest in optics and his knowledge of Boscovich’s scholarly achievements: science linked even Moldavia to the Republic of Letters. Improvement was possible. Stanisław Poniatowski’s estate was an inspiration in this respect, with its palace furnished ‘in the manner of the cultivated lands of Europe’, its skilled colonists, its workshops and glass factory. Boscovich hoped that the nobles of Poland would follow this example: ‘we would see that conditions in Poland would very soon become quite different from those in which it now languishes’. For Boscovich, to be barbarous is to be unlearned and uncivil. His classifications of difference in such terms serve less to establish innate East/ West distinctions within Europe than to draw attention to the possibility of change through cultivation—the application of enlightened ideas to superstition and tradition, oppressive laws and corrupt institutions. His travel account sketches out a parable on the relativity of things and the possibility of progress even in the most difficult conditions.3 Much recent research has encouraged us to think of the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ as the invention of west European observers, and the inhabitants of the east of Europe as the passive objects of western discursive constructions—more mapped than mapping.4 Indeed, by some accounts it is in the eighteenth century that the very concept of a distinctive Eastern Europe is supposed to have emerged, as the product of efforts by Western intellectuals to assert their own self-promoting definitions of civilisation.5 3 Cf. Larry Wolff, who places Boscovich firmly in the Western camp, Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford: 1994), 171–83. Željko MarkoviΔ, Ruđe Bošković, 2 vols. (Zagreb: 1968) is a full biography; briefer but in English is Roger Joseph Boscovich, SJ FRS, 1711–1787, ed. L.L. Whyte (London: 1961). 4 Most importantly, Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe; Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: 1997); Kiril Petkov, Infidels, Turks and women: The South Slavs in the German mind, ca. 1400-1600 (Frankfurt: 1997); Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The imperialism of the imagination (New Haven & London: 1998). 5 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 62

4/14/08 2:51:45 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

63

Ruggiero Boscovich’s travel account reminds us that the invention of Europe and of its constituent parts was hardly so one-sided. Boscovich had been born in Ragusa (Dubrovnik). Despite his Italian education and his international career, he never lost his Ragusan loyalties. In 1770 he vigorously disputed D’Alembert’s characterisation of him as an ‘Italian geometrician’, stressing that he was ‘a Dalmatian and a Ragusan’. Indeed, the following year when the Russian fleet in the Adriatic threatened Ragusa, Boscovich presumed on a travel acquaintance from Warsaw and wrote asking King Stanisław August Poniatowski to intercede on behalf of the Republic with Catherine the Great, whose enlightenment he contrasted with the violence threatened by her admiral.6 Ragusan ambassadors had long produced reports on the East and West for various purposes (and the Republic’s diplomatic filing system classified reports according to such a division: the lettere di Levante and Ponente). Boscovich’s Levantine travel notes echo the commonplaces of many earlier Ragusan texts, including his own father’s travel account of Serbia: so many households of Greeks, Bulgarians, or Wallachians, so many of ‘Turks’, the doctrinal ignorance of the Orthodox clergy and faithful, the parlous condition of the few Catholics.7 His ‘ethnographic’ interests were not at all novel in this context. Nor were his methods. As with earlier Ragusan travellers, Boscovich’s special advantage in investigating these regions was his native speech, so that he was able to converse with his informants. In Bulgaria, he pointed out, ‘the language of the land is a dialect of the Slavonic language, and that being also my own natural language of Ragusa I could make myself understood by them and understand something of what they were saying’.8 He was a scientist, however, and he took care to verify his conversations with the help of a translator. In his account, Boscov6 His reply to D’Alembert in Voyage astronomique et géographique (Paris: 1770), 449–50; letter to Poniatowski in MarkoviΔ, Ruđe Bošković, 2:747–8. 7 E.g., the ‘Relazione dello Stato della Religione nelle parti dell’Europa sottoposte al dominio del Turco’, by Matteo Gondola, Ragusan Ambassador to the Porte in 1672–4, in Imperium orientale sive Antiquitates Constantinopolitanæ, ed. A. Banduri (Paris: 1711); and the account by Ruggiero’s father, Nikola BoškoviΔ, ‘Relazione della Provincia della Rassia’, in MarkoviΔ, Ruđe Bošković, 1:22–5. See also Martha Bur, ‘Catholic missionaries on Orthodoxy in the Balkans, 17th –18th c.’, Études balkaniques 29:4 (1993), 43–54. 8 Boscovich, Giornale di un viaggio, 31.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 63

4/14/08 2:51:45 PM

64

Under Eastern Eyes

ich blurred the distinction between insider and outsider, combining his own local knowledge with a cosmopolitan education and perspective. Many such ‘East Europeans’, both before and after Boscovich, produced travel accounts of Europe. Some travelled and wrote in the service of imperial projects or converted their local knowledge into a commodity for the publishing market; others used accounts of their travels as a means of criticising or enlightening their own nations; still others protested the descriptions and categorisations imposed upon them by others. These travel writings, like those of western travellers, traced symbolic maps just as much as they recorded real itineraries. The frontiers were set not just by the language of geography (Europe, Asia, East, West) but by the vocabularies of culture (barbarism, civilisation, cultivation, backwardness). The task of this chapter is to survey some of the ways such writers located themselves and their societies with reference to Europe. What communities did their travel accounts presume or create; whose interests did they promote and legitimate; against what others? The plan adopted here has been to examine some common forms of travel writing, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, with an eye both to variation and to specificity in the ways that they set Europe’s limits and divisions, and then to look more closely at travel accounts that deal directly with the idea of Europe under the banner of reform and improvement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This period represents something of a watershed in views of Europe, both from the centre and at its margins. It was not only western or imperial interests that introduced and manipulated the vocabulary of Europe and the Orient in this period. It could suit the purposes of the traveller from the east intent on reform, for example, to hold up the example of the intellectual achievements and material prosperity of an ‘Enlightened Europe’ to the backwardness and semi-Oriental torpor found at home.9 Though few of the ideas expressed in the period’s

9 For non-European examples, see Carter Vaughn Findley, ‘Ebu Bekir Ratib’s Vienna embassy narrative: Discovering Austria or propagandizing for reform in Istanbul?’ Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 85 (1995), 41– 80; idem, ‘An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat meets Madame Gulnar, 1889’, American Historical Review, 103:1 (1998), 15–49; Nazik Saba Yared, Arab travellers and western civilization (London: 1996).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 64

4/14/08 2:51:45 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

65

travel texts were really new (and particularly the pejorative discourses of easternness and barbarism they deployed), they united observers, East and West, in a wide consensus about what Europeanness might mean. It’s true that travel writing was only one of the means by which knowledge of Europe was transmitted, meanings attributed, identities mapped and knowledge converted into power, but it was (and is) an important one. Much of this writing deals explicitly with understandings of Europe; with assessments of Europe’s significance for the traveller’s self and society; and with dramatisations of individual and collective identities against a European background, for local or international readerships. Even when the vocabulary of Europe isn’t deployed, the ways travellers turn ‘space’ into ‘place’ reveal the concepts and paradigms at work. This mapping of Europe and its limits is neither an arbitrary nor a neutral process: the resulting representations make, as well as describe, difference and similarity.10 And they might make fun of these ideas too, in idiosyncratic, personal, and ironic readings of the world. It would be wrong to assume, however, that east European travel writing is solely concerned with transmitting messages about Europe or the West. Even when that is the ostensible topic, the point might be closer to home. If knowledge does equal power, such power depends heavily on the intended audience. Travel accounts written in languages of international circulation for a readership abroad—such as Boscovich’s account of his journey from Constantinople—might depend upon very different relations of power and knowledge than accounts written in a national vernacular for a domestic audience. In contrast to the much more closely studied travel writing of British and French imperialism, where colonial domination and subordination are sometimes assumed 10 F. Benjamin Schenk, ‘Mental Maps. Die Konstruktion von geographischen Räumen in Europa seit der Aufklärung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002), 493–514 gives an excellent overview of the literature on ‘mental mapping’. More generally on ideas of Europe see, inter alia, Denys Hay, Europe: The emergence of an idea (Edinburgh: 1957); Heinz Gollwitzer, Europabild und Europagedanke. Beiträge zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: 1951), and Michael Heffernan, The meaning of Europe (London: 1998).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 65

4/14/08 2:51:46 PM

66

Under Eastern Eyes

to have determined its representations at every level, accounts of travel from Europe’s eastern peripheries suggest different relations of knowledge, representation and power, rather less monolithic or polarised.11 So—a proviso: to the extent that the workings of power in these vernacular texts are in large part local and specific, the following attempt to explore the uses of ‘Europe’ in east European travel writing can only be fragmentary at best, just as its overview of the meanings of Europe can only be schematic. Eastern Europe is taken here provisionally, as elsewhere in this volume, in terms of the lands lying between today’s Russia, Germany, Turkey and Italy—though tracing the early genealogy of the concept of a distinct ‘Eastern Europe’ is one object of this chapter. It should be obvious that it is difficult to speak of a single, coherent Eastern Europe or of an East European perception of Europe in the period covered here or indeed, later. The two counter-worlds of western Christianity (whether Catholic or Protestant) and eastern Orthodoxy probably did most to shape divergent understandings of Europe in the region, at least before the late eighteenth century, but other differences of social or historical context have also produced significant variations. One must always ask who is defining Europe and its limits, by what criteria, to what ends? The account that follows, though it concentrates on travellers from the east of Europe, is not an attempt simply to ‘reverse the gaze’ and to balance accounts of the ways the West constructed the East with a symmetrical study of the opposite process. For one thing, western power and precedence implies a whole series of asymmetries constraining non-western autonomy in the discursive construction of self and other: asymmetries of political power, but also of access to technologies such as publishing, vernacular literary languages, even vocabularies of identity. This does not mean that east Europeans could not represent themselves; they could, and did, at length. Their many travel accounts, among other writings, demonstrate their diverse and creative self-fashionings. But neither these texts nor the texts produced by western travellers can be studied in isolation. Travel writing about Europe represents the very model of an ‘entangled history’, a vivid exam11 See Steve Clark, editor’s introduction to Travel writing and empire (London: 1999) for a useful critique of the colonialist approach to travel writing.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 66

4/14/08 2:51:46 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

67

ple of the need for transnational and comparative analysis.12 Concepts of belonging or difference evolved with the circulation of both people and writings across Europe’s boundaries—not only did people travel, they also corresponded, wrote books and reports, sent them on to colleagues, and reviewed them; others met travellers, learned each others’ languages, read, translated, argued, polemicised. These people’s ideas did not evolve in isolation, even if they may not have worked them out as a direct result of their travels. The closely intertwined history of these mutual perceptions illustrates the futility of attempting to analyse understandings of Europe and its divisions solely in terms of a single constitutive gaze emitted from a hegemonic centre—or even of reactions to that gaze in which the inhabitants of the continent’s putative peripheries did or did not recognise themselves. This survey is not exhaustive, nor is it sufficiently comparative. It does, however, try to demonstrate that travellers from both the east and the west of Europe, each pursuing their own interests, contributed jointly to definitions of the limits of Europe, coming to equate the concepts of modernity, progress and cultivation with Europe, their absence as barbaric, backward and Oriental. In so doing they created oppositions within Europe that would increasingly come to be described in the vocabulary of East and West.

PILGRIMAGES TO THE HOLY LAND Pilgrimage not only provided a framework for early travel writing in the east of Europe, it also helped define notions of the world. In spiritual terms, the route traversed by the pilgrim represented a single sacralised space, from the point of departure (marked by prayer or a holy vow), to the destination (the Holy Sepulchre, Rome, Compostela, Constantinople, the Holy Mountain of Athos), and then home again bearing witness to the experience. In practice, however, this continuous sacred space only partly transcended the sense of other

12 On ‘entangled histories’, see, for example, Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. S. Conrad and S. Randeria (Frankfurt: 2002); Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Penser l’histoire croisée. Entre empirie et réflexivité’, Annales 58:1 (2003), 7–36.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 67

4/14/08 2:51:46 PM

68

Under Eastern Eyes

boundaries. The world of the pilgrim was cut across by religious, social, political and ethnic difference. The Saracens, Arabs, Turks and other infidels who occupied the Holy Land were the most extreme exemplars, but local Christians or even fellow pilgrims could also seem alien. In one sense, divisions of rank, custom or origin among fellow pilgrims were in themselves trials for the pious Christian, staged so that they could then be resolved through acts of charity or shared worship.13 But the final effect of descriptions of pilgrimage was less that of a common corps of Christendom than of a world full of strangeness and diversity. On the other hand, common language or origin could sometimes bridge even profound religious and social difference. Thus, in the 1580s, Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł (Sierotka) recorded an occasion when he and his companions were threatened by a group of Turks in Egypt, where he was on pilgrimage. A Jew heard them speaking Polish among themselves, and introduced himself as ‘our countryman from Russian Chełm’ and saying that they shouldn’t take offence, gave them assistance; ‘after that he was often in our company’.14 Similarly, in an early eighteenth-century account, a group of Orthodox Serbian pilgrims in Jerusalem was greeted by a Muslim guard who recognised them by language, since he himself came from Bosnia: he treated them to coffee and showed them sites closed to other Christians.15 The journey to and from the Holy Land gave definition to the physical and cultural frontiers of Europe. Pilgrim accounts from western or northern Europe emphasise the double boundary traversed on the way to Jerusalem: into the Holy Land and at the same time into the lands of the infidel, since the sacred sites were under Muslim rule. Pilgrims from within the Ottoman Empire, of course, crossed no such boundaries, and Muslim control of the Holy Places was of a single piece with Ottoman suzerainty over the Orthodox peoples of the Balkans and Asia Minor more generally. For those who took ship from Venice or Ragusa, or for travellers crossing the Black Sea from 13 Christopher Wesley Charles Williams, Langages pellegrins: Pilgrimage and narrative in the French Renaissance (Oxford: 1993). 14 Excerpted in Antologia pamiętników polskich XVI wieku, ed. R. Pollak (Wrocław: 1966), 66–7. 15 The pilgrimage account of Joan DamjamoviΔ of Buda, cited in Milorad PaviΔ, Istorija srpske književnosti baroknog doba, XVII i XVIII vek (Belgrade: 1970), 308.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 68

4/14/08 2:51:47 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

69

Odessa, political and religious boundaries coincided with and were reinforced by the terrors of a sea crossing, a symbolic transition between worlds, often dramatised by descriptions of storms or near-shipwrecks. The journey back from Jerusalem was often marked as a simultaneous return to familiar home territory and—oddly enough—to Christendom. Thus the relief of the Bohemian pilgrim Kryštof Harant on his arrival in Cyprus on his way back in 1599: ‘being again in a Christian land, we were as though at home’—though he had just left the holiest lands of Christendom behind him.16 The Ottoman presence in the Holy Lands helped reduce the wider notion of ‘Christendom’ to the narrower space of ‘Europe’ in the lived experiences described in travel writing, and not only in sixteenth-century humanist projects for political unity.

EUROPE’S DIVERSITY Historians have traced the emergence of Europe out of the erosion of the sense of a common Christendom caused by the fragmentation of ecclesiastical and political unity in the West on the one hand, and the persistent tension between the Orthodox and the Latin churches on the other. The vocabulary of diplomacy gradually introduced the concept of Europe in western Europe; the same slow shift from Christendom to Europe can be followed in the language of travellers, though the two terms long remained interchangeable in phrases meaning ‘everywhere’ (or everywhere that counted). In the seventeenth century, the Pole Jakob Sobieski could use both in the same description of Amsterdam, referring to the city as being ‘famous within Christendom’ and full of goods ‘never seen in our Europe’.17 A secular, geographic concept of Europe was more appropriate for travels across a religiously divided continent, especially for Catholics and Protestants (the term came into general use much more slowly among Orthodox travellers).

16 Putování aneb cesta z království ∑eské do města Benátek, odtud po moři do Země Svaté, země Judské, a dále do Aegypta a velikého města Kairu, potom na horu Oreb, Sinai a sv. Kateřiny v pustě Arabii ležící (Prague: 1608); republished as Cesta z Královstvi ∂eského do Benátek, 2 vols. (Prague: 1855), 2:258. 17 Cited in Hanna Dziechci≈ska, O staropolskich dziennikach podróży (Warsaw: 1991), 46.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 69

4/14/08 2:51:47 PM

70

Under Eastern Eyes

What principles united or divided this European space in the minds of east European travellers? It’s possible to identify two alternative paradigms that shape understandings of the continent from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, each reflected in a different travel genre.18 The first might be described as a ‘centripetal’ model of Europe, with Rome or Constantinople as its focus and the pilgrimage account as its natural narrative formulation, whether the pilgrimage was made for traditional devotional purposes or in a new, more secular form, inspired by the Renaissance rediscovery of classical antiquity. The ideal of the Italian tour, with Rome as its goal, was something shared by the educated Catholic and Protestant elite across Europe from the sixteenth century onwards. Catholics could combine devotional purposes with an interest in the classical tradition, while Protestant travellers paid their homage to Italy’s classical past. Even eighteenth-century Orthodox travellers from the Ukraine or the Balkans left accounts of their visits to Rome, acknowledging its aura. (The eighteenth-century Ukrainian traveller Vasyl’ Hryhorovych-Bars’kyi included in his peregrinations a detailed account of the city of Rome, calling it ‘famous from West to East’.)19 As with other pilgrim narra18 This approach draws on Stephen Olaf Turk Christensen’s discussion of centre-periphery and multi-polar images of Europe in Anglo-German travel writing, ‘The image of Europe in Anglo-German travel literature’, and Michael Harbsmeier’s discussion of early-modern German understandings of difference and similarity in and beyond Europe, ‘Elementary structures of otherness: an analysis of sixteenth-century German travel accounts’, both in Voyager à la Renaissance, ed. J. Ceard and J.C. Margolin (Paris: 1987). Harbsmeier’s triangular cosmological framework (locating the traveller with reference to others both in space and time) is particularly helpful (see also his Wilde Völkerkunde: andere Welten in deutschen Reiseberichten der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt & New York: 1994)). 19 Stranstvovaniia Vasil’ia Grigorovicha-Barskago po sviatym miestam vostoka s 1723 po 1747, ed. N. Barsukov. 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: 1885), 1:121; also a modern Ukrainian edition: Vasyl’ Hryhorovych-Bars’kyi, Mandry po sviatykh mistsiakh Skhodu z 1723 po 1747 rik, trans. O. Subtel’ny (Kiev: 2000); and see Alexander Grishin, ‘Vasyl’ Hryhorovy∑ Bar’skyj: an eighteenth-century Ukrainian pilgrim in Italy’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 17:1–2 (1993), 7–26. On the journey to Italy, Claude Backvis, ‘Comment les Polonais du XVIe siècle voyaient l’Italie et les Italiens’, Literary studies in Poland/Études littéraires en Pologne, 19: L’Autre dans la culture polonaise (Wrocław: 1988), 7–39; Viaggiatori polacchi in Italia, ed. E. Kanceff and

iBracewell_A_book.indb 70

4/14/08 2:51:47 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

71

tives, these travel tales tended to focus less on the travellers’ own experiences and more on the associations of the sites they visited. The most characteristic phrase in such accounts is ‘… the place where …’. It was the authority of an ecclesiastical and cultural centre that defined these centripetal travels from the farthest reaches of Europe, but they should not be understood as implying a centre-periphery model, if ‘periphery’ is taken to imply an increasing degree of disadvantage or inferiority. All roads might lead there, but to acknowledge the pre-eminence of Rome was at the same time to assert one’s place as an equal participant in a wider ecumene. Pilgrimages were journeys from the outposts to the centre of a shared, Europe-wide heritage, whether this was understood in terms of the community of the faithful, or a community of learning, culture and taste. At the same time, the persistent emphasis on present-day decline in comparison to Rome’s former glories helped assuage any sense of the relative inferiority of the traveller’s home society. The second model according to which early modern travellers organised their depictions of European space derived from the literature of travel instruction, with its methodical advice and tables of things worthy of observation, beginning with geographical features and moving through urban landscapes and political institutions to manners and customs. The Hungarian David Frölich and the Pole Piotr Mieszkowski made their own contributions to this popular genre, while selections from other authorities were widely translated and adapted, particularly in paternal instructions on the appropriate way to travel.20 These apodemic writings taught educated travellers to see and to understand Europe as a multipolar space made up of cities, provinces and states, each

R. Lewanski (Geneva & Turin: 1988); Zdeněk Hojda, Bohemia-Italia: ∂esi ve Vlaších a Vlaši v Praze 1600–2000 (Prague: 2000); Zaharia Sângeorzan, Pelerini români la Columna lui Traian (Bucharest: 1979). For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Scrittori cechi in Sicilia, ed. J. Stehlík and R. Liotta (Padua: 2000) and Margareta Dumitrescu, Viaggiatori romeni in Sicilia (Palermo: 2003) offer interesting contrasts. 20 David Frölich, Medulla geographiæ practicæ (Bardejov: 1639) and Biblioteca seu Cynosura Peregrinantium (Ulm: 1644); Piotr Mieszkowski, Institutio peregrinationum peregrinantibus peroportuna (Louvain: 1625). On apodemic literature, Justin Stagl, A history of curiosity: The theory of travel, 1550–1800 (Chur, Switzerland: 1995).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 71

4/14/08 2:51:48 PM

72

Under Eastern Eyes

with their own specific characteristics ‘in all their variety,’ a way of seeing suggested by the title of the first travel account published in Hungarian, Márton Szepsi Csombor’s Europica varietas (Košice: 1620), recounting his itinerary through Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, England, France and Bohemia. Europe’s variety manifested itself in a multiplicity of languages, confessions, climates, and political units, but the whole patchwork made up a single, more-or-less harmonious European whole. There were, of course, many ways of piecing together an itinerary through this diversity, and different motives and constraints might influence the traveller. A Catholic peregrinatio academica might look very different from a Protestant one, for instance. Each stopping point had its own characteristics, its own ‘things worthy of note’, each of which was comparable to other similar places or phenomena. ‘Europe’ provided the over-arching framework for comparison, for instance in the accounts of the seventeenth-century Polish traveller Teodor Billewicz. He constantly sets superlatives against the measure of Europe or even sees them through Europe’s eyes: the goldsmiths and watchmakers of Augsburg are ‘the most famous in Europe’; there is no equal to the Tuileries Palace in Europe; no building like the Amsterdam Rathuis is to be found in Europe; the Medici chapels in Florence were extraordinary—‘stuperet Europa’.21 Though this use of Europe might suggest a way of avoiding making direct (and possibly invidious) comparisons with home, travellers did this too. Some of these comparisons served simply to orient readers who had no first-hand knowledge of the places being described. At the same time, linking a foreign place or monument (particularly a celebrated one) to a domestic equivalent could also integrate the traveller’s homeland firmly into the wider variety of Europe.22 The confrontation with alien ways might occasionally prompt self-criticism. One example comes from a seventeenth-century Pole remarking with surprise on the small size of palace kitchens in Genoa: The people seem to be parsimonious; they prefer to do what posteritati servit and makes their country more elegant. It is just the reverse 21 Diariusz podróży po Europie w latach 1677–1678 (Warsaw: 2004), 130, 254, 288, 311. 22 See Murdock, ‘They are laughing at us’, this volume.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 72

4/14/08 2:51:48 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

73

of our own ways, for we build a kitchen larger than the house we live in miserably, and so all our profits we turn in cloacam.23

Some scholars of seventeenth-century Poland suggest that a smug, inward-looking gentry culture meant travellers failed to draw disturbing conclusions from the differences they noted between home and abroad, concentrating instead on details of landscape or architecture.24 But early modern travellers within the borders of Europe did not often use the experience gained from travel to stand outside their own cultures and examine them with detachment. Travelling, reading travel accounts, comparing manners and customs, social and political arrangements, things taken for granted at home but done differently abroad, did not necessarily produce the doubt, questioning and sense of the relative that Paul Hazard has identified as linked to travel writing at the end of the seventeenth century—but perhaps the varieties of Europe were simply too familiar. If so, this too is evidence of the ways in which ‘Europe’ was coming to denote a common civilisation—at least as far as an educated elite was concerned.25 It was above all the common people who bore the burden of otherness in learned travel accounts of Europe’s diversity. They are described as often as not in terms of their unlettered and therefore ‘barbaric’ ignorance. This is the sense, for example, in which the Šibenik-born, Italian-educated humanist scholar and Imperial ambassador Antonius Verantius (Anton Vran∑iΔ, Antal Verancsics), his eye alert for remnants of classical antiquity on his journey through Serbia and Bulgaria in 1553, describes the common people as mired in ‘barbarous blindness’ since they ‘know nothing of the ancient wars which raged in this part of Europe between the Greeks, Thracians, Mace23 Stefan Pac, cited by Antoni Mączak, ‘Progress and under-development in the eyes of Renaissance and Baroque man’, Studia Historiæ Œconomicæ (Pozna≈) 9 (1974), 90. 24 E.g., Stanisław Cynarski, ‘The ideology of Sarmatism in Poland’, PolishWestern Affairs 33:2 (1992), 32; Janusz Tazbir, ‘L’attitude envers les étrangers dans la Pologne au XVIIe siècle’, Il pensiero politico 6:2 (1973), 169–87; but cf. Hanna Dziechi≈ska, ‘Le voyage—sa situation dans la conscience sociale des XVIe –XVIIe siècles’, Acta Poloniæ historica 68 (1993), 79–98. 25 Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience europeénne (Paris: 1935).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 73

4/14/08 2:51:48 PM

74

Under Eastern Eyes

donians and Romans, and ascribe everything to their own time’. As a result they insisted on attributing the origins of local places to Marko KraljeviΔ and Novak Debeljak rather than to Philip of Macedon, as Verantius speculated on the basis of his reading of classical authors. Educated travellers deprecated similar examples of a ‘barbaric’ lack of learning and manners in rustic environments throughout Europe.26 Both the centripetal and the multipolar models of Europe assured educated travellers of secure positions from which to judge Europe’s particularities. The ways that differences were explained—static variables of climate or nature, providence, learning, moral character—tended to encourage a certain untroubled (and untroubling) determinism. Even religious differences did not necessarily imply civilisational patterns of superiority and inferiority. It is also striking how seldom educated travellers across the continent divide up Europe with reference to its cardinal points. For these travellers, a mutually-defining barbarous (or youthfully vigorous) North and civilised (or decadent) South are by no means as evident as they are in the writings of German cosmographers or Italian political philosophers. From the sixteenth century, travellers from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Bohemian Lands, Hungary or Croatia hardly mention the European West, or the Occident, as such, though countries such as France or England are sometimes referred to as ‘western lands’. Within Christendom, the Latin West had long been opposed to the Orthodox East, following the division of the Roman Empire, but in the minds of western Christians, the Ottoman conquests gradually replaced this Orthodox East with an Ottoman Orient (one which seemed to shift parts of the Balkans into Asia, even for geographers).27 By the mid-sixteenth century, Polish and Habsburg emissaries crossing the Balkans on the way to Constantinople would describe the Orthodox inhabitants of the Balkans as ‘poor deserted Christians’ rather than ‘Eastern’ schismatics, pitied for their poverty and ignorance, their Ottoman bondage and their vulnerability to con26 Iter Buda Hadrianopolim anno MDLIII (Venice: 1774), reprinted in Alberto Fortis, Viaggio in Dalmazia (Venice: 1774); here cited from the Latin text in the English edition of Fortis, Travels into Dalmatia (London: 1778), 574. On educated vs. illiterate as a cosmological differentiation in sixteenth-century travel accounts, see Harbsmeier, ‘Elementary structures of otherness’, 346. 27 Jürgen Fischer, Oriens-Occidens-Europa. Begriff und Gedanke ‘Europa’ in der späten Antike und im frühen Mittelalter (Mainz: 1957); Petkov, Infidels, Turks and women.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 74

4/14/08 2:51:49 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

75

version. Benedict Curipeschitz, a pious German- and Slovene-speaking Catholic from the south Styrian borderlands, on his way through Serbia in 1530 with a Habsburg embassy to the Porte, described affecting meetings with the Orthodox Christians there, who begged the emissaries to preserve their Christian faith as they themselves had done, in spite of all hardship and oppression. ‘Oh dear Lord, have mercy on us’, wrote Curipeschitz, ‘for we must take consolation and encouragement from these poor, tormented and deserted Christians!’28 Orthodox Europe had its own version of the centripetal world described above, centred on the imperial city of Constantinople and the Holy Mountain of Athos. A circuit of monastic centres also defined an Orthodox world of faith and learning stretching from the lavras of Russia, the Kiev Academy and the monasteries of Moldavia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece; reaching out to the Greek colleges of the University of Padua; and extending as far as the Orthodox monastic foundations of Palestine and Sinai. Piety was not the only incentive to travel, of course: Orthodox merchants established communities in Livorno, Trieste, Budapest, Vienna, Leipzig and beyond, while others traversed long distances as semi-nomadic pastoralists, caravan leaders or sailors.29 Some Orthodox travellers to the west of Europe left accounts of secular journeys, such as the sixteenth-century texts by the Patmos merchant Iakovos Miloitis, or that by the humanist Nikandros Noukios of Corfu, whose narrative of his extensive travels included a voyage to the British Isles. These, however, were the exceptions, usually written at the instigation of Western scholars.30 The more conven28 Itinerarium der Botschaftsreise des Josefs von Lamberg und Niclas Jurischitz durch Bosnien, Serbien, Bulgarian nach Konstantinopel, ed. E. LambergSchwarzenberg (Innsbruck: 1910), 46. 29 Traian Stoianovich, ‘The conquering Balkan Orthodox merchant’, Journal of Economic History 20 (1960), 234–313. 30 See especially Maria Kostaridou, ‘Nikandros Noukios, a Greek traveller in mid-16th-century Europe’, Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 6:1–2 (2005), 3–23. See also Joseph Georgirenes, Metropolitan of Samos, A description of the present state of Samos, Nicaria, Patmos and Mount Athos (London: 1678), discussed in Steven Runciman, The Great Church in captivity (Cambridge: 1968), 296; but also the description of the Orthodox peoples of the Adriatic coast composed by the Serbian Patriarch Vasilije BrkiΔ for Admiral Orlov in 1771 (‘Opis turskih oblasti i u njima hrišΔanskih naroda’, Spomenik Srpske kraljevske akademije 10 [1891], 43–66).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 75

4/14/08 2:51:49 PM

76

Under Eastern Eyes

tional Orthodox travel narrative was the product of the pilgrimage tradition and the monastic peregrination in pursuit of sacred learning or alms. The men who produced such texts were for the most part clerics, though the brief inscriptions by returned lay pilgrims in books presented to monasteries and churches might be regarded as a vestigial form of travel account: In 7238 (1731) I came here, sinful Iovan of Razlog, from the village of Gorna Draglitsa below Rila Mountain, near to the monastery of the Holy Father Iovan Rilski. […] And I fulfilled my desire and knelt at the holy sepulchre of our Lord and saw the holy places. And with me were Belcho, Bilo’s son, and Stoian of Bansko. And in that year Sultan Mehmed assumed the throne.31

If Orthodox piety provided the framework for these accounts of travel, the Orthodox faith and an Orthodox vision of Christian universalism defined the sense of community, at least in principle. (Variations in Orthodox liturgical practice or rivalries among Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian monks, on Mount Athos for instance, elicited some comment in travellers’ accounts.)32 Ecclesiastical divisions, above all, shaped the travellers’ representations of the world: ‘East’ and ‘West’ most often referred to the eastern and western Churches. ‘Europe’, if it was used at all, remained a geographical term, not a synonym for a shared Christianity. The Christian world was split by the Great Schism and the long rivalry between Patriarch and Pope; the sense that Ottoman conquest had been divinely ordained to preserve the integrity of the Church from Latin corruption (popularly expressed in the phrase ‘better the Turkish turban than the Latin tiara’); the bitter experiences of Orthodox faithful under Catholic rule; and the Russian hostility to ecclesiastical union. Even so, the Orthodox traveller might justify a westward journey by pious purposes. Joseph Georgirenes ‘came into England with intentions to publish a book in print called Anthologion, for the use of the

31 Inscription in sixteenth-century menaion, in Kniga na bulgarskite khadzhii, ed. S. Giurova and N. Danova (Sofia: 1985), 302. 32 On Athos, Dositej ObradoviΔ, The life and adventures of Dimitrije Obradović, trans. G.R. Noyes (Berkeley & Los Angeles: 1953), 241; Gerasim ZeliΔ, Žitije, ed. J. RaduloviΔ (Belgrade: 1988), 76–86.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 76

4/14/08 2:51:49 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

77

Eastern Greek Church’,33 though he also described himself as prompted in 1676 to leave the grotto where he had retired after resigning the Metropolitanate of Samos by ‘the desire to see the Western parts of Europe’.34 The Muscovite Petr Tolstoi, sent abroad in 1697 by Peter I to study naval science, kept a diary that preserves much of the form and the religious character of the pilgrimage account, with its close attention to sites and relics sacred to the Orthodox as well as the Latin believer. East and West, from this perspective, might mix and interpenetrate, given the presence of Orthodox communities, as well as sacred relics, across much of Europe. Thus, while Tolstoi distinguishes obsessively between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ ecclesiastical practice, he doesn’t use the terms to denote discrete geographical entities (indeed, he gives the impression of only having acquired the necessary conceptual vocabulary for this while abroad, introducing the ‘Levant’ as a new concept—though not the ‘Occident’).35 Similarly, the Kievan pilgrim Hryhorovych-Bars’kyi explained his 24 years of travel to Italy, Greece, Palestine and Egypt as first prompted by a vow to make a pilgrimage to the relics of St. Nicholas in Bari. His lists of sights encountered on his peregrinations often owe as much to the spirit of apodemic manuals as to the conventions of pilgrimage accounts. He has an eye for secular detail, observing, for example, that the streets of Košice are washed clean because the paving is cambered to take advantage of the rain. Still, his motives for travel are those of the Orthodox pilgrim and he shapes his itinerary according to sites sacred to the Orthodox believer. In describing his world he marks confessional differences far more than anything else: the Orthodox faithful and the ‘other-believers’, including Lutherans and Calvinists and above all Catholics, Romans and ‘Christian-hating’ Papists. But in keeping with his identity as pilgrim, the 33 From the Arch-Bishop of the Isle of Samos in Greece. An account of his building the Grecian church in So-hoe Feilds, and the disposal thereof by the masters of the parish of St. Martins in the Fields (London: 1682). 34 Or his contemporary translator and editor Antoine Galland did; see his version of Georgirenes’ Description of the present state of Samos in Galland, Voyages inédits, ed. M. Couvreur and D. Viviers (Paris: 2001), 302–3. The phrase does not appear in the earlier English translation, from which Galland says he worked. 35 Peter Tolstoi, The travel diary of Peter Tolstoi: a Muscovite in early modern Europe, ed. and trans. M. Okenfuss (DeKalb, Illinois: 1987).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 77

4/14/08 2:51:49 PM

78

Under Eastern Eyes

greatest compliment he can pay to believers of any faith is that they are ‘stranger-loving’.36 The two worlds of Latin and eastern Christendom were usually kept apart by a sharp awareness of cultural and doctrinal difference, but the practice of pilgrimage and charity, as well as reverence for shared saints and sacred sites, might bring them together in the accounts of the pious traveller.

THE FRONTIERS OF EUROPE Journeys beyond the frontiers of western Christendom helped define Europe’s borders as something more than a matter of geography. ‘Turkish’ travels, in particular, play this role for both Catholic and Protestant Europe. The Christian traveller gazing into the Ottoman mirror saw his own society in reverse, the salient features of the Turk altering to reflect changing European self-definitions. The sixteenthand seventeenth-century image of the Turk as a cruel and mighty infidel drew on fears about Christian weakness and disunity; the debauched and despotic tyrant of eighteenth-century accounts focused attention on the ‘European’ characteristics of law, morality, and liberty; the fatalistic, backward and unchanging ‘sick man’ of nineteenthcentury Europe threw into contrast Western agency, progress, material prosperity. Positive assessments of Ottoman society—and they were by no means uncommon—were employed as foils to point out failings and deficiencies at home and to urge reform.37 As with pilgrimage literature, ‘Turkish’ travel accounts by east European humanist orators, ambassadors, and returned captives followed wider European literary models and cultural patterns. Still, there are some pertinent differences in the image that some of these travellers saw in the mirror. For those who lived close to the frontier, the Ottoman system was scarcely exotic, though it may have been threatening. 36 Grigorovich-Barskii, Stranstvovaniia, 1: 18–9, 20–1. See also Alexander Grishin, ‘Bar’skyj and the Orthodox community’, in The Cambridge history of Christianity, Vol. 5: Eastern Christianity, ed. M. Angold (Cambridge: 2006), 210–28. 37 Malcolm Yapp, ‘Europe in the Turkish mirror’, Past and Present 137 (1992), 134–55; Aslı Çırakman, From the ‘terror of the world’ to the ‘sick man of Europe’: European images of Ottoman empire and society from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth (New York: 2002).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 78

4/14/08 2:51:50 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

79

Trading, correspondence and negotiations with enemies who often shared common origins and a common language encouraged a sense of familiar, even intimate difference. Travellers from the lands on the Ottoman borders frequently remarked on the widespread use of Slavic languages among the janissaries or those who held high office in the Ottoman administration. Bartolomæus Georgievits, a Croatian subject of the Hungarian crown, spent long years in Ottoman captivity after being taken prisoner at the battle of Mohács in 1526; on his escape he published several semi-autobiographical accounts of his experiences. One of these, De afflictione captivorum, provided a word-list and exemplary dialogues in Croatian for those who might find themselves in the same straits. The sentences suggested that an escaped captive might find sympathetic assistance from local inhabitants (‘Is this the right road to Gallipoli? – No, brother, you have gone very far astray – Show me the right road, for God’s sake – Come with me and fear nothing’), but the notes also point out that the ‘Slavic tongue’ was one of the languages of the Sultan’s court.38 The sense of Slavic origin shared with members of the Ottoman elite could produce a certain ambivalence in accounts by travellers from these borderlands, who noted what they shared with the Turk as well as what differentiated them.39 There were also other connections across the frontiers of religious and political difference. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Polish and Hungarian noble dress was self-consciously ‘Oriental’, establishing a link with imagined ancestors from the east and a distance from Western cultural influences. Western Europeans saw their curved sabres, caftans, elaborate silk sashes, shaved heads with a single lock of hair, and fur-faced calpaks decorated with a jewelled feather as exotic if not

38 De afflictione tam captivorum quam etiam sub Turcæ tributo viventium Christianorum (Antwerp: 1544), n.p. 39 Examples of consciousness of ethnic and linguistic connections in Verantius’s letters (e.g., Hrvatski latinisti, ed. V. Gortan and V. VratkoviΔ [Zagreb: 1969], 636–9); the autobiography of Bartol KašiΔ, Vita Bartholomæi Casii Dalmatæ ab ipsomet conscripta, Croatian translation: Putovanja južnoslovenskim zemljama, trans. S. Sršan (Privlaka: 1987); Václav Vratislav z Mitrovic, Příhody Václava Vratislava svobodného pána z Mitrovic, kteréž v Tureckém hlavné městě Constantinopoli viděl (Prague: 1777); English translation: Adventures of baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz, trans. A.H. Wratislaw (London: 1862).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 79

4/14/08 2:51:50 PM

80

Under Eastern Eyes

downright barbarous.40 As a result, some Hungarian seventeenth-century travellers in western Europe show a degree of self-consciousness about their dress, taking care to provide themselves with outfits that correspond to local taste: Miklós Bethlen had to change into French dress in Venice in 1665, since people gathered around him ‘gaping on account of my Hungarian dress’.41 Polish emissaries to the Porte in the early 1700s reported snide insinuations by western ambassadors: were the Poles’ caftans and dolmans perhaps booty from the defeat of the Turks before Vienna in 1683?42 The sense of ethnic closeness and familiarity with Ottoman ways of life, perhaps paradoxically, put an added emphasis on religion as the crucial factor that differentiated these travellers’ societies from that of the Turk. Anxieties over the seductions of Islam and the ease of conversion, explored in many western travel accounts, seem to have an extra urgency for some of these authors, especially when ‘turning Turk’ could seem a matter of simply putting on Turkish clothes. Despite their Oriental dress, Poles and Hungarians were vehement in underlining their religious differences from the Turk, asserting their Christian status through the rhetoric of the antemurale, the bulwark against Islam. Consequently, the notion of a community defined by a common Christendom retained its utility for self-definition in these regions long after a more secular concept of Europe superseded it elsewhere. Alliances with the Ottoman Empire could make the need for cultural differentiation still more pressing. After the failure of Rákóczi’s revolt against Habsburg rule in the early eighteenth century, the exiles found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. The ‘Turkish letters’ of the Transylvanian Hungarian Kelemen Mikes, one of these Ottoman exiles, contain bitterly ironic passages about the Turk: Thanks be to God! Not the least misfortune has befallen us: wherever we find the Turk, everywhere he is pleased to see us; for the Turk 40 For the Poles, with some examples of French reactions, see Janusz Tazbir, ‘Culture of the Baroque in Poland’, in East-Central Europe in transition from the 14th –17th centuries, ed. A. Mączak, H. Samsonowicz and P. Burke (Cambridge: 1985), 167–80. 41 The autobiography of Miklós Bethlen, trans. B. Adams (London: 2004), 214. 42 Janusz Tazbir, ‘La Pologne: Rempart de la Chrétienté’, in Mythes et symboles politiques en Europe centrale, ed. C. Delsol, M. Masłowski and J. Nowicki (Paris: 2002), 103.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 80

4/14/08 2:51:50 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

81

loves the Hungarian most of all. In return for all this we can wish them nothing better than that they may yet become Christians.

He reports on their odd customs: the Aga of the Janissaries has sent a ceremonial gift of flowers and fruit to the prince: ‘it is true that such a gift displeases us, and we consider it suitable for a woman, but we must consider that here it is customary, and that what is customary somewhere is fitting in that country’. Customary, however, does not mean good: In Poland the priests put cognac in the holy water in their vestry, to keep it cool until Mass is over; would we permit that? Among us a lady of quality would be ashamed to smoke; but here they all smoke. In China the girl that marries soonest is the one with the longest ears, even if they reach her shoulders; among us, men would abhor such a thing. Here they eat with only with the fingers but we use knife and fork.

Though the Ottoman Empire was the only state that would give these rebels refuge, Mikes insists on the distance between the Hungarians and their hosts in every possible way. Though they were held at arm’s length by the European ambassadors, even by their former allies the French, the refugees insisted on living as far as possible according to familiar rules of politeness, precedence, daily rituals—in spite of their tents, their caftans, their dependence on Ottoman favour, their position ‘on the very margin of Europe’, wrote Mikes.43 The Turkish mirror told these travellers and their audiences that, in spite of appearances, they nonetheless belonged to Europe.44 43 Kelemen Mikes, Letters from Turkey, trans. and ed. B. Adams (London & New York: 2000), 81, 43, 37. In his Mémoires sur les Turcs et les Tartares, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: 1784), Baron François de Tott, the son of one of Rákóczi’s (and Mikes’) companions in Turkish exile, educated in France and sent back by the French Minister Vergennes to reform the Turkish military, had no hesitation in contrasting essential ‘European’ and ‘Turkish’ qualities (though for him the source of difference is a matter of debate—origin, climate or form of government?). Mikes doesn’t yet use Tott’s adjectival vocabulary of ‘European’ manners and customs, though he too presents them as innately different. 44 Similar conclusions in Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, ‘Polish embassies in Istanbul or how to sponge on your host without losing your self-esteem’, in The illuminated table, the prosperous house, ed. S. Faroqhi and C. Neumann (Würzburg: 2003), 51–8.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 81

4/14/08 2:51:51 PM

82

Under Eastern Eyes

Muscovy presented similar challenges to the sense of a European identity, at least for some learned travellers, particularly among the western Slavs.45 Were the Russians Europeans? And if not, did this have implications for their fellow Slavs? The boundary between Europe and Asia (traditionally placed at the River Don) ran through Muscovy. From the early sixteenth century, travellers and cosmographers used the paired categories of European and Asiatic to classify the Russian state and people, in terms that went beyond mere geography. Polish writers and map-makers were the first to promote the image of an ‘Asiatic’ Russia, as part of a late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century propaganda campaign against their newly belligerent eastern neighbours. Representing the Russians as infidel barbarians in league with the Tartars and Turks in turn established the Poles as essentially different, an antemurale protecting both Christendom and Europe.46 Such perspectives completely ignored any Slav linguistic and ethnic affinities between Poles and Russians. Acknowledging these could produce different assessments. Even though he moved in the same circles that produced the ‘Asiatic’ depictions of Russia, in his 1517 Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis, Asiana et Europiana the Polish cosmographer Maciej z Miechowa placed the Russians in ‘European Sarmatia’, restricting ‘Asian Sarmatia’ to the Tartar tribes. His decision to do so was connected to his interpretation of the origins of the Slavs: polemicising against the claims of Italian geographers who put the Slavs’ origins in Asia, he insisted that the Slavs were autochthonous in Europe. (This, of course, had implications for the origins and character of the Poles.) He also laid a Polish claim to the prestige of ‘discovering’ Muscovy: Southern lands and oceanic peoples all the way to India have been discovered by the King of Portugal. Now may the northern lands with 45 On German travellers on Russia, Harbsmeier, ‘Elementary structures of otherness’, 347–9; Gabriele Scheidegger, Perverses Abendland—barbarisches Russland: Begegnungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im Schatten kultureller Missverständnisse (Zurich: 1993); Marshall Poe, A people born to slavery: Russia in early modern European ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca, New York & London: 2000). 46 Ekkehard Klug, ‘Das “asiatische” Russland: Über die Entstehung eines europäischen Vorurteils’, Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987), 265–89.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 82

4/14/08 2:51:51 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

83

the peoples living by the Northern Ocean to the East, discovered by the armies of the King of Poland, become known to the world.47

Religious difference, military conflict and clashing cultural expectations could outweigh any popular sense of linguistic or ethnic affinity between Poles and Muscovites. In his seventeenth-century military memoirs, recounting his experiences acting as escort for the Tsar’s emissaries to Warsaw, the bluff Polish squire Jan Chryzostom Pasek records these clashing expectations with great relish and a fine sense of his own culture’s superiority. Though his perceptions are not translated into the learned language of Europe and Asia, he underlines differences between Russian and Pole in terms of superficial linguistic similarities set against yawning cultural differences. When he is invited to an imperial banquet featuring ‘knee of beluga and rump of swan’ he quotes the boyar’s speech of invitation in garbled Russian, assuming the language itself will be more or less comprehensible—but derives considerable amusement from the scope for both linguistic and cultural misunderstanding. I, being unfamiliar with that etiquette of theirs, sulked; think I to myself, what practice is this, to go inviting someone for a KNEE and an ARSE, and I did not yet know what a beluga was. Right then, I wanted to exclaim: ‘tell him to eat arse himself ’; then I restrained myself.48

Pasek makes fun of his own misunderstanding, but goes on to disparage mightily the Muscovites’ etiquette, food, and drink. The drink, especially, demonstrates the Russians’ lack of civilisation. ‘Not only rot-gut does he drink, whereof even the whiff is nasty, but he quaffs it down with as much gusto as if it were the greatest speciality; they even enjoy the taste.’ When the Muscovites travel somewhere as emissaries they know that they cannot serve such stuff, says Pasek, and they procure decent drink from a settlement with special privileges for foreign47 Maciej z Miechowa, Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis, Asiana et Europiana (Krakow: 1517), n.p. (introduction). 48 Jan Chryzostom Pasek, Memoirs of the Polish Baroque, trans. and ed. C.S. Leach (Berkeley: 1976), 139–40.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 83

4/14/08 2:51:51 PM

84

Under Eastern Eyes

ers outside Moscow, ‘where only the English reside; being a civilised people, they have all sorts of excellent liquors’. But the Russians serve this only to their guests, preferring themselves to drink their own bad vodka.49 Pasek’s conviction of superiority was not disturbed one bit by encounters with Russians—in this context seen as entirely alien to the Sarmatian ‘nation’ represented by the Commonwealth’s gentry. For other more learned travellers, however, ethnic similarities among the Slavs could cause apprehension when they came up against Russian cultural difference. A second traveller, Jakob Reutenfels, visited Muscovy at about the same time as Pasek encountered the Russians in Poland. Himself by origin from Courland and closely connected to the Polish court, he had little positive to say about the Muscovites, but at the same time he was uneasy about the relationships between Russians, Slavs, Asians and Europeans. In his De rebus Moschoviticis, based on his experiences in Polish service in Russia and published in Padua in 1680, Reutenfels agreed that the Slavs had come out of Asia. They not only had founded Muscovy but had ‘subordinated to themselves under the name of Slavs the whole land to the River Elbe, where they laid the foundations of the Poles and the Czechs’. The Muscovites looked like Europeans, but appearances were deceptive: ‘Their colour is the same as that of Europeans because of the cold climate which has changed their original dark, Asian one.’ Their manners were a mixture of ‘civilised’ Greek influences with ‘more barbaric’ Scythian ones: […] though today Asiatic usages predominate and few European features are evident. The cut of their clothes, their magnificence in public celebrations, their customary methods of housekeeping, their modes of government, finally, their whole way of life show more Asiatic extravagance and rudeness than European refinement […] So that in the course of my wanderings, during my Muscovite peregrinations I became ever more convinced that those things which are done one way by the majority of European peoples, are done entirely differently among the Muscovites, completely unlike any other people under the whole heavens.50

49 Ibid., 142–3. 50 Jakob Reutenfels, De rebus Moschoviticis (Padua: 1680), 15, 179, 187–8.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 84

4/14/08 2:51:52 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

85

This implied a get-out clause for Reutenfels’ Polish and Czech associates, who may have had the same Slav origins but whose manners and habits reflected more ‘European refinement’. A third perspective on the relations between the Slavs, the Russians and Europe comes from another seventeenth-century traveller to Muscovy, the Croatian priest Juraj KrižaniΔ, whose entire life’s work was shaped by his belief in the kinship of the Slavs. KrižaniΔ had arrived in Moscow in 1659, driven by his faith in the possibility of the ecclesiastical unification of all the Slavs in the Catholic Church, and by his hope of convincing the Tsar to unite the Slavs under his leadership and lead them in a war of liberation against the Ottomans.51 KrižaniΔ believed in the power of the written word. He read much and he wrote much, in many different genres: letters and memoranda to the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and to the Tsar; works on the Slav language; a history of Siberia; and much else. The short travel account that he presented to the Tsar in 1659 dealt only with his journey from L’viv to Moscow; but he also wrote a Relazione delle cose di Moscovia, a report on the affairs of Muscovy, now lost. Its title suggests that it would have contained a mixture of description and personal travel experience, like other similarly titled accounts (e.g., Sigismund Herberstein’s Rerum Moscoviticarum commentarii of 1549). The work for which he is best known, the ‘Discourse on Government’ or Politika, contains personal travel observations, but it is basically an advice manual intended for the Tsar and a plan for the reform of Muscovite politics, economy and society. KrižaniΔ is acutely aware of the attitudes of western writers to the Slavs. He is one of the first to object to the blanket use of ‘barbarian’ to characterize eastern Europeans: ‘of all the Christian nations the Europeans consider two as barbarian: us Slavs and the Hungarians’. He supports this statement with summaries of western travellers’ books (descriptions by Protestant Germans, especially, are full of insults and calumnies), and by evidence drawn from his own experience, including a whole list of derogatory proverbs and sayings used to characterise the Slavs in particular: 51 In English on KrižaniΔ see especially Ivan Golub, ‘The Slavic idea of Juraj KrižaniΔ’, in Concepts of nationhood in early modern Eastern Europe, ed. I. Banac and F. Sysyn [= Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10:3–4 (1986)], 438–91, with comprehensive bibliography.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 85

4/14/08 2:51:52 PM

86

Under Eastern Eyes [Greeks] have a saying: ‘Greek is beautiful; Albanian is young; Bulgarian is not human’. Hungarians also say: ‘A Magyar is a wolf, an Italian is cunning, a German is a pig, a Pole is a thief, and a Slav is not human’. […] Italians say: ‘Either a Caesar or a Slav’, that is, either the top or the bottom of humanity. When they bargain and a merchant asks too much, the purchaser usually says: ‘I am not a Pole’, meaning ‘I am not stupid’. Germans say: ‘Guard your things so that Poles will not steal them’ or ‘A Magyar and a Croat support each other, when you add a Czech to them you will have three real thieves’. They refer mockingly to their Croat subjects as lice and pigherders and speak of them not as ‘Croat’ but as ‘little Croat’.52

His rejection of these slanders, and his characterisation of the more fortunate European nations as barbarous in their own ways, betrays a resentment that would reverberate through other east European traveller’s accounts, but to an extent KrižaniΔ agrees that the Slavs are barbarians. He distinguishes very precisely between varieties of barbarism: the primitive or savage; the irreligious and wicked; the unlearned.53 Slavs are barbarians not because of any essential difference from the rest of the Europeans but ‘because of our ignorance, laziness and stupidity’. Furthermore, the Slavs are not capable of holding their own in Europe because of their mania for foreign things and their neglect of what is their own (and particularly the Slavic language). KrižaniΔ’s Politika not only forcefully points these things out, it also argues for reforms that would allow the Russians and the Slavs to take their proper place among the European nations. KrižaniΔ is that rare early modern traveller who stands outside his own culture and examines it, aided by other people's books of travel description (however full of calumnies they might be) and by his own experiences. Like later reforming travellers in Europe, he uses the disturbing differences that he identi52 In abridged English translation in Russian statecraft: The Politika of Iurii Krizhanich, ed. and trans. J.M. Letiche and B. Dmytryshyn (Oxford: 1985), 109–12; but here corrected according to KrižaniΔ’s ‘common Slavic’ version in Politika, ed. M.N. Tikhomirov (Moscow: 1965). KrižaniΔ also gives the proverbs in their original languages. 53 Cf. W.R. Jones, ‘The image of the barbarian in Medieval Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 13:4 (1971), 376–407 on the changing post-classical definitions of barbarism.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 86

4/14/08 2:51:52 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

87

fies to shake his readers out of their self-satisfaction and to spur them to change. He is a precursor in this as well as in his pan-Slav ideas, though at the time his arguments met with indifference, and he himself was sent into exile in Siberia (probably due to the accidental revelation of his Catholicism and priesthood). It would be his pan-Slav ideas and in particular his prophecies of a Muscovite messianic mission among the Slavs that got him Russian attention at last, when his Politika was discovered in manuscript and published in Moscow in 1859 as an exercise in ventriloquism—using KrižaniΔ to give historical weight to nineteenth-century Russian pan-Slavism. The sense of both closeness to and difference from ‘Turks’ and Muscovites elicited a whole variety of reactions and alignments among travellers on the frontiers of Europe—far more than this survey can list and analyse—but it is notable that the accounts cited here only seldom base their assessments on matters of geography. Cultural characteristics, far more than cartography, determined who was to be seen as European or not.

ORTHODOX TRAVELLERS: FROM THE LATIN WEST TO ENLIGHTENED EUROPE Over the course of the eighteenth century, an ecclesiastically-defined East and West gave way in the accounts of some Orthodox writers to a new designation: a Europe that was both ‘fortunate’ and ‘enlightened’. Ideology sometimes maps onto itinerary, in interpretations of this shift: journeys to the West are credited with opening up windows on the world and acting as factors for change. Paschalis Kitromilides, for example, has argued for the importance of travels by eighteenthcentury Orthodox monks who became disappointed in the limits of the traditional circuits of piety and learning, and looked towards the promise of new learning to be found in the West. By bringing back the new ideas they found there, they thereby became a force for ideological and cultural change.54 Two travel accounts illustrate some of the contradictions and ambiguities of these contacts, as well as throwing the shift in perspective 54 Paschalis M. Kitromilides, The Enlightenment as social criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek culture in the eighteenth century (Princeton: 1992).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 87

4/14/08 2:51:52 PM

88

Under Eastern Eyes

into relief. The first is that by Partenii Pavlovich, who was born into a Bulgarian family in Silistra around 1700 and who would eventually become a high official in the Orthodox Metropolitanate in Sremski Karlovci. He wrote several works, including a long, largely autobiographical text that deals in part with his peregrinations after the model of the pilgrimage account and the hagiography.55 His sufferings on the road demonstrate the divisions of Partenii’s world: the Orthodox faithful, the Latins, and the infidel ‘Hagarenes’ (Muslims). The Hagarenes were a scourge sent by God, but the Latins were worse, deliberately rejecting spiritual enlightenment. Partenii describes what happens when he preaches the true faith in the western countries: ‘In Italian Naples I endured blows and expulsion from the Latin Church, having told the priest: non e vero pastore il Pontefice, ma e falso, perche e fato la schisma in chesa de Jesu Christu [sic]’ (67). The same thing happened in Rome, Venice, Florence and Bari—and when he climbed up in the pulpit of the cathedral in Vienna and tried to preach ‘a little sermon in Latin on peace, love and the seven ecumenical councils’ (that is, on the subsequent errors of the Latin church), ‘they wanted to shut me up as insane’ (69). He is prevented by the Hagarenes from visiting Moscow, where there is an Orthodox monarch, Peter the All-Russian Emperor, but he lists all the places where he has prostrated himself before holy relics, including Bari and Pozsony (Bratislava), tracing a single Orthodox sacred space that ignores East/West frontiers. He also cites the places of learning he visited or hoped to visit, hinting at a single space incorporating Latin scholarship (this includes Albanian Castoria, where Cartesianism had been on the curriculum, the Latin Academy of Trnava and the Saxon Academy). Still, though he was attracted by Latin learning and admired the secular achievements of the Habsburg lands (beautiful cities and excellent craftsmen), this did not soften Partenii’s fulminations against the errors of the Latin Church. After all, the Metropolitanate was on the frontline of Orthodox relations with the Catholic Church in the Habsburg Empire. Exposure to the West might mandate defensiveness and differentiation at the same time as admiration or emulation, reinforcing divisions between East55 Avtobiografiia, Bulgarian trans. in Pirin Boiadzhiev, Partenii Pavlovich (Sofia: 1988); citations are to this, corrected according to the first publication in Srpski Sion (Novi Sad: 1908) 14, 15, 17, 19.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 88

4/14/08 2:51:53 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

89

ern and Western Christianity even while imagining the possibility of a single world of piety and learning. One of the most famous of eighteenth-century Orthodox travellers and autobiographers was the Serb Dositej ObradoviΔ (1741– 1811), whose account of his Life and Adventures is essentially a tale of his search for learning and enlightenment, and of where he found it.56 The first volume, published in 1783, covers his disillusionment with the monastic life and his decision to flee Hopovo monastery, and ends with an essay criticising popular superstition, emphasising the utility of education in the vernacular language, and defending Joseph II’s educational reforms as compatible with the Orthodox faith. The second volume, published five years later, traces Dositej’s subsequent educational peregrinations, first through the traditional Orthodox centres of learning in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, including Corfu, Athos, Smyrna; then through the great cities and universities of central and western Europe, as far as Paris and London. In line with the notion of a radical break in the Orthodox world-vision caused by the encounter with the West, his turning point has usually been placed at the point when he turned west and set out for Vienna in 1771.57 But though his outward appearance changes on his western journey— he discards his monk’s habit to put on a student uniform and then a gentleman’s wig—the real break in his account of his life comes at the end of his first volume when he decides to leave the monastery. By the time Dositej turns westwards he has already demonstrated the narrowmindedness and self-interest of the monastic life; the practical benefits of worldly learning; the responsibility of teachers and especially the clergy for secular improvement; the need for books in the popular language to reach the widest number of people. His second book is mere56 Život i priklju∑enija Dimitrija Obradovića, nare∑enoga u kaluđerstvu Dositeja, njim istim spisat i izdat, 2 vols. (Leipzig: 1783–1788); English translation: The life and adventures of Dimitrije Obradović, trans. G.R. Noyes (Berkeley & Los Angeles: 1953); citations are from this edition. On Dositej as a traveller and enlightener, see especially Jovan DeretiΔ, Put srpske književnosti (Belgrade: 1996). 57 E.g., DeretiΔ, Put srpske književnosti, 221–2, where Dositej’s departure for Vienna is symbolic of a wider shift in Serbian culture (though DeretiΔ also cites Dositej’s eastern journeys as making him a bridge between the old and new).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 89

4/14/08 2:51:53 PM

90

Under Eastern Eyes

ly an illustration of these points. Halle inspired him with its schools and its publishing houses, but these simply reinforced his desire to bring enlightenment to his people; London dazzled him with its wealth and size—but even there he found respect for the Greek learning he had acquired from his eastern education. Like Partenii Pavlovich, Dositej relies on familiar conventions as a way of making his travels comprehensible in traditional Orthodox terms. Dositej’s second book is made up of ‘travel letters’, a novel literary genre for eighteenth-century Orthodoxy, but what he describes takes the form of the monkish peregrination in search of learning and the pilgrimage to sacred sites—though these are now cities and schools rather than relics (232). His second book describes a single educational pilgrimage, though, in effect, it joins two worlds of faith and learning. Athos, Smyrna, Vienna, Halle and London are all places where the traveller can seek enlightenment and find teachers. Dositej doesn’t mark transitions in the space he crosses, just as Partenii Pavlovich doesn’t when his travels explore the worlds of piety and of scholarship. Enlightenment can be found anywhere learning and reason are respected. As well as ‘the enlightened nations of all Europe’, those places that are striving to perfect their own dialects and produce books in the vernacular (134), the enlightened world encompasses Smyrna, where Dositej found his first, most inspiring teacher; Russia (where useful books in the Slavic tongue are produced); and even the Serbs—particularly the Habsburg Serbs, who have the benefit of an enlightened ruler in Joseph II. Dositej’s use of familiar models for travel and spiritual enlightenment and his emphasis on a single world of learning are part of his purpose: convincing his readership that secular education is not only vital for a better life, it is also entirely compatible with their Orthodox faith. ObradoviΔ’s cosmopolitan map of light and darkness is not separated into Latin and Orthodox, or into East and West, but it does have its divisions. His enlightened Europe is characterised above all by the capacity for reasoned change, but this is thrown into relief by the contrast with unenlightened barbarism. ‘If Europeans had not dared to correct their thoughts and enlighten their minds with reason, they would remain until today in their aboriginal stupidity and barbarism, and would be like the wretched peoples of Africa’ (147). But there is an ambiguity here: does this mean that those stubborn souls who refuse to

iBracewell_A_book.indb 90

4/14/08 2:51:53 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

91

follow the example of ‘the learned and enlightened nations’ might forfeit their claim to be proper Europeans? This seems to be his message for those who deliberately turn away from change. If the Serbs do this, Dositej warns, they will be indistinguishable from Africans. ‘All nations which merely cling to old opinions and customs must needs lie in eternal and hopeless darkness and stupidity, like all the nations of Asia and Africa’ (211). A single enlightened Europe could be a useful rod for recalcitrant backs at home, but might also be a forfeit to the future. Dositej ObradoviΔ’s Life and Adventures is only one of a number of eighteenth-century Orthodox autobiographies whose criss-cross European itineraries began to blur the divisions between Latin West and Orthodox East. The sceptical outlook, rationalism, and emphasis on useful knowledge shared by many of these men was not new; nor was it necessarily the result of their encounter with the West (contacts with Russia and particularly the Kievan Academy had already acquainted itinerant Orthodox monks with such perspectives well before the eighteenth century). What was new was the vision of a geographical Europe which was, simultaneously, a superior form of civilisation. This new vision of Europe could now encompass the Orthodox peoples as well as the Latin West. The prestige of Orthodox Russia—decisively oriented towards Europe under Peter the Great and his successors— contributed to this change; so did the newly secular character of Western learning, which made it less of a threat to Orthodox piety.58 To be sure, a secular Europe might also be an atheistic Europe: ObradoviΔ does not mention the fact, but his beloved Smyrna teacher, Ierotheos Dendrinos, was of this opinion: ‘They are atheists, all those who study in the lands of the Franks, and on their return they convert others to atheism as well!’59 From this perspective Europe, and especially enlightened Europe, was little different from the Latin West. For others in the clerical elite, however, an Orthodox universalism of faith could be extended to an enlightened universalism of learning without much 58 Alexandru Duţu, ‘Tradition and innovation in the Roumanian Enlightenment’, Rumanian Studies 2 (1971–1972), 104–19; Carole Rogel, ‘The wandering monk and the Balkan national awakening’, Études balkaniques 1 (1976), 114–27; L.S. Stavrianos, ‘The influence of the West on the Balkans’, in The Balkans in transition, ed. B. and C. Jelavich (Berkeley, CA: 1963), 184–266. 59 Cited in Kitromilides, Enlightenment, 22–3.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 91

4/14/08 2:51:54 PM

92

Under Eastern Eyes

difficulty. As far as Dositej was concerned, reason and knowledge were not the enemies of faith but its allies. But Dositej’s ambiguities in respect to the definition of Europeanness heralded problems to come. If Europe was a matter of culture or intellectual achievement as much as geography, what did it mean where those qualities were lacking?

DISCOVERIES OF EUROPE From the late eighteenth century, western travellers regularly judged countries in the east of Europe not just in terms of civility or barbarism, but according to their ‘European’ character. This was nothing new for territories such as Russia or the Ottoman Empire that had long been understood as frontiers between Europe and Asia, as discussed above. What is novel is the notion of a degree of Europeanness, or the process of becoming ‘more’ European. Travelling through Bucharest in 1786, Jeremy Bentham met two or three boyars whom he described as ‘Europeanised’: they spoke foreign languages and attended the theatre (he thought the inhabitants were in general ‘vegetables’).60 Two years earlier, William Coxe had described the Russian court as displaying ‘traces of Asiatick pomp, blended with European refinement’—this was a familiar observation, as we have seen. However, he also assessed Moscow as a town built on the Asiatic model, ‘but gradually becoming more and more European’.61 By the end of the eighteenth century, Russia was regularly evaluated in this way, usually with reference to Peter the Great’s ‘Europeanising’ reforms.62 At the same time, the frontiers of an ‘enlightened Europe’ were being staked out closer to the centre of the continent. While Poland was still generally viewed with sympathy in western Europe as a European antemurale against Russian barbarism, travellers could also note 60 Cited in Alex Drace-Francis, The making of modern Romanian culture (London & New York: 2006), as possibly the first use of the term in English, 30, 38. 61 William Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, 3 vols. (Dublin: 1784), 2:86; 1:316–7. 62 The first recorded French use of the term (according to Trésor de la langue française, 16 vols. [Paris: 1971–94], 8:323; thanks to Alex Drace-Francis for the reference) links Russia and Moldavia: in 1790 the Prince de Ligne wrote from Iaşi that Pierre le Grand a européizé vos armées.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 92

4/14/08 2:51:54 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

93

their sense of leaving a familiar European world when they crossed the frontier into Poland.63 Travellers made similar comments on Hungary. The country had been described as a frontier with Asia as early as 1673, when the English traveller Edward Brown noted that outside Buda, the traveller: seems to enter upon a new Stage of the world, quite different from that of these Western countrys: for he then bids adieu to hair on the Head, Bands, Cuffes, Hats, Gloves, Beds and Beer: and enters upon Habits, Manners, and course of life: which with no great variety, but under some conformity, extend unto China, and the utmost parts of Asia.64

A century later, Robert Townson took similar cultural markers into account when he placed Hungary apart from ‘those nations which now form the polished part of Europe,’ and added new criteria in setting it ‘much behind most other countries of Europe in its political institutions’.65 From the other direction, the Russian naval officer V.B. Bronevskii combined the language of Enlightenment with that of ethnic origins in Hungary (and in the process demonstrated his own Europeanness). Returning to St. Petersburg from the Adriatic, he remarked that ‘enlightened Europe ceases at the frontiers of Hungary, and ceases very harshly’. The Kazan Tartars among Bronevskii’s troops discovered vocabulary they had in common with the ‘Asiatic’ Magyars, but otherwise communicating with them was as impossible as ‘a Russian with a Japanese’.66 63 On Poland as a frontier of Europe, see Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 117– 22, 354; and Bernhard Struck, ‘Terra incognita, European civilisation and colonised land: Poland in mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century German travel accounts’, in Unravelling civilisation: European travel and travel writing, ed. H. Schulz-Forberg (Brussels: 2005), 171. On the variable eastern frontier of Europe in the eighteenth century, Patrick Jager, ‘Les limites orientales de l’espace européen’, Dix-huitième siècle 25 (1993), 11–21. 64 Edward Browne, A brief account of some travels in Hungaria, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Friuli (London: 1673), 69; cited in Božidar Jezernik, Wild Europe (London: 2004), 28. 65 Robert Townson, Travels in Hungary (London: 1797), 200. 66 Puteshestvie ot Triesta do S.-Peterburga v 1810 godu (St. Petersburg: 1828), 54–5, 63.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 93

4/14/08 2:51:54 PM

94

Under Eastern Eyes

Aspects of material life and intellectual or cultural patterns (‘cultivation’, ‘politeness’, ‘manners’) were the main markers travellers considered, though some also considered political institutions or economic life. The evidence might not add up. David Hume puzzled over the relationship between Europeanness and civilisation, and the relative influences of climate and government, in the mid-eighteenth century. On the inhabitants of Styria: ‘Their Dress is scarce European as their Figure is scarce human’ but on the other hand, they sing beautifully and don’t seem deficient in religion; what then does civilisation consist of?’ Travel through the Tyrol made matters even more complicated: an Air of Humanity, & Spirit, & Health & Plenty is seen in every Face, yet their country is wilder than Styria … both Germans subject to the House of Austria, so that it wou’d puzzle a Naturalist or Politician to find the reason of so great and remarkable a difference’.67

More often, though, travellers described the lands of central and southeastern Europe in terms of mixture, part European, part Other; or as existing on a scale of Europeanness. The term ‘European’ often seems to float free of geography; a compliment paid to a people, policy or political regime the traveller was familiar with or approved. How far any evidence of ‘European refinement’ reflected innate qualities, mere superficial polish or true improvement was a matter of debate. What these travellers only rarely disputed was the assumption that these societies had to adapt to standards set in the capitals of Enlightenment in order to be recognised not just as ‘civilised’ but also as European; and not that definitions of Europe should reflect the sometimes quite different experiences of these countries. This was Eurocentrism of a particular sort, limiting ‘Europe’ to a single corner of the continent, and indicating the way that universalist ideas of Enlightened civilisation were being revised in spatial and hierarchical terms, not just as a variety of metropolitan centres and as-yet-unenlightened peripheries, but as something more polarised: ‘at the centre, a zone whose inhabitants basked in the glow of illumination, while in the outer shadows lived people whose idiosyncratic mental habits deprived 67 The letters of David Hume, ed. J.Y.T. Greig, 2 vols. (London: 1932), 1:130–1.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 94

4/14/08 2:51:55 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

95

them of membership in the singular culture of rationality’.68 French philosophes and German philosophers helped shape this cultural geography and in the process marginalised parts of the continent. Still, as we shall see, many east Europeans adopted the same vocabulary and premises, contributing to the resulting consensus. From the mid-eighteenth century, a series of east European travellers made journeys abroad and in turn discovered ‘Europe’—or at least they affected to discover it. Like earlier voyagers to the New World, they usually travelled with their conceptual categories in place and their agendas already formulated. What they found was not startlingly unfamiliar, either to the travellers or to their audiences—these travellers often justify their journeys with references to their prior knowledge of what they hoped to find. What Dositej ObradoviΔ, and many others, brought back was an ‘enlightened Europe’ of rationalism and cosmopolitan learning. Others presented a cultivated Europe of manners and fashion, a material Europe embodying the commercial and industrial revolutions, or a political Europe of revolutionary republicanism, liberalism or utopian socialism. Their travel accounts described intellectual accomplishment and called it French; technology or manufactures and called them English; bourgeois norms of respectability and called them German. Often they bundled all these things together under the general ‘European’ label, just as French, English or German travellers did when noting the absence or presence of these things outside the confines of Europe’s north-western metropolises. In effect, what these writers dramatised through their travels was an encounter with modernity—as the accelerating changes taking place in intellectual outlook, technical and economic development, and political organisation in north-western Europe were coming to be called. This was an encounter that was proceeding with variations in 68 The sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. W. Clark, J. Golinski and S. Schaffer (Chicago: 1999), 19, on ‘uniformitarianism’ as a key to Enlightenment culture; also 26–9 on Europe. This was by no means a uniquely east European problem: on the problems of perceiving difference (and being perceived as different) in a cosmopolitan context, see Melissa Calaresu on eighteenth-century accounts of Naples, ‘Looking for Virgil’s tomb: The end of the Grand Tour and the cosmopolitan ideal in Europe’, in Voyages and visions: towards a cultural history of travel, ed. J. Elsner and J.P. Rubiés (London: 1999), 138–61.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 95

4/14/08 2:51:55 PM

96

Under Eastern Eyes

timing and context throughout the world outside the European core. The story of the resulting dilemma between pursuing the promises of change and protecting native values and dignity has been told both as separate national studies and for eastern Europe as a whole.69 In many ways, east Europeans shared a similar experience with non-European colonial societies or, perhaps a closer comparison, with Russia. The controversy between Russian Westernisers and Slavophiles, over the desirability of developing political institutions and socio-economic structures according to Western models or on the basis of indigenous institutions, was in many ways an echo of earlier debates in eastern Europe. East European encounters with modernity were given a specific character, however, by being set within a Europe that was both geographical and cultural. For colonial societies overseas, Europe’s colonising powers were both the model for development and the obstacle to native autonomy; emancipation thus required cultural differentiation as well as political liberation from Europe. Russia’s geographical position and its own imperial might encouraged a range of alternatives, from acceptance of European cultural hegemony beginning with Peter the Great’s reforms, to a professedly ‘Europeanising’ mission with respect to Russia’s imperial subjects or clients (in the Crimea and the Caucasus, but also in the Danubian Principalities and Bulgaria), to anti-European reactions and alternatives.70 The societies of eastern Europe were distinctive, however, in that the alternative to an imitative Occidentalism could only with difficulty involve any sort of rejection of Europe as such, even in the Orthodox countries of the Balkans (where national dignity rested in part on differentiation from their Ot69 For example, Jerzy Jedlicki, A suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-century Polish approaches to western civilization (Budapest: 1999); Andrew Janos, The politics of backwardness in Hungary, 1825–1945 (Princeton: 1981); Diana Mishkova, Prisposobiavane na svobodata: modernost-legitimnost v Sŭrbiia i Rumŭniia prez XIX vek (Sofia: 2001). Ivan T. Berend, History derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the long nineteenth century (Berkeley, California: 2003) is a general survey from this perspective. The meaning of Europe, ed. M. af Malmborg and B. Stråth (Oxford: 2002) includes essays on other European societies (Spain, Italy, Austria, etc.), as well as on Poland, the Czech lands, Greece. 70 Mark Bassin, ‘Russia between Europe and Asia: the ideological construction of geographical space’, Slavic Review 50:1 (1991), 1–17; see also Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich (Munich: 1992).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 96

4/14/08 2:51:55 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

97

toman and Oriental past by virtue of their European credentials). Geography implied that these were European societies; it followed that they should be judged by European norms. Problems arose, however, when these norms were based on the experiences of only a narrow part of Europe. The consequence was that these societies could find themselves in Europe, but only dubiously ‘European’. The solution of generations of reformers across the region was a programme of change based on imitation, understood in terms of catching up to western standards. Travel books were one way in which encounters with western modernity were represented. As public texts, they do not necessarily reveal the experience of east European societies in general. Private letters, travel diaries and memoirs of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sometimes do record experiences in western Europe in terms of a personal discovery, understood in terms of civilisational difference or the shock of the new: the Amsterdam chronicles of the eighteenthcentury Greek merchant Ioannes Pringos or the letters of his contemporary Stamates Petros, for example; the memoirs by the reformist king of Poland, Stanisław Augustus Poniatowski; István Széchenyi’s early nineteenth-century diaries of his travels in England; or Mihail Kogălniceanu’s student letters from Vienna, Lunéville, and Strasbourg.71 A sense of distance and difference was by no means inevitable, however: Poniatowski’s contemporary, August Moszy≈ski, found provincial France just as provincial as Poland; unlike Kogălniceanu, Prince Nicolas Soutsos simply mentions his west European travels in 1839 with little comment, as something taken-for-granted; Miklós Wesselényi, Széchenyi’s companion on his travels in 1821–1822, as71 On Pringos and Petros, Dean J. Kostantaras, Infamy and revolt: The rise of the national problem in early modern Greek thought (New York: 2006), 128–37; Adamantios Koraes’s autobiography in The movement for Greek independence, 1770–1821, ed. R. Clogg (London: 1976); King StanisławAugust Poniatowski, Mémoires, ed. S. Goryainov, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: 1914); Poniatowski’s biographer Fabre heads his chapter on Poniatowski’s youthful travels ‘A la découverte de l’Europe’ in Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski (Paris: 1952); for Széchenyi, see Janos, Politics of backwardness, and George Barany, Stephen Széchenyi and the awakening of Hungarian nationalism, 1791–1841 (Princeton: 1968); Mihail Kogălniceanu, Scrisori (1834– 1849), ed. P. Haneş (Bucharest: 1913), and Al. Zub, Mihail Kogălniceanu, 1817–1891: Un fondateur de la Roumanie moderne (Bucharest: 1978), ch. 2.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 97

4/14/08 2:51:55 PM

98

Under Eastern Eyes

sessed what he saw on a case-by-case basis, rather than seeking to generalise about Europe or the West.72 Given that travel writing was closely associated with the communication of discoveries, published travel books were frequently assigned a role in public revelations about progress and backwardness. Educators and reformers urged their audiences to bestir themselves—‘from the cushions of Asiatic lounging’, as one Hungarian writer put it;73 to travel abroad and to bring home useful knowledge; and then to publish accounts of their travels that would serve as sources of information and inspiration to a wider public. Of course, travel accounts were not the only types of writing available to the reformer, and different genres could hold the field in debates over ‘Europeanisation’. Thus, for example, in spite of King Stanisław Augustus Poniatowski’s bursaries for travel to western Europe in the interest of promoting European models in Poland, few of the resulting accounts were published at the time; polemical and economic tracts, rather than travel writing, were the main vehicles for debate about modernisation in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Poland.74 In addition to the volumes describing his ‘life and adventures’, Dositej ObradoviΔ published programmes for change and improvement in a variety of other texts, all intended to

72 A. Moszy≈ski, Voyage en Provence d’un gentilhomme polonaise, 1784–1785, ed. F. Benoit (Marseilles: 1930); Prince Nicolas Soutsos, Mémoires (Vienna: 1899), 129; Miklós Wesselényi, Úti napló 1821–1822 (Cluj: 1925). 73 Lőrinc Tóth, Úti tárcza (Pest: 1844), n.p. (author’s introduction) (trans. Zsuzsa Varga). 74 On Poniatowski’s support for travel, Fabre, Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski; on the debates over modernisation in Poland, Jedlicki, A suburb of Europe. Some eighteenth-century observers claim that in spite of travelling a lot, Poles drew no utility from their travels: they ‘do not make any effort at all to obtain useful information, essential to their country and beneficial to their subjects’ (Friedrich Schulz, Reise eines Liefländers von Riga nach Warschau, Berlin: 1795–1797) and ‘Running around the world out of vanity, pride, exposing one’s ignorance and awkwardness, ruining oneself, getting bad habits and becoming ridiculous—this is the aim and the result of this vagrancy which the Poles call travelling’ (Gazette de Varsovie); both cited by Jacek Wijaczka, ‘Franconia as seen by Prince Stanisław Poniatowski in 1784’, Acta Poloniæ historica 90 (2004), 77–96. Accounts such as the young Poniatowski’s belie these claims, but their circulation in manuscript limited their visibility and impact.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 98

4/14/08 2:51:56 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

99

reach the widest possible popular readership.75 The travel diary published by the Wallachian boyar Dinicu Golescu in the 1820s has subsequently received much attention as a reformist text; however he too explored other genres in promoting new ways of doing things in his homeland.76 Chance, individual taste and the publishing or political context, rather than the mere fact of an encounter with western modernity, determined the choice of the published travel book as a forum for ‘discovering Europe’. Still, polemicists found the travel book on Europe a vehicle well adapted to programmes of reform or challenges to the current order. The account of adventures and discoveries set the writer up as a knowledgeable man of the world and displayed his learning (nearly all such writers before the middle of the nineteenth century were men). Presented as a simple record of travel experiences, the travelogue was an effective way to dramatise contrasts with abroad, and to give weight to the author’s conclusions about what ought to be done at home. These travel texts adopted the private letter or diary format, but often to tendentious public ends. The staged spontaneity and intimacy of the published diary implicitly vouched for the accuracy of its impressions and the truth of its emotions, while the published travel letter in addition suggested the theoretical possibility of a reply, soliciting a mental comparison between the traveller’s ‘there’ and the reader’s ‘here’ even when the parallels were not explicitly drawn.77 One striking cluster of such travel books about Europe comes from the period of ‘unenlightened absolutism’ in Hungary. In the decade and a half before 1848, reform-minded members of the middling gentry published travel accounts of western Europe and North America

75 His other writings included collections of translations, extracts and fables, etc.: Sovjeti zdravago razuma (Leipzig: 1784), Basne (Leipzig: 1788), Sobranije raznih nravou∑itelnih veš∑ej (Vienna: 1793). 76 See especially Alex Drace-Francis, ‘Dinicu Golescu’s Account of My Travels (1826): Eurotopia as Manifesto’, Journeys 6:1–2 (2005), 24–53; more generally on nineteenth-century Romanian travel accounts of Europe, Stela Mărieş, ‘Das westliche Europa aus der Sicht rumänischer Reisender (erste Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts)’, in Die Rumänen und Europa, ed. H. Heppner (Vienna: 1997), 143–64. 77 See John W. Howland, The letter form and the French Enlightenment (New York: 1991).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 99

4/14/08 2:51:56 PM

100

Under Eastern Eyes

that surveyed political, social and cultural circumstances through Hungarian eyes. The first and most influential of these was Sándor Bölöni Farkas’s Utazás észak Amerikában [Journey in North America] (1835), followed by a series of other similar texts, including Bertalan Szemere’s instantly popular European Utazás külföldön [Travels Abroad] (1840), and a number of others (including a few by women).78 An advantage of the travel account in the Hungarian context seems to have been the slightly more tolerant attitude of the censors to works that—at least ostensibly—focused on foreign affairs rather than criticising domestic circumstances directly and that employed the—again, ostensibly—artless, spontaneous and digressive conventions of the travel account. In spite of the fact that Bölöni Farkas’s book was eventually seized and placed on the index of prohibited publications, while other travel texts were delayed or cut before publication (Szemere’s Travels Abroad and István Gorove’s Nyugot [The West], 1844) or published abroad to evade censorship (József Irinyi’s Német-, franczia- és angolországi uti jegyzetek [Travel Notes from Germany, France and England] (1844), published in Halle), the genre proved well suited to the purposes of these liberal reformers.79 However, despite describing what their authors in Europe at great length, these travel books, like other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century accounts, seldom stopped to define what Europe might be, or to meditate on its meaning. (The Hungarian travellers also introduced the terminology of the ‘West’ in this period, something that seems to derive from the self-ascribed ‘Eastern’ origins of the 78 On these writers, István Fenyő, ‘A polgárosodás eszmevilága útirajzainkban 1848 előtt’ in Két évtized (Budapest: 1968) and Popova-Nowak, in this volume. For women travellers, see also Mária Takács, ‘Magyar világjárónők: Társadalomkép és szerepminták a XIX. századi és XX. század eleji magyar nők útleírásaiban’, available at FemiDok, http://www.femidok.hu/article. php?artid=200503064 (accessed 10 March 2007; thanks to Gwen Jones for a translation). 79 Bölöni Farkas reduced his observations of Europe to a minimum in his published account, concentrating instead on North America as a sop to the censors (many of his points are first formulated in a European context in his original travel diaries). See the editors’ introduction, Alexander Bölöni Farkas, Journey in North America, ed. and trans. T. and H. Benedek Schoenman (Philadelphia: 1977) and István Gál, ‘The British travel diary of Sándor Bölöni Farkas, 1831’, in idem, Magyarország és az angolszász világ (Budapest: 2005), 612–35.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 100

4/14/08 2:51:56 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

101

Magyars.80 At least eight Hungarian travel accounts published before the First World War used the term ‘the West’ or ‘Western Europe’ in the title, but its location was not always specified.) Perhaps it is the case that talk of Europe or the West ‘requires a certain imprecision to be effective; hence it is quite mistaken to look for clearly defined concepts’.81 In any case, the real subject of these texts, as with ObradoviΔ and Golescu, is the traveller’s homeland. Indeed, rather than discovering Europe, such reformist travellers might better be described as discovering their own societies or, more precisely, disclosing to their readers the lamentable position these occupied in the context of a wider European community. Thus in Paris in 1837, Bertalan Szemere ironically ‘discovers’ that use of the French language is not an indicator of social distinction: ‘My friend, I have not given you the news about my great big discovery: here everyone talks in French’. In Paris ‘the poor labourer invites his friend for a soirée, the carter goes to dîner at lunchtime, my bootshine goes to souper at night-time, and the servants go on promenade’. (To make the point sharper, he reported the reaction of a French acquaintance to the idea that the Hungarian upper classes sprinkled their speech with foreign words in order ‘to play at being gentlemen’: ‘repeating “je m’en vais sétálni [promenade]” “je voudrais pour mon ebéd [lunch] et pour vacsora [dinner] du gibier,” “au revoir au estély [soirée],” he shook with laughter’.) This was scarcely a revelation about France itself: it is only the implied juxtaposition with Hungarian pretensions that gives it meaning. The technique used in these accounts is comparison: accounts of a foreign institution or a practice are regularly paralleled by an assessment of the state of things at home. Comparison is, of course, travel writing’s natural mode of grasping difference, but in these published texts it has a didactic purpose: to highlight domestic backwardness or simple foolishness, the better to convince the readers of the need for change. ObradoviΔ and Golescu describe the societies of ‘enlightened Europe’ as near-Utopias, ideal models abstracted from history and set 80 Tamas Hofer, ‘East and West in self-image of the Hungarians’, in Encountering ethnicities, ed. T. Korhonen (Helsinki: 1995). 81 Timothy Reuter, ‘Medieval ideas of Europe and their modern historians’, History Workshop Journal 33 (1992), 176–80.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 101

4/14/08 2:51:57 PM

102

Under Eastern Eyes

up as an inspiration in contrast to domestic realities.82 The Hungarian travellers, hoping to develop their country while at the same time escaping the worst evils of capitalist modernity, did not hesitate to describe western slums, stock market swindles or the breakdown of family relations. But their censure of foreign institutions is not only a warning of aspects of modernisation that might be avoided, but sometimes also serves as a coded critique of domestic circumstances. Thus, while generally positive about English examples, the Hungarian travellers deplored the oppression and exploitation of the Irish by England, a situation suggesting parallels to the relationship between the Hungarians and Austria.83 Similarly, praise of foreign ways reads in reverse as criticism of the system at home. What is selected for comparison depends on the writer’s political purposes. ObradoviΔ, arguing for support for popular education, and Golescu, challenging a political regime on patriotic, enlightening grounds, dwell particularly on public culture. The Hungarian reformers tend to focus on political institutions and social practices: freedom of the press, suffrage, religious tolerance, philanthropic organisations, labour relations, education, patterns of consumption. Expressions of dismay and shame recur. The common lament voiced by all these travellers is: ‘when will these benefits reach our homeland?’ but most have concrete suggestions about what is necessary for this to happen. The attention to foreign perceptions of the traveller’s homeland reinforces the impression that western Europe is a mirror held up to their own societies. Golescu is typical in noting down, for example, an Englishman’s critical observations of Bucharest (and his shame at hearing them) or in noting that ‘we have come to be ridiculed in the

82 See Mircea Anghelescu, ‘Utopia as a journey: Dinicu Golescu’s case’, Synthesis (Bucharest) 18 (1991), 25–31. 83 E.g., Ferencz Pulszky, in Aus dem Tagebuch eines in Grossbritanien reisenden Ungarn (Budapest: 1837), and József Eötvös, ‘Szegénység Irlandban’ [1840], trans. in Ireland through continental eyes, ed. M. Hurst (Bristol: 2000), 1–63 (for Eötvös, the parallel exposed the costs of liberal economic policies: in Hungary, even under Austrian rule, there was no such poverty as in Ireland). Further examples, and differences in the travellers’ diagnoses, in R.J.W. Evans, ‘Hungary in the Habsburg Monarchy in the 19th century’, Hungarian Quarterly 44, nr. 171 (2003).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 102

4/14/08 2:51:57 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

103

world’s opinion’.84 The same concern grips Bölöni Farkas, who is alert everywhere he travels for references to Hungary, and who responds to questioning on Hungarian affairs with references to the ‘bitter sorrow’ that ‘troubles the Hungarian traveller abroad if he has the misfortune to carry the image of his homeland with him […] Only hope in the future offers a measure of comfort’.85 These reforming travellers understood Europe as a single moral and cultural community as well as a geographical entity, accepting discourses of ‘European civilisation’, of progress and backwardness and, increasingly, of East and West as measures of their own standing in Europe. By adopting such standards for the evaluation of their own domestic circumstances, these travellers in effect adopted the same perspective as the western travellers who judged their societies in terms of the degree to which they exhibited ‘Europeanness’. Given that accepting standards set elsewhere necessarily placed them in an inferior position vis-à-vis the more developed countries of western Europe, such perceptions have been theorised in terms of ethnic (self-)stigmatisation or, more drastically, as self-colonisation, in both cases as the consequence of internalising the gaze of the western European as normative. The concept of ethnic stigma has been elaborated (and carefully historicised) in the Romanian context by Sorin Antohi, while Aleksander Kiossev has proposed the theory of Balkan ‘self-colonising cultures’ as characterised by the voluntary adoption of ‘alien values and models of civilisation’ in response to west European claims to universality and their own traumatic but self-constitutive Balkan perception of absence and inferiority.86 In some cases, Selfhood achieved in such an interaction with the Other was indeed a poisoned gift. The oscillation in east European travel accounts between the travellers’ desire to be recognised by their hosts and the fear of being hu84 Drace-Francis, ‘Dinicu Golescu’s Account’, 37, 44. 85 Bölöni Farkas, Travels in North America, 98–9, and the same sentiments in his European diary, cited in Gál, ‘British travel diary’, 626. 86 Sorin Antohi, Imaginaire culturel et réalité politique dans la Roumanie moderne: Le stigmate et l’utopie, trans. C. Karnoouh and M. Antohi (Paris: 1999); Aleksander Kiossev, ‘Notes on self-colonising cultures’, in After the wall: Art and culture in post-communist Europe, ed. B. PejiΔ and D. Elliott (Stockholm: 1999), 114–7; on self-colonisation also Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: a cultural poetics (Oxford & New York: 2003), 47–53.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 103

4/14/08 2:51:57 PM

104

Under Eastern Eyes

miliated in front of them is one indication of the much-attested inferiority complex experienced by east European elites in the face of the West. Some scholars have gone further, generalising collective encounters with western modernity in psychoanalytic terms: the impossible struggle to reconcile an idealised model of European modernity with intransigent domestic realities results in a ‘collective crisis of identity’, ‘culture shock’, even ‘cultural schizophrenia’.87 The danger in this approach, however, is that the study of cultures (or cultural manifestations such as travel writing) becomes a matter of a general pathology of difference, rather than a clinical examination of the symptoms. Alex Drace-Francis has challenged blanket diagnoses of cultural trauma in his analysis of Golescu’s travel journal, arguing that this Wallachian traveller demonstrates no sense of inauthenticity in the face of Europe, but rather employs a more strategic double consciousness that allows him to move between European perspectives and domestic traditions in interpreting the significance of his discoveries for his readership.88 It is striking that, in fact, ‘being European’ is not presented as an ontological problem in any of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books of discovery and self-critique considered here. But it could scarcely be otherwise, in texts written and published to urge change by setting up ‘Europe’ as a model to follow. It is a difference of degree, rather than of kind, that the authors identify as dividing their societies from civilised Europe. In the private diary compiled on his journey to England together with Széchenyi, the Magyar aristocrat Miklós Wesselényi puts it this way, rather ironically: ‘The reason for [Transylvania’s] misery and backwardness in many respects is its distant geographical position. I am often distressed that my homeland 87 ‘Collective crisis of identity’, for Hungarians between 1825 and 1848, who ‘would not only accept the legitimacy of inequality, but would do so with a sense of shame and guilt’, Janos, Politics of backwardness, 44–50; ‘culture shock’, for Bulgarians who had turned themselves ‘from a self-sufficient and static grass-roots ethnic culture into an inferior European culture’, Vladimir Trendafilov, Neizlichimiiat obraz v ogledaloto (Sofia: 1996), 52; ‘cultural schizophrenia’, for Greeks, Richard Clogg, ‘The Greek mercantile bourgeoisie’, in Balkan society in the age of Greek independence, ed. R. Clogg (London: 1981), 90 (and, more generally for traditional cultures in contact with a west they cannot reproduce ‘naturally’, Samuel P. Huntington, The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order [New York: 1996], 154). 88 Drace-Francis, ‘Dinicu Golescu’s Account’.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 104

4/14/08 2:51:58 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

105

has to be so far away from the civilised world, but then the idea that I could have been born in Greenland or New Holland comforts me.’89 Such reformers interpret their position as a ‘combination of relatedness and belatedness’, 90 a diagnosis which both explains the inadequacies they identify and suggests optimism for the future. Thus Golescu, for example, hopes that ‘the people will in a few years not fail to reach the same level as the other inhabitants of Europe’ and precisely the same hope concludes the lamentations from the Hungarian travellers. The shame these travellers express at their societies’ deficiencies was surely real but it was also calculated, a means of goading their compatriots along a path of development that is presented as their birthright and their fate. More than travels abroad, it is accounts of home that begin to register contradictions between ‘Europeanness’ and national characteristics. One aspect of this is the persistent choice of European standards for evaluating sights encountered in domestic travels. While descriptions of foreign sites in terms of domestic analogues could tie the traveller’s home into a larger European whole, depicting Belgrade or Bucharest in terms of their similarity to or difference from Paris had a rather different effect. This comparison often reflected a sense that value and originality lay elsewhere, that the domestic and indigenous could only ever be a reflection or a copy. Even the frequent patriotic assertion that ‘abroad’ is over-valued, that the urge to travel to the West rests on snobbery and that ‘home’ is equally beautiful, interesting or important only served to confirm the status of western Europe as a yardstick. Accounts of the homeland by the first generations of western-educated students give some substance to the notion of a split self, when they reveal the authors struggling to hang on to the values they have learnt abroad while at the same time beset with an uneasy nostalgia for the domestic ways that they have been taught to despise. An example is the memoir by the Moldavian writer Alecu Russo (1819–1859), who presents his native Iaşi in the 1840s as a ‘semi-European’, ‘demi-civilised’ society, a picturesque mixture of Orient and Occident, the site 89 Wesselényi, Úti napló 1821–1822, 30 (trans. Zsuzsa Varga). 90 A formulation suggested by Henry L. Roberts, Eastern Europe: Politics, revolution and diplomacy (New York: 1970), 14.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 105

4/14/08 2:51:58 PM

106

Under Eastern Eyes

of struggle between stagnation and ‘Europeanism’ (‘a technical term in Jassy’), and between eastern-oriented fathers and western-educated sons. His faith in the promise of an inevitable modernisation carried by ‘the young people who have sojourned in European cities’, who ‘are introducing other views, other ideas and another way of seeing things’ is tempered by a melancholy nostalgia for the native values being lost in the process (including the possibility that Moldavia’s foreign-educated youth will end up knowing French or German culture better than their own).91 This was not something that would have occurred as a problem to Golescu, who made no link between innate, cultural qualities and social development. The disjunctures felt by the returned student are perhaps more characteristic of those societies where education abroad was a relatively recent phenomenon in the nineteenth century—the Balkans, or the Russian Empire. The sense of the nation as being both inferior and infinitely precious is shared much more widely, however, and lies at the paradoxical core of much nationalist rhetoric. New ‘European’ standards, products, or ways of life could be experienced as alien—and alienating—when brought home. One Serbian traveller, Ljubomir NenadoviΔ, put his finger firmly on the resulting problems. In 1845, when he made the mistake of travelling in provincial Serbia wearing a felt hat, he found himself treated as a foreigner. The innkeeper served him rotten meat (while the whole tavern watched to see if he would swallow the affront) and then excused himself by claiming that he’d thought NenadoviΔ was a German: ‘It’s true that I’ve often heard that you types scarcely touch meat till it starts to smell a little, so I thought, if it’s so much to his taste, why don’t I give him a treat, and he can go and tell the whole province that even in Jagodina they know how to fix food German-style’. NenadoviΔ put this down to provincial backwardness—and a coarse joke at the expense of a citified Serb. Having pinpointed the potential for social fracture caused by a partial westernisation of Serbian society, NenadoviΔ went on to note the recent tendency to call specific styles of furnishing, time-keeping, or clothing ‘European’ as opposed to ‘German’: ‘This is 91 Alecu Russo, ‘Iassy et ses habitants en 1840’, in Scrieri, ed. P. Haneş (Bucharest: 1908), 237–69. See also Paul Michelson, ‘Alecu Russo and historical consciousness in 19th-century revolutionary Romania’, in Temps et changement dans l’espace roumain, ed. A. Zub (Iaşi: 1991), 139–49.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 106

4/14/08 2:51:58 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

107

because our tradesmen have travelled to Pest, Vienna, Leipzig, Trieste and even further though the world and they’ve seen that it’s not only Germans who wear felt hats and clothes like this, but also Magyars, Serbs and Italians.’ This was a step forward. But, he goes on: I would like to change even that word ‘European’ and make it the custom to say ‘Serbian’ instead. For as long as we regard Europe and its enlightenment as something alien, in which we participate as foreigners, for so long Europe will regard us as Asia Minor. So I repeat: we ought to call Serbian everything that we today label as ‘European’, and only then will our nation join the great family of cultivated European peoples. And although till now we have said ‘those other cultivated European nations’, then we will have the right to say ‘we cultivated European nations’.92

The Serbian elites (like those elsewhere in the region) could feel sufficiently acculturated to differentiate themselves from the common people—but not enough to compel recognition from the Western arbiters of Europeanness or even to convince themselves. In the short term, NenadoviΔ dealt with the problem by sending the coachman out to buy him a fez or a šubara, a peasant fur cap, and by writing a travel sketch that defended cultural imports against provincial ridicule. He would go on to make his literary reputation with a series of travel accounts—about Switzerland and Prussia, Italy, Germany and finally, Montenegro—that grew increasingly sceptical of the idealised picture of Europe (and of Western civilisation) that was drawn in Serbian travellers’ accounts and impatient with the sense of inferiority this could engender at home. ‘Europe’ could be a stumbling block, as well as a road map for change. But looking only for expressions of trauma in the encounter with Europe can be misleading, as the sheer variety of approaches in travel accounts—from the agonised to the pragmatic to the playful—make clear. The many humorous accounts of European travel from nine92 Ljubomir NenadoviΔ, ‘Jedan dan iz putovanja mog po Srbiji u 1845 g.’, Šumadinka I (1850), reprinted in Putovanje po južnoslovenskim zemljama u XIX veku, ed. P.Ž. PetroviΔ (Belgrade: 1934). See also his Pisma iz Nema∑ke, (Belgrade: 1922) and O Crnogorcima (Valjevo: 1889).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 107

4/14/08 2:51:59 PM

108

Under Eastern Eyes

teenth-century eastern Europe deserve special attention. The selfconfidence of social privilege may have insulated some travellers from a too-pressing awareness of ethnic or civilisational stigma, though it could also be argued that the frivolity of some such accounts was simply a way of avoiding the issue. But the witty European excursions by writers such as the Croat Antun Nem∑iΔ (1813–1849) or the Romanians Vasile Alecsandri (1821–1890) and Ion Codru Drăguşanu (1820–1884) did not preclude critical self-knowledge. Travel writing’s licence for irony and self-mockery could pre-empt external criticisms and draw some of the sting of humiliations suffered abroad, while still confronting the reader with discomforting truths. It is easier to recognise and laugh at your own shortcomings with a compatriot, than to know that foreigners are laughing at you. The wide diversities of tone and style in east European travel accounts are significant, indicating the many different ways travellers could respond to Europe’s asymmetries: internalised self-disgust, ressentiment, self-protective mimicry or ‘geocultural bovarism’, sublimation, insouciant disregard, or creative adaptation and syncretism.93 Our travellers also provide a reminder that not all foreign evaluations were accepted uncritically and deferentially. One of the reasons for retailing the perceptions held by westerners was to underline the ways they got things wrong, as with the grotesque stereotypes of Szemere’s images of ‘Hungary seen from abroad’. Hungary: […] is beginning to wake up, so they say [in Prussia], and they are progressing with tremendous steps, because their spirit is strong, full of tremendous virtue and much knowledge. It has inclinations towards the Turkish and Russian system of slavery, with which two countries it shares borders. The estates of some lords are equivalent 93 Ressentiment as a factor in identity-formation is summarised with reference to the Russian example in Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: five roads to modernity (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: 1992); Antohi provides a stimulating discussion of sublimation and of ‘geo-cultural bovarism’ in ‘Romania and the Balkans: From Geo-cultural Bovarism to Ethnic Ontology’, Tr@nsit-Virtuelles Forum 21, (2002), available at http://www.iwm. at/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=235&Itemid=411 (accessed 10 March 2007).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 108

4/14/08 2:51:59 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

109

to the province of a German prince. Slavery has not been abolished yet. Darkness prevails. It is populated by masters and helots.94

Szemere finds himself constantly compelled to respond to the misrepresentations of foreigners, even educated ones, who think that Hungarian is a Slavic dialect or that Hungarians speak Latin or German, as well as more serious misconceptions. Such mistakes may have been wounding to the traveller’s national self-esteem but citing them underlined the ignorance of his western hosts rather than confirming any sense of inferiority on the part of the traveller (rather the reverse). The theme of miscategorisation, the result of ignorance or indifference, would become a persistent trope in east European travel writing, a running critique of the western refusal to accept the travellers on their own terms. (The reverse is the sense that the east European travellers always knew more about their western hosts than vice versa: ‘asymmetrical ignorance’, to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term.)95 The travellers’ responses to foreign misconceptions encountered abroad are reminiscent of the touchy attention paid at home to accounts of their societies published by western travellers. Such writings were treated everywhere as something between a school report and overheard gossip, and were strenuously contested as malicious, superficial, or just plain wrong. An entire anthology might be constructed out of challenges to the authority and intentions of western travellers— challenges that were often addressed directly to the court of European opinion in languages of international circulation.96 Foreign assessments 94 Bertalan Szemere, Utazás külföldön (Budapest: 1983), 92–3 (trans. Zsuzsa Varga). 95 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton: 2000), 28. 96 Examples: Ivan LovriΔ’s counter-travelogue, Osservazioni... sopra diversi pezzi del viaggio in Dalmazia del Signor Abate A. Fortis (Venice: 1776), disputing Fortis’s conclusions; the Moldavian Gheorghe Saul responding to Jean-Louis Carra’s history of Moldavia and Wallachia in the French press (see Alexandre Cioranescu, ‘Le Serdar Gheorghe Saul et sa polémique avec J.L. Carra (1779)’, Acta historica Societatis Acad. Dacoromania 5 [1966]); Krystyn Lach Szyrma, polemicising on ‘miraculous and absurd’ accounts of the ‘Sclavonians’ retailed in western books of travels, in Letters, literary and political, on Poland (Edinburgh: 1823); Liuben Karavelov on ‘superficial’ foreign accounts of Bulgaria, ‘Iz zapisok Bolgara’, in Stranitsy

iBracewell_A_book.indb 109

4/14/08 2:52:00 PM

110

Under Eastern Eyes

were not always inaccurate, however, and reformers made deliberate use of these for their own purposes. The second-hand judgements they cited were often meant to sting: it is mortifying to have one’s defects exposed by outsiders before the whole of Europe, as these travellers repeatedly stressed in their exclamations of shame and guilt. All this goes to suggest that reactions to western representations were as important as eastern travel ‘discoveries’ of western material culture or social change in provoking self-awareness and selfcriticism.97 But this does not mean that the travellers’ self-criticisms were made on the authority of western perceptions rather than on the basis of their own judgements, nor that the changes they advocated were only intended to impress western observers (though ‘Europeanisation’ was sometimes urged as a means of securing political allies in the West).98 And even with all due scepticism about the universalism of European Enlightenment ideals, can it safely be claimed that the travellers’ admittedly self-serving complaints about their own impoverished public culture, the glaring inequalities in their societies, or the one-sidedness of their political systems were based on ‘alien values and models of civilisation’ that were somehow essentially foreign to their mentalities? The diversity of travellers’ responses suggests the limitations of a psychological-pathological approach to identities and power relations iz knigi stradanii bolgarskago plemeni (Moscow: 1868), addressing a Russian audience. Françoise Knopper establishes a framework for considering such counter-representations in ‘Öffentlichkeit und Meinungsfreiheit: Repliken und Gegenschriften zu Reisebeschreibungen am Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Die Welt erfahren: Reisen als kulturelle Begegnung von 1780 bis heute, ed. A. Bauerkämper, H.E. Bödeker and B. Struck (Frankfurt: 2004), 219–38. 97 See, on the Ottoman engagement with European representations (and consequently an ‘inadvertent’ internalisation of Western value systems) as a factor in Ottoman reform initiatives, Selim Deringil, The well-protected domains (London: 1999), especially 150–65. A similar approach to Greek reactions to the ‘European gaze’ in Kostantaras, Infamy and revolt. 98 Kogălniceanu: ‘To show Europe our desire to Europeanize our country will be to attract the sympathies and support of the Great Powers and of foreign public opinion’, cited by Katherine Verdery, ‘Moments in the rise of the discourse on national identity, I: 17th –19th centuries’, in Românii în istoria universală 3–i, ed. I. Agrigoroaiei, Gh. Buzatu, V. Cristian (Iaşi: 1988), 44.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 110

4/14/08 2:52:00 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

111

on Europe’s peripheries. Here the analogy with postcolonial theory is helpful, in spite of frequently-expressed reservations about east Europe’s colonial status. As critiques of Homi Bhabha’s concepts of colonial ambivalence and hybridity point out, subjectivities are constituted not only by internal psychic processes but also by much more particular and variable considerations of class, ethnicity, gender and context, undercutting assumptions of a single paradigmatic ‘split colonial subject’. Furthermore, ‘processes of individual subject-formation cannot be endlessly expanded to account for social collectivities’, sounding a note of caution with regard to theories of collective inadequacy or trauma vis-à-vis Europe or the West.99 The aspirations and anxieties of the well-educated and well-travelled intellectual were not necessarily shared across whole societies. NenadoviΔ, remembering his experiences in the Jagodina tavern, might have agreed. Still, the books these travellers produced, with their unremitting focus on domestic deficiencies and absences, may well have aggravated their readers’ difficulties in feeling fully European. This sense is exemplified in local usages that locate Europe elsewhere, or Europeans as ‘other people’. A long series of observers have remarked on the use of the phrase ‘going to Europe’ employed by those setting off from the Balkans to France, Italy or other points west, and so apparently considering themselves as something apart from Europe.100 Similarly, the phrase ‘the civilised West’ (used in the title of one nineteenth-century Hungarian travel account) may be a pleonasm, but its use also implies a point of departure in an uncivilised East.101 Even Bertalan Szemere, who includes Hungarians unproblematically among ‘the other European nations’ on his outward journey, when he turns homewards writes that ‘ever since I have been in Europe, I have felt the wind on my face, blowing from the Carpathians,’ making his homeland hard to place.102 Enlightened travellers hoped that change and improvement could be achieved by following the example laid down in ‘the more cultivat-

99 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/postcolonialism (London: 1998), 150, 173–83. 100 See on this Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 43 and Jezernik, Wild Europe, 29, with a list of citations. 101 Jenő Szentkláray, Úti képek a művelt Nyugatról (Budapest: 1890), covering travels through Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Bohemia. 102 Szemere, Utazás külföldön, 195 (trans. Gwen Jones).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 111

4/14/08 2:52:00 PM

112

Under Eastern Eyes

ed parts of Europe’. But universalistic ideas about the perfectibility of man sat uneasily with the conviction of an innate European superiority conveyed by the binary vocabulary of Europe and the Orient. While it was at first deployed as a road-map towards change and improvement in eighteenth-century eastern Europe, the idea of Europe gradually evolved into something altogether more fixed and uniformitarian, particularly as the idea of civilisation as a single, inevitable process fragmented into a far more particularistic concept of distinct, hierarchically ordered cultures or civilisations, in the plural.103 If east European reactions to this idea of Europe encouraged a compensatory sense of the national, as both different and precious, they could also promote what might be labelled an ‘exteriority complex’: the sense that the normative horizon of Europe was centred elsewhere.

EASTERN EUROPE Did these travel writers’ depictions of European difference contribute to the emergence of a distinctive Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century? While the term appears occasionally before the nineteenth century, the concept of a separate, cohesive ‘Eastern Europe’ emerged in German and French geopolitical discourse between the Congress of Vienna and the Crimean War. The term makes manifest a shift in Europe’s inner boundaries from a North/South orientation to an East/ West division, in which the distinctions first drawn between Asia and Europe, the Orient and the Occident, were transplanted into European soil. The waning of the Ottoman threat and the increasing importance of Russia as a factor in the European balance of power at the beginning of the nineteenth century helped shift the Russians firmly into the European East, at least in German and French eyes. At the same time, a new historical anthropology posited the Slavs as a single ethno-linguistic unit with a distinctive culture and history, set in opposition to the Latin and Teutonic peoples (and consequently linking all of the Slavs to Russia, the great Slav-ruled empire). The perception of Romanians and Greeks as eastern Orthodox peoples further marked 103 On this shift in French usage, Lucien Febvre, ‘Civilisation: Evolution of a word and a group of ideas’, in A new kind of history, ed. P. Burke (London: 1973), 219–57.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 112

4/14/08 2:52:00 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

113

by their long subjection to the Ottoman Porte, and of the Magyars as ‘Asiatic’ in origin and character helped link ideas of a ‘Slav Europe’ to a broader ‘Eastern Europe’ in western discourses in the course of the nineteenth century, though neither the new nomenclature nor the ‘Euro-Orientalism’ it embodied was fully institutionalised in political, academic and diplomatic usage until after the First World War. 104 The only people from the region to make a consistent claim to ‘Easternness’ as a characteristic in the nineteenth century were the Magyars, not always in a self-congratulatory manner (as István Széchenyi’s despair over his fellow Hungarians as ‘the people of the East’ and as ‘exiles of civilisation’ indicates).105 But the idea did produce some interesting sidelights in travel writing. After his journeys in the West Bertalan Szemere produced a second volume of travel notes in 1870, Utazás Keleten [Travels in the East], from a journey through Bulgaria to Istanbul. Here Szemere plays with notions of Magyar Easternness, and especially kinship with the Turks, the only race (he claims) with whom the Magyars have a family connection. Szemere is happy to display his own affinities for an Oriental East (though he travels through the nearer East of Oltenia with his eyes closed, scornful of this unchanging, boring land with its poverty and lack of culture). As soon as he arrives in Vidin, Szemere acquires a fez, slippers, a silk sash and a chibouque. He revels in the bright colours of Turkish men’s dress: they reflect the colours of nature, and are the very opposite of Europe’s sombre, uniform fashions. In short, he feels at home among the Turks: the East is the cradle of the sun, of humanity, and of the Magyar; a desire for home draws Szemere there. He balances this, however, by recalling Hungarian battles against the Turk. When he visits Varna, he muses on János Hunyadi, the Hungarian hero of the campaigns against the Ottoman forces in the fifteenth century, routed at the battle of Varna in 1444. Szemere concludes that at Varna, 104 See especially Hans Lemberg, ‘Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffes im 19. Jahrhundert: Vom “Norden” zum “Osten” Europas’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 33 (1985), 48–91; and Ezequiel Adamovsky, ‘EuroOrientalism and the making of the concept of Eastern Europe in France, 1810–1880,’ Journal of Modern History 77:3 (2005), 591–628. Their studies modify Wolff’s dating of the shift from North/South to East/West in western discourse. 105 Barany, Stephen Széchenyi, 391 and passim; see also Hofer, ‘East and West’.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 113

4/14/08 2:52:01 PM

114

Under Eastern Eyes

Hungary had fought the Turks in order to defend Europe from Asia, and Western civilisation against the destructive conquerors of the East. ‘Here’, he concludes, ‘the Hungarians bled not as Hungarians but as European citizens’.106 But accounting for Magyar uniqueness in terms of eastern origins and affinities forestalled any concept of a shared Eastern Europe. When Szemere discussed Hungary’s special role in Europe in his travel account of 1840, he had placed it in a class of its own, neither East, West nor Centre: ‘Western and Central Europe look expectantly to it: the future of Eastern Europe lies in its hands. [Hungary] is like a flower, brought from the East to the West and suffering from the transplant; but now it has rested and, in its new field, it will remember that the East is its home’.107 (These divisions of Europe could apparently be taken for granted: Szemere did not stop to define them for his readers.) The ‘Slav Europe’ that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century was a gesture of proud defiance towards a German and Latin West that stigmatised the Slavs as barbarian and un-European. But it did not produce a similarly positive notion of Eastern Europe. It was not just that ethnic diversity stood in the way of a shift from a community defined in ethno-linguistic terms (‘the Slav world’) to one defined spatially (‘Eastern Europe’). ‘Easternness’ was not always an easy or inevitable self-identification, even for partisans of Slavdom and Slavophile-influenced critics of the decadent West, and particularly not for the Catholic or Protestant Slavs. When the Slovene Slavist Bartolomæus (Jernej) Kopitar wrote in 1810 of the ‘eastern half of Europe’ as ‘inhabited almost exclusively by Slavs’, he immediately balanced this admission of ‘easternness’ by adding that a third of Asia was being introduced to ‘European culture’ by Slav rule.108 Poles were perhaps slightly more likely to use ‘East European’ as a self-designation in the early nineteenth century, putting the emphasis on ‘Europe’ and reflecting a tendency to mark the boundary with a Russia seen,

106 Bertalan Szemere, Utazás Keleten a világosi napok után (Budapest: 1870), 8 (trans. Gwen Jones, to whom I’m also indebted for her detailed summary). 107 Szemere, Utazás külföldön, 51–2 (trans. Gwen Jones). 108 Kopitar, Kleinere Schriften (Vienna: 1857), 16–7.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 114

4/14/08 2:52:01 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

115

by implication, as non-European.109 Was ‘Eastern Europe’ any more straightforward as a self-designation for the Orthodox nations? An emphasis on a common Orthodoxy could place the centre of gravity of the Slav world in the East, but in practice, general usage among the nineteenth-century Serbs, Bulgarians and Russians (as well as the Greeks and Romanians) reserved the ‘East’ for the Muslim Orient and the Holy Land, while ‘Europe’s Orient’ implied the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans—and the need to overcome it. Thus in 1867 at the Moscow Slav Congress, the Vojvodina Serb Mihailo Polit-Desan∑iΔ assured the participants in Moscow that Russia’s task as a ‘pan-Slav power […] lies not only in Asia, but here as well, on the threshold of Europe, in the European Orient’.110 Travels through the Slav world might trace an alternative map of Europe, but it was seldom conceived as an explicitly Eastern one. 111 The polarisation of East and West in Europe created a new place for the middle and the intermediary. Czech patriots such as František Palacký readjusted Slavism’s East-West frontier by laying claim to the role of centre: the Czech nation, ‘the centre and heart of Europe’, was destined ‘to serve as a bridge between Germandom and Slavdom, between the East and the West in Europe in general’.112 (This paralleled 109 Examples in the work by the Breslau Pole Jerzy Samuel Bandtkie, Historisch-critische Analecten zur Erläuterung der Geschichte des Ostens von Europa (Breslau: 1802), which begins by refuting calumnies against the Slavs in general, but concentrates on the Poles; or Stanisław Plater, Jeografia, wschodniéy czę√ci Europy (Wrocław: 1825) in which ‘the eastern part of Europe’ represents ‘the areas inhabited by the multitudinous Slav peoples’, but the coverage excludes the Russians. 110 Cited in Julien Klaczko, ‘Le Congrès de Moscou et la propaganda panslaviste’, Revue des deux mondes (1867), 159, and cf. Polit-Desan∑iΔ, Putne uspomene (Novi Sad: 1896). 111 See Bracewell, ‘Travels Through the Slav World’, this volume. 112 Palacký, Dějiny národu ∑eského, 5 vols. (Prague: 1848), 1:9, 13; cited by Vladímir Macura, Znamení zrodu (Prague: 1983), 198–207; and in Peter Bugge, ‘The use of the middle: Mitteleuropa vs. Střední Evropa’, European Review of History 6:1 (1999), 15–35. An earlier version of the same sentiment, this time from a Prague German perspective, in the 1837 manifesto for the journal Ost und West, intended as ‘a literary link between the Slav East and Germany’, and published in a Bohemia located at ‘the frontier between the European East and West’, cited in Alois Hofman, Die Prager Zeitschrift ‘Ost und West’ (Berlin: 1957), 27.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 115

4/14/08 2:52:01 PM

116

Under Eastern Eyes

the early nineteenth-century discovery of the Mitteleuropa idea among Germans, and its mobilisation to redress their newly tenuous position on the very periphery of the civilised West.)113 Others, too, claimed a place at the centre of Europe, and the role of mediator between East and West. Thus, for example, the speech made by the Greek statesman Ioannes Kolettis in 1844 to the National Assembly seems to defy geography, but makes perfect ideological sense: ‘because of its geographical position, Greece represents the centre of Europe: having the East on the right and the West on the left, it is destined to enlighten the West with its fall and the East with its resurrection’.114 Similar examples could be multiplied. Here, the point is the potential for cultural mediation offered by such a position in the middle. Another formulation of Greek dualism, in between Latin-German and Slav or Oriental civilisation, imagines it explicitly from the position of a cosmopolitan traveller: Take a Russian to Paris, or a Frenchman to Moscow: each will feel strange to the civilization of the country and out of their own milieu; while a Greek will feel equally at home in Paris and in Moscow. It’s the Greek who is the most universal form of man, the sole true Catholic in Europe.115

Travel writers made much use of the possibilities afforded by a position in the middle, portraying the East to the West and vice versa. Rather than dissolving East-West essentialisms, however, such a stance could strengthen them by assuming separate and independent entities in need of mutual interpretation. The idea of a Central Europe both required and reinforced that of an Eastern Europe. Furthermore, narratives of cosmopolitanism often turned out to be skewed or loaded, 113 Hans-Dietrich Schulz, ‘Fantasies of Mitte: Mittellage and Mitteleuropa in German geographical discussion in the 19th and 20th centuries’, Political Geography Quarterly 8 (1989), 317–27. 114 Cited in Effi Gazi, ‘“Europe”: Writing an ambivalent concept in 19th-century Greek historical culture’, in Die Griechen und Europa: Aussen- und Innenansichten im Wandel der Zeit, ed. H. Heppner and O. Katsiardi-Hering (Vienna: 1998), 107. 115 Markos Renieris, ‘Le dualisme grec’, Le Spectateur de l’Orient 1 (26 August 1853), 37.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 116

4/14/08 2:52:02 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

117

redrawing the circles of belonging in ways which might include the individual travel writers but not necessarily their societies; for example in a shared, ostensibly pan-European community of culture and learning that could exclude the crude, unlearned, ‘eastern’ philistines at home. ‘Nesting’ Orientalisms could operate on an individual, as well as a group level.116 According to those who travelled from the region from the mid-nineteenth century, ‘Eastern Europe’ was nearly always to be found somewhere else. When the Czech geographer and publisher Karel Vladislav Zap (1812–1871) produced his series of travel accounts and other texts entitled Zrcadlo života ve východní Evropě [A Mirror of Life in Eastern Europe] in 1844, with the aim of familiarising his readership with ‘the lands of Eastern Europe, and with people for the most part related to us by race’, the texts included suggested that Eastern Europe was confined to Lithuania, Bessarabia, Volhynia, Podolia, Galicia and the rest of the Ukraine.117 Zap’s usage of the term was relatively neutral, but when in the 1870s Karl Emil Franzos, a Germanised Jewish author, published travel sketches of a part of this same region, his native Galicia, he used the title of ‘Halb-Asien’ as his disparaging and revealing equivalent for this Eastern Europe.118 Accounts of travels in the ‘East’ could refer to other regions of Europe, particularly the Balkans. The Hungarian György Urházy’s pictures of the East came from Serbia and Bulgaria (Keleti képek [Eastern pictures] [Budapest: 1854]); the Pole Antoni Zaleski’s Z wycieczki na Wschód [From an excursion to the East] (Warsaw: 1887) traced a journey through Romania and 116 An example of some of the possible complexities in Jacob M. Landau, ‘Arminius Vámbéry: traveller and scholar’, Exploring Ottoman and Turkish history (London: 2004), 168–75. At greater length on such cosmopolitanisms in Balkan travel accounts, Wendy Bracewell, ‘Orijentalizam, okcidentalizam i kozmopolitanizam: Balkanski putopisi o Evropi’, Sarajevo Notebook, 6–7 (2004), 179–93; on nesting Orientalisms, Milica BakiΔHayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The case of former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review 54:4 (1995), 917–31. 117 Karel Vladislav Zap, Zrcadlo života ve východní Evropě, 3 vols. (Prague: 1844), 1:v. 118 Karl Emil Franzos, Aus Halb-Asien. Culturbilder aus Galizien, der Bukowina, Südrußland und Rumänien, 2 vols. (Leipzig: 1876). Further volumes and editions had the subtitle Land and Leute des östlichen Europas.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 117

4/14/08 2:52:02 PM

118

Under Eastern Eyes

Bulgaria as far as Istanbul; the Czech writer J. Wagner’s Na evropském Východě [In the European East] (Třebí∑: 1889) explored the Balkans and Russia. Hardly anyone really wanted to be East European. A Romantic revaluation of the connotations of ‘the East’ in terms of spirituality and social harmony could not remove a persistent ambivalence attached to the term. Older and darker shadows hovered about it. They were reinforced by contemporary political divisions both inside and outside the region. While some liberal Western observers in the 1830s–1840s (e.g., Alphonse de Lamartine, Ami Boué, Cyprien Robert) welcomed the ‘young Oriental Europeans’ as a force for European regeneration, negative images of the bogey of a Russian-dominated Pan-Slavism, of the barbaric and despotic East, and of poverty and backwardness dominated German and French discourses of Eastern Europe, across the whole political spectrum.119 Ezequiel Adamovsky traces the ubiquity of the term Eastern Europe in French political discourses by the 1860s, as well as the gradual hardening of an associated ‘Euro-Orientalism’. In the region, however, ‘Eastern Europe’ had well before then become a term to be applied to others—because of the ways ‘Europe’ and ‘the East’ were applied as criteria of value and disdain, East and West, in travel writings as in other texts. If hegemony implies the acquiescence of those who were designated as East European, it was not really achieved until after 1945—but by then the terms East and West had acquired new shades of meaning that depended less on cultural connotations and more on direct ideological oppositions.

THE LIMITS OF EAST AND WEST This survey has picked out the ways an increasing East/West polarisation, produced collaboratively by travel writers and others across the continent, shaped ideas of Europe and east European selves. But a focus on the East/West division of Europe as constitutive of east European identities has some serious drawbacks. The approach encourages a tendency to think in terms of rigid and lasting oppositions between united and homogenous wholes; with the unequal relationships between East and West often seen as providing the dynamics of 119 See on this especially Adamovsky, ‘Euro-Orientalism’, 604–6.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 118

4/14/08 2:52:02 PM

The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing

119

all change, to the neglect of alliances and fissures that cut across this divide, particularly the divisions within the societies of the periphery. Furthermore, concentrating on the effects of Western precedence, political and economic power, and cultural hegemony tends to cast east European self-definitions solely in terms of adaptation, assimilation, or resistance, and to produce predetermined explanations of causality and change. Looking at east European travel accounts can help break down some of these assumptions. Travel writers from the eastern reaches of Europe contributed to making the world, for their own domestic audiences and for a European-wide readership, but never—to paraphrase Marx’s dictum—from a place or in circumstances of their own choosing. It was not just that writers from small nations were caught in the interstices of the great empires that clashed over this region. It was also because they had to describe their world in terms that were already in use, that had their own pre-existing definitions. Some struggled valiantly to remake the world, to redefine the cardinal points by which it might be comprehended, in ways that would put themselves and their own societies at the centre of a map of civilisation, rather than at the peripheries of Europe. They may have had little apparent success. Even so, while the projections were largely set (and the dilemmas defined) elsewhere, the perspectives that these writers chose did have an effect—not least in contributing to the continued ambivalence that would hang around the idea of Europe’s East. But the strict dichotomies of a centre/periphery relationship are not capable of capturing the heterogeneity of eastern Europe’s circumstances, nor of its travel accounts. Despite the shared experiences of the small nations in ‘the lands between’, different historical experiences render problematic the concept of a single, homogeneous eastern Europe and a centre of power in an undifferentiated ‘West’. If we survey some of the different combinations of geopolitical power, cultural authority and local power relations across the region at the beginning of the nineteenth century this becomes clear. Compare the Hungarian reformers countering both native aristocratic privilege and Viennese political domination with French and English examples (while at the same time using the rhetoric of Europe and of civilisation to dominate their own Slav and Romanian minorities); the Poles, abandoned by ‘Europe’ and partitioned among three states—Prussia, Austria and

iBracewell_A_book.indb 119

4/14/08 2:52:03 PM

120

Under Eastern Eyes

Russia—each with very different civilisational credentials and sociopolitical structures; Czech national revivalists, representing the West to the eastern Slavs, but their Slavism making them increasingly ‘Eastern’ in the eyes of their German neighbours; the Romanians of the Principalities, freed from Ottoman rule and introduced to ‘European manners’ and constitutional government by Russia, but trying to emancipate themselves from Russian tutelage according to French-made models; the Balkan elites under Ottoman rule, increasingly affected by ‘Europeanising’ Ottoman reforms but looking to other sources of legitimacy in their calls for liberation (including Russia as well as France, Germany or England). The changing agendas of Great Power politics had their own implications for each society. ‘Europe’ could mean very different things to the Greeks, on whom it had conferred both political liberation and the prestige of giving birth to European civilisation (as well as the shame of contemporary decline), and to the Poles or the Bulgarians, sacrificed to the exigencies of the European balance of power in the Partitions or the Eastern Question. If geocultural notions of East and West were shaped by political choice as well as by psychological reaction, then what was going on at the local level also needs consideration when examining the ways travel writing used these ideas in representations of the individual or national self. So does an awareness of other categories that could shape the traveller’s perspectives: male or female; young or old; noble or plebeian; urban or rural; progressive or reactionary. An approach predicated on clear-cut oppositions between Self and Other, East and West, tradition and modernity, has little to say about the multifaceted character of identity discourses constituted in these borderlands, not just with reference to Europe or an undifferentiated ‘West’ or ‘East’, but to a whole series of other Others. East European travel writing, about Europe and the world, has much more to tell than has been examined here.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 120

4/14/08 2:52:03 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and Early Modern European Identity Graeme Murdock

During the sixteenth century the Hungarian ‘bulwark of Christendom’ was breached by the armies of the Sultan. Hungary’s southern and central counties fell under Ottoman control, and the remainder of the kingdom was divided between two territories which came to be known as Royal Hungary and the Transylvanian Principality. Royal Hungary was ruled by Habsburg monarchs, while in Transylvania the Diet elected from the native nobility a series of princes who offered fealty to the Sultan. Hungarian society was further divided from the 1540s to the 1560s as Evangelical, Reformed and anti-Trinitarian preaching spread among the nobility and in towns. Religious divisions hardened as rival clergy secured the loyalty of magnates, gentry, urban magistrates and ordinary people. From the late sixteenth century the Habsburg court increasingly promoted the cause of Counter-Reform in Royal Hungary, aiming to win back the loyalty of nobles to the Catholic Church and to overturn legal privileges granted to Protestants. Meanwhile in Transylvania, princes promised on their election to uphold the rights of four legal religions; the Reformed, Evangelical, anti-Trinitarian and Catholic Churches. However, the Reformed Church acquired an increasingly dominant role within the principality during the early seventeenth century thanks to the support of a series of Reformed princes. In the wake of this disruption to Hungarian society, the country’s different political and confessional communities formed distinct international networks in the realms of diplomacy, education and intellectual life. Both Hungary’s Habsburg kings and Transylvania’s princes sought external political and military allies in their efforts to prevent at least further Ottoman encroachment to the north. Clergy and students from Hungary’s different Churches were also in contact with co-religionists at academic centres across the continent. Hungarians

iBracewell_A_book.indb 121

4/14/08 2:52:03 PM

122

Under Eastern Eyes

had in fact long travelled to attend foreign universities, and substantial numbers of students had studied from the fifteenth century at Vienna, Prague and Kraków in particular. The cost and difficulties of travel abroad had also been undertaken by Hungarians for religious purposes, and in addition, notions developed about the pleasure and benefits to be derived from travel for its own sake. By the early seventeenth century, Catholic students travelled to colleges especially in Austria and Italy, while Catholic nobles visited Venice and Rome. Large numbers of Lutheran students travelled to study at Evangelical universities in the Empire.1 Meanwhile, Reformed ministers and students were drawn to more distant destinations in north-western Europe. Thanks to the patronage of princes, nobles and urban magistrates, Reformed students at first studied alongside Lutherans at Wittenberg, but most then moved to study at Heidelberg in the Palatinate, at Frankfurt an der Oder in Brandenburg, Herborn in Nassau, Marburg in Hesse, and at Bremen. After Heidelberg fell to Catholic forces in 1622, substantial numbers of students turned to the universities of the Dutch Republic. Hungarian students travelled in ever greater numbers via Kraków to Danzig, before venturing onwards to Franeker, Leiden, Utrecht and Groningen. Around one hundred Reformed students voyaged on from the Dutch coast to England during the first half of the seventeenth century, mostly living in London and visiting Oxford and Cambridge.2 Reformed students who travelled across Europe during the early seventeenth century have left a range of surviving records of their experiences. Some kept personal diaries, while others compiled albums of signatures and verses written by professors, clergy, other students and friends during their period abroad. These albums were intended

1 Pál Nyáry, A krakkói egyetem és magyar diákjai a XIV–XVI. században (Budapest: 1942); Néda Relkovi∑, A gráci egyetem legrégibb magyar hallgatói (1586–1640) (Budapest: 1933); Endre Veress, Olasz egyetemeken járt magyarországi tanulók anyakönyvei és iratai (Budapest: 1941). 2 Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600–1660. International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford: 2000), 46–76; idem, ‘Foreign Calvinist students’ contact with Presbyterians and Puritans in England: The experience of Péter Körmendi’, in Művelődési törekvések a korai újkorban. Tanulmányok Keserű Bálint tiszteletére [Adattár 35], ed. M. Balázs et al. (Szeged: 1998), 433–51; György Gömöri, Angol– magyar kapcsolatok a XVI–XVII. században (Budapest: 1989).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 122

4/14/08 2:52:03 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 123 as a source of private reflection on travel, but were also perhaps useful in providing tangible evidence to patrons that their money had been well spent. In addition, albums may have served as a form of contact book, which recorded the names of individuals likely to give a warm welcome to later Hungarian travellers. Certainly, early pioneers who attended universities in the Empire and beyond were instrumental in establishing a network of contacts which other Hungarians were later able to use.3 These sources, alongside university and other official records, are helpful in building up a picture of the range of contacts established by Hungarian students, and demonstrate that most Reformed Hungarians travelled abroad primarily in order to benefit from the educational opportunities available in the Empire, Dutch Republic and England. Students were supposed to gain a competent training in Reformed theology, and patrons hoped that the expense of sending students to universities abroad would be repaid by their later service in local schools and parishes. In addition, many students returned home with copies of theological and other texts, and some translated or adapted works by leading Reformed writers. There were, however, also unexpected consequences for the Reformed community of these growing connections with foreign co-religionists. On their return home, some students stimulated sharp debates within the church over a range of issues, including the standard of education available in local schools. Others were quickly labelled as Presbyterians and Puritans when they advocated further reform of church institutions and stressed the importance of improving standards of moral discipline. How did this new pattern of travel undertaken by hundreds of Reformed students impact on Hungarian attitudes towards other parts of Europe and towards their homeland? Did Hungarians perceive themselves as travelling to study in countries which were more advanced and cultivated than their own? This article will seek to understand

3 Zsigmond Jakó, ‘Miskolci Csulyak István peregrinációs albuma’, in Acta historiae litterarum hungaricarum 10–11, ed. B. Keserű (Szeged: 1971), 59–71; Szenczi Molnár Albert naplója, levelezése és irományai, ed. L. Dézsi (Budapest: 1898), 3–86; György Gömöri, ‘Some Hungarian alba amicorum from the 17th century’, in Wolfenbütteler Forschungen. Stammbücher als kulturhistorische Quellen, ed. J. Fechner (Munich: 1981), 97–109.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 123

4/14/08 2:52:04 PM

124

Under Eastern Eyes

Hungarian perceptions of travel to north-western Europe by first considering the views of János Apáczai Csere, a prominent critic of the standard of education in Transylvania’s schools. Apáczai’s remarks on Western civilisation and Hungarian backwardness will then be compared with the attitudes of other commentators on their experiences of travel. While a range of sources will be considered, including the letters, diaries and autobiographies of some noble travellers, the text of Europica varietas [Europe in its variety] written by Márton Szepsi Csombor will be dealt with here in some detail. Csombor was the son of a Reformed minister from an area of north-eastern Hungary which lay close to the border with Ottoman Hungary. His description of the voyage he undertook on the eve of the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War was published at Kassa (Košice) in 1620.4 Although Csombor’s text has received some attention from historians in Hungary, its reception elsewhere in studies of travel literature has been limited.5

HUNGARIAN BACKWARDNESS János Apáczai Csere travelled to study at Utrecht and Harderwijk universities in the Dutch Republic during the late 1640s and early 1650s, and he compiled an Encyclopaedia which was published in Hungarian at Utrecht in 1653. On his return to Transylvania in late 1653, Apáczai was first appointed to teach at the princely Academy, but his pro-

4 Márton Szepsi Csombor, Europica varietas, avagy Szepsi Csombor Mártonnak Lengyel, Mazur, Pruz, Dánia, Frisia, Hollandia, Zelándia, Anglia, Gallia, Német és Cseh országon viszontsag: a Prussiai, Pomeraniai, Sveciai, Norvegiai, Frisiai, Zelandiai, Britanniai tengeren való bujdosásában látott, hallott külömbb külömbb féle dolgoknak rövid le-irása mely minden ólvasóknak nem tsak gyönyörüségére, sok fele hasznára-is szólgál (Košice: 1620). See also Szepsi Csombor Márton összes művei, ed. I.S. Kovács and P. Kulcsár, 2 vols. (Budapest: 1968–79). 5 My references hereafter are to the 1620 edition. Partial English translations from Europica varietas include Neville Masterman, Sándor Maller, ‘Szepsi Csombor Márton’s description of England’, Angol filológiai tanulmányok (1938), 63–80; M. Holmes, ‘The London of Márton Csombor’, Hungarian Quarterly (1964), 134–42; George Cushing, in Old Hungarian literary reader, ed. T. Klaniczay (Budapest: 1985), and Bernard Adams, ‘As through the land of England once he passed: Márton Szepsi Csombor and his 1620 Europica varietas’, Hungarian Quarterly 43:171 (2003) and 45:175 (2004).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 124

4/14/08 2:52:04 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 125 posals for reform at the Academy were blocked and he was dismissed in 1655. In 1656 Apáczai was able to take up a new post in the smaller college at Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca), where he spoke passionately about the limited number and inadequate nature of Transylvania’s schools, and about the appalling ignorance of many ordinary people. Apáczai argued that standards of teaching needed to be dramatically improved and that the scope of the school syllabus ought to be broadened. He also claimed that the failures of local colleges and schools were having disastrous consequences for political, social and cultural life. In support of this agenda of reform, Apáczai employed a striking rhetoric in his published works and in public speeches which highlighted the virtues of the ‘West’ and decried, by contrast, domestic backwardness. In 1653 Apáczai asked his Hungarian readers to consider the extent to which the French, English, Dutch and ‘other Western, cultivated nations’ had surpassed them in learning. Apáczai was clear that Hungarians ought to admit ‘with blushing faces’ to their inferiority in comparison with the educational achievements of these more civilised Western nations.6 Apáczai claimed that the low standards of local schools left students ill-prepared for study at universities abroad, where Hungarians were treated as ignorant barbarians. He complained that ‘we are for ever only giving foreigners occasion for hearty laughter. They are laughing at us, and they are right.’ Apáczai argued that even the natives of the Dutch East Indies had overtaken Hungarians in their dispersal of ignorance and barbarism. Although Apáczai suggested that Hungarian society had fallen behind not only the West but also the Orient, he suggested that ‘the cause of our miserable backwardness does not lie in a barbarous spirit of our people, but in the disastrous organisation of our teaching’. Hungarians needed to open more schools in villages and to reform the curriculum taught in colleges. If these reforms were undertaken, then Apáczai looked forward to a time when Hungarians would catch up with Western countries, and when Hungarians would know Latin, ‘which the whole West speaks,

6 Magyar Encyclopaedia, az az, minden igaz és hasznos böltseségnek szep rendbe foglalása és magyar nyelven világra botsátása (Utrecht: 1653), ed. M. Tarnoc (Budapest: 1979), 658–9. István Bán, Apáczai Csere János beszéde ‘a bölcsesség tanulásáról’ (Debrecen: 1955); István Bán, Apáczai Csere János (Budapest: 1958).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 125

4/14/08 2:52:04 PM

126

Under Eastern Eyes

and there is hardly a remote village in Europe in which it is not understood’.7 János Apáczai Csere’s analysis of the backward state of Hungarian and Transylvanian culture and society raises important questions about the results of extensive contacts between Hungarians and the rest of the Reformed world during the early seventeenth century. Was Apáczai appealing to widely-held perceptions about the West which had developed among, and were spread by, students who had travelled to study in German, Dutch and English universities? Had a new pattern of travel to Reformed north-western Europe enlightened many Hungarians about the extent of the relative ignorance of their own people and about the general backwardness of their country? Did Hungarian travellers carry with them anxiety about the state of their homeland and awareness of its uncertain and marginal location on the frontier of Christian Europe? Apáczai’s juxtaposition of Western civilisation and Hungarian backwardness was, however, not at all commonly employed by other clergy and writers during this period. Was Apáczai therefore rather trying to persuade his audience to accept a view about western European nations which he had developed primarily to highlight his own agenda of domestic school reform? To answer such questions, it is necessary to reflect on the attitudes of other commentators on travel, and consider whether Apáczai’s views reflected a widespread and developing sense of inferiority among Hungarians towards cultivated, Western nations. Over thirty years before Apáczai travelled to the Empire and the Dutch Republic, Márton Szepsi Csombor had visited England. From his own account of the time he spent in England, Csombor emerges at first sight if not quite as an ignorant barbarian, then as a somewhat laughable figure, who survived a short and troubled stay marked mostly by confusion, anxiety and disappointment. This poor Hungarian was so overwhelmed and befuddled by his venture to England that he searched the town of Canterbury for university colleges in the mistaken belief that he had arrived at Cambridge. The day before his arrival in Canterbury had also been a pretty dreadful one for Csombor. Travelling from London, Csombor had set out alone for Cambridge, head7 Apáczai’s 1653 speech ‘Oratio de studio sapientiae’ in Magyar encyclopaedia, ed. Tarnoc, 609–55, 619, 639.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 126

4/14/08 2:52:05 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 127 ing in the wrong direction to Gravesend. On the road to Rochester, he met someone who failed to understand his requests for directions and help. This character carried a large axe, and Csombor became fearful that he was going to be attacked, but then the stranger seemed to grasp his worried pleas for assistance and showed him the way to Rochester. When he arrived in the town, Csombor went into a hostelry in search of something to eat, but wrote that he was given far more beer to drink than he wanted. Then, when Csombor tried to explain that he wished to spend the night in the tavern, things went from bad to worse. One of the girls in the tavern ‘began to squeeze my hand and stroke my head, and frequently to kiss me, and I, as a Hungarian, not being accustomed to such practices, and understanding well what the outcome would be’, left as quickly as possible for another inn.8 Csombor might have hoped that his readers would interpret this story as a young man abroad defending the upright morals of his nation by rejecting the advances of an English prostitute. However, this episode rather seems to add to the impression of an innocent but comic travelling hero. The next morning Csombor was on the road again, aiming to visit ‘the academy which I had wanted to see from the beginning’. After his arrival in Canterbury, Csombor met a local archdeacon, James Lambert, who revealed that he was in fact nowhere near Cambridge. Lambert, seeing the traveller’s evident disappointment at this news, took Csombor for a drink in a pub. Csombor commented on this that ‘they [the English] do not treat it as shameful to eat or drink in any place’. Before inviting Csombor back to his house, Lambert gave Csombor a tour of Canterbury. Csombor remarked on his visit to the cathedral that ‘I would not have believed that a church, which lacked any gold or silver, could be so beautiful.’9 Csombor then wondered whether to retrace his steps and head north to Cambridge, or to give up on visiting the university which he had travelled so far to see. He decided that because he was running out of money and England was such an expensive country he had better continue on to the south coast. He made his way south, terrified that some Kentish peasants he encountered were going to rob and kill him. He finally arrived at an inn at Dover, where he described how he endured the 8 Csombor, Europica varietas, 214–6. 9 Ibid., 218 –9.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 127

4/14/08 2:52:05 PM

128

Under Eastern Eyes

terrible cooking and foul temper of a hideously ugly and disgustingly dirty serving-girl. Csombor’s attempt to leave England was at first blocked by port officials who required him to provide a letter of explanation about who he was, before granting him permission to depart for France. Perhaps concerned about the consequences of revealing his exotic origins, Csombor lied and pretended that he was a visiting Protestant from Brandenburg.10 Csombor’s faltering steps around England might seem to offer some support for Apáczai’s later assertions about how Hungarians’ backwardness and ignorance was cruelly revealed when they travelled to the West. Csombor’s uncertain foray to England was marked by a commendable spirit of adventure but he was evidently out of his depth. The travel undertaken by Csombor and other pioneer Reformed Hungarians to north-western Europe during the early seventeenth century was certainly marked by a degree of anxiety and uncertainty caused by unfamiliarity with the region. However, the rest of Csombor’s text and the reflections of other Hungarian travellers about their experiences also reveal other important themes. First, Europe was commonly portrayed as full of wonderful marvels and inspiring new experiences, but also, secondly, a world of perils, danger and immorality. Thirdly, foreign lands were portrayed by Csombor as having lots of connections with Hungary, and the landscape, buildings and social customs of different countries were described as being comparable with those of Hungary. It is hardly surprising that Hungary was Csombor’s point of reference, but his failure to articulate any ideas about domestic backwardness in this context is significant. Finally, Csombor depicted Europe as primarily divided, not by stages of cultural or social development, but rather by confessional differences.

A CONTINENT OF WONDERS In May 1616 the twenty-two year old Márton Szepsi Csombor, accompanied by Bálint Liszkai, departed on his voyage across Europe. Csombor had previously studied at schools in Gönc, Nagybánya (Baia Mare) and Kassa, before briefly teaching at the school in Telkibánya 10 Ibid., 223–5; Ágnes Békés, ‘Szepsi Csombor Márton Angliában’, Angol filológiai tanulmányok 2 (1965), 5–35.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 128

4/14/08 2:52:05 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 129 in 1615.11 Csombor received financial support for his trip from some merchants and leading residents in Kassa, to whom he dedicated different chapters of his book. In Europica varietas, Csombor declared that he both intended to study abroad and also wished to fulfil a desire, held since childhood, to see foreign countries. Again on his departure from Danzig in 1618, Csombor wrote of his excitement at the prospect of travel: ‘I do not know how to express with what great passion I wanted to see in the world the wonders of God and of men.’12 Csombor also wanted to record the details of his experiences in order to remedy the lack of books in Hungary which set out the ‘laws, customs, rivers, clothes and actions’ of other countries and peoples. Csombor suggested that his Hungarian audience was unfamiliar with the wonders of Europe. Not only that, but Csombor identified a certain lack of interest in discovering more about foreign lands. Csombor wrote that he wanted to challenge those who spoke of the Danube river as if it were a sea, and those ‘many in our nation who judge that the world ends at the limits of their own horizon’.13 Csombor’s book was intended to reveal the attractive variety of Europe’s sights and experiences. His time abroad was split into two periods. The first began with his departure from northern Hungary in May 1616 and his trip across Poland, Mazuria and Prussia towards Danzig, where he studied at the academy until April 1618. Then, Csombor travelled to Denmark, Friesland, Holland, Zeeland, England and France, before returning across the German lands and Bohemia and arriving back in Hungary in August 1618. Csombor’s account treated each territory in turn, and he did not reflect upon the general character or identity of Europe as a whole. This is hardly surprising since, although the concept of Europe was gaining greater currency during this period, it had hardly weakened more immediate senses of identity related to towns, localities, regions or countries.14 Csombor also did not employ the term ‘Western’ Europe in his text, nor the 11 For biographical details see Jenő Zoványi, Magyarországi protestáns egyháztörténeti lexikon. 3rd edition, ed. Sándor Ladányi (Budapest: 1977), 597. 12 Csombor, Europica varietas, 118–9. 13 Ibid., vi, 1. 14 Janusz Tazbir, ‘Poland and the concept of Europe in the sixteenth- eighteenth centuries’, European Studies Review 2 (1977), 29–45; Peter Burke, ‘Did Europe exist before 1700?’, History of European Ideas 1 (1980), 21–9.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 129

4/14/08 2:52:06 PM

130

Under Eastern Eyes

term ‘Christendom’, nor did he refer to any idea of ‘Eastern’ Europe, nor to ideas about a civilised, southern Europe in opposition to northern European barbarity.15 Csombor rather offered his readers distinct descriptions of each of the countries and regions he visited, including comments on customs, clothing and characteristics which he ascribed to each people. These descriptions mixed both positive and negative reflections. For example, Csombor described the Germans as clever but unsociable guardians of their old customs, but of weak character, and as more blond than any other nation in Europe.16 Csombor’s experiences of distant foreign lands did not disappoint his passion for seeing the wonders of God and men. Csombor mentioned a number of specific places and buildings as among Europe’s most wondrous sights. These included the minster at Strassburg, the beautiful stone houses of Nürnberg, London Bridge and the ‘earthly paradise’ of Leiden. Csombor carefully described Leiden’s beautiful location, its fine houses and gardens, its lovely stone bridges, its university, printing works, well-constructed mills and its accurate church bells.17 Csombor wrote of France that, ‘no-one could ever see a more beautiful country even if they wandered all around the world’.18 Csombor was particularly impressed by Paris during twelve days which he spent in the city in May 1618. He thought of Paris as ‘the greatest wonder of the world’, and wondered why, especially since financial

15 Similarly, Hungarian travellers to Russia and the Ottoman Empire did not employ the term ‘Eastern’; see the journals of István Kakas Zalánkeményi on his voyage to Moscow and Persia in 1602–3, and of Tamás Borsos on his trip to Constantinople in 1613. Régi magyar utazók Europában, 1532– 1770. Eredeti kútfőkből összeállította és magyarázatokkal ellátta, ed. I. Szamota (Zrenjanin: 1892), 6–37; Tamás Borsos, ‘Utazás a fényes portára’ in Erdély Öröksége. Erdélyi emlékírók Erdélyről 3. Tűzpróba, 1603–1613, ed. L. Makkai (Budapest, 1993), 175–87; Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The map of civilization on the mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, California: 1994); Michael Confino, ‘Re-inventing the Enlightenment: Western images of Eastern realities in the eighteenth century’, Canadian Slavonic Papers 36 (1994), 305–21; Katherine E. Fleming, ‘Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan historiography’, American Historical Review 105 (2000), 1218–33. 16 Csombor, Europica varietas, 323. 17 Ibid., 165–8, 327, 352. 18 Ibid., 229.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 130

4/14/08 2:52:06 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 131 support was available to travel, more young men from Hungary did not try to visit such cities.19 Csombor tried to convey to his readers some sense of the amazing scale of Paris, with a population which he estimated at some 450,000 people, including 40,000 residents at the royal court alone, 300 churches and 24,000 students in ‘countless schools’. Csombor also wrote of his astonishment at the busy commercial life taking place on the bridges over the Seine, but warned his readers about high prices in the city. Csombor also provided descriptions of the architectural wonders he saw when walking around Paris, although he made some mistakes in his identification of the city’s major buildings. Csombor visited the royal court at the Louvre, the Arsenal, and listened to a disputation at the Sorbonne. Although Csombor expressed great enthusiasm about Paris, he was not simply a starryeyed visitor who saw marvels wherever he looked. While Csombor was impressed by Notre Dame and its gargoyles, he challenged conventional wisdom which accounted the church of St. Denis as ‘among the seven wonders of Europe’. Rather, Csombor wrote that the outside of St. Denis was surpassed by Notre Dame, while he judged the inside of Canterbury cathedral to be twice as good as that of St. Denis. The simpler surroundings at Canterbury perhaps appealed to Csombor’s Reformed taste rather more than the elaborate embellishment of the interior of St. Denis, and in a final swipe against the claims of St. Denis, Csombor wrote that its royal graves were not as impressive as those of England’s kings in Westminster Abbey.20 In his eagerness to record his impressions of Europe’s major cities, churches and other buildings, Csombor sought to inspire other Hungarians to follow in his footsteps and see more of the diversity of their continent. This idea about the purpose of travel to broaden the horizons of the traveller was shared by some nobles. Gábor Bethlen, the Reformed Prince of Transylvania, sent his young nephews, István and Péter, to study at universities in the Empire and Dutch Republic. Péter Bethlen was sent abroad in the company of a party of nobles and tutors in 1625, with strict instructions issued by the prince that his nephew should pray frequently, study hard, practise his Latin and German, 19 Ibid., 282. 20 Ibid., 278, 281, 285. István Bán, ‘Szepsi Csombor Márton Párizsban’, Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények 60 (1956), 263–9.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 131

4/14/08 2:52:06 PM

132

Under Eastern Eyes

and not speak Hungarian to his travelling companions. However, the prince also recommended that the group should make the most of opportunities to visit towns and buildings where they could take in useful and worthwhile sights. Most young nobles who travelled abroad were certainly intended to spend time studying at foreign universities, but also to expand their understanding of the world more broadly in preparation for their role in public life at home. In 1627 the prince received news that Péter Bethlen had curtailed his studies at Leiden University in favour of travelling on to see London and Paris. However, not all of Péter Bethlen’s party were equally as enthusiastic about their experience of travel. For example, László Cseffei wrote home from France to his mother in 1628 that he had not yet seen anything particularly marvellous, except for two ostriches in England and an elephant in Paris.21 Between 1631 and 1635 the young Transylvanian noble Gábor Haller also travelled through the Empire and studied at universities in the Dutch Republic. In his diary he carefully recorded some of the wonderful sights he encountered in different Dutch towns, including the church at Dordrecht where the famous Reformed Synod had been held in 1618, as well as exotic fruit trees in the princely gardens at the Hague, and an elephant at Amsterdam.22 During the early 1660s Miklós Bethlen also went to study in Heidelberg, Utrecht and Leiden, before travelling to England and France. In his autobiography, Bethlen frequently commented on the architecture and sights he encountered in different countries. However, he also questioned the value of travel simply to see the unknown. After touring several Dutch towns, Bethlen concluded that ‘we certainly saw large and beautiful towns, but I do not know what use there is only in seeing many people and stone walls’.23

21 Imre Lukinich, A Bethlen-fiúk külföldi iskoláztatása, 1619–1628 (Budapest: 1926); idem, ‘Adatok Bethlen Péter külföldi iskoláztatásához’, Századok 45 (1911), 716–18; idem, ‘Bethlen Péter iskoláztatásához’, Történelmi tár 12 (1911), 305–10. Cseffei’s letters were published in Történelmi tár (1881), 196; Samu Gergely, ‘Bethlen Péter utazása történetéhez’, Történelmi tár (1884), 590–2. 22 ‘Haller Gábor naplója, 1630–1644’, in Erdélyi történelmi adatok, ed. K. Szabó, 4 (1862), 10–11, 19, 26. 23 Miklós Bethlen, Önéletírása, ed. É.V. Windisch (Budapest, 1955), 188.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 132

4/14/08 2:52:06 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 133

THE PERILS OF TRAVEL Travel could prove to be not only a very rewarding but also a very perilous business. Márton Szepsi Csombor explained that one of the most important reasons for writing an account of his trip was to act as a witness to God’s watchful protection over him during his journey. He pointed out that people sought God’s help when embarking on trips of ten, fifty or sixty miles, never mind one or two hundred miles. Therefore, Csombor argued how much more had God’s faithful care been demonstrated than by his safe return after a voyage of some 966 miles by land and sea.24 In particular, the entirely novel experience of travelling by boat across the Baltic Sea, North Sea and English Channel was presented by Csombor as among the greatest challenges which he had to face. In April 1618 Csombor set off from Danzig full of enthusiasm only immediately to face the trauma of life on a boat going along the Pomeranian coast towards Denmark. Csombor was badly affected by the swell of the open sea, and could not eat or drink for three days. He then faced the perils of the seas between Denmark, Sweden and Norway in strong winds with ‘waves as tall as high houses’. Again he was overcome with sea-sickness, and only by meditating on Psalm 91 could he find any relief from his misery. The winds finally relented as the boat reached the coast of Friesland, and ‘we gave great thanks to God, that he rescued us from illness and the wars of the sea’.25 This complete aversion from travelling by boat was shared by other Hungarian travellers. In 1613 Tamás Borsos described the terrible swell and waves which made him violently ill while trying to cross the Bosphorus to gain an audience with the Sultan on behalf of the Transylvanian prince.26 In April 1628 László Cseffei was relieved to have returned safely across the fearful English Channel back to France. He wrote that ‘thanks to God’s mercy we took our leave of the sea, we had travelled enough by boat’.27 In January 1634 Gábor Haller was equally glad to be back on dry land after fearing for his life on a boat which was only going along the Dutch coast, and he also claimed to have wit24 Csombor, Europica varietas, v–vi. 25 Ibid., 119, 123, 136, 140–1, 151. 26 Borsos, ‘Utazás a fényes portára’, 180. 27 Történelmi tár (1881), 196.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 133

4/14/08 2:52:07 PM

134

Under Eastern Eyes

nessed boats being captured by pirates while attempting to cross the Channel.28 Meanwhile in early 1664, when Miklós Bethlen travelled to England, he became seasick and was so terrified of the sea that he prepared himself for death. Bethlen wrote his name on a piece of paper and tied it around his neck so that, if he drowned, when his body was discovered, people would know who he was. As things turned out, Bethlen was right to be worried. On his way back across the Channel, Bethlen’s boat was barely out of port before running into problems in a storm. Bethlen was able to jump into another boat which came to help, but commented that, had they been further out to sea, he would certainly have died since ‘I am about as good a swimmer as a stone.’ Bethlen had no option but to board another vessel bound for Calais, and in a further storm again believed he was going to die.29 Márton Szepsi Csombor did not hide from his readers the many other practical challenges of travel, including running short on cash, getting lost, losing possessions, encountering all sorts of unfamiliar food and customs, and dealing with unhelpful innkeepers. Csombor also offered regular comments on the moral challenges of travel, and on the conduct of others he met. Csombor described how people in Poland were arrogant, lecherous and bad-tempered. At Warsaw, Csombor commented on how soldiers went about with prostitutes, while life in Kraków, with its army of whores, was thought by Csombor to be even more abominable than Sodom or Gomorrah.30 According to Csombor, the situation at Danzig was little better. The haughty, unfriendly citizens of Danzig worked on Sundays without any punishment, no-one was executed for theft, there were many brothels in the city, and people went to parties late into the night.31 Meanwhile, Csombor was more impressed by the disciplinary regime imposed in the towns of the Dutch Republic, where beggars and orphans received indoor relief in a ‘house of good morals where work was taught’. Troublemakers were apparently turned from roaring lions into gentle lambs by the regime in these institutions, and above all by punishment

28 ‘Haller Gábor naplója’, 15, 21. 29 Miklós Bethlen, Önéletírása, 189, 195–7. 30 Csombor, Europica varietas, 11, 23, 302, 394. According to Miklós Bethlen, Venice was also comparable to Sodom; Önéletírása, 211. 31 Csombor, Europica varietas, 93–5.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 134

4/14/08 2:52:07 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 135 in a drowning-cell. However, Csombor balanced this positive view of Dutch towns with other criticisms of Dutch society. Csombor was, for example, amazed by the enthusiasm for tobacco of people in Dordrecht, while at Leiden he noted that men and women sat together in churches which he thought would not prove popular back home.32 Europe, for Csombor, was therefore both a world of wonders but also a realm of immorality, temptation and danger for the unwary traveller. Csombor returned to this theme after his return to Hungary. Csombor was ordained, taught at a school in Kassa, and then in 1620 moved to Varannó (Vranov nad Topľou) to educate the son of the noble István Bedegi Nyáry. Csombor completed a book of advice for his noble patrons on the education of their son, which was published after Csombor’s untimely death in late 1622. In this text, Csombor reflected on life’s journey along ‘the true but untrodden path’ to our eternal home. He commented on how easily young people could wander off the ‘straight way’ in the world, which was ‘like the labyrinth of Crete’ and full of sin and danger.33 Other travellers succumbed to some of these temptations while abroad. Gábor Bethlen tried hard to ensure that his nephews behaved properly, and sent instructions to Péter Bethlen in March 1628 warning him against drinking to excess or getting involved with prostitutes. Despite these warnings, János Kemény asserted that Péter Bethlen’s morals were corrupted by his time abroad and that he became a good-for-nothing. Kemény’s views were, however, perhaps clouded by his own regret at not taking up the opportunity to travel with Péter Bethlen as he had originally intended.34 Gábor Haller also admitted in his diary to having behaved badly after drinking too much in Leiden in January 1633, and in January 1635 promised not to drink for a month. Miklós Bethlen revealed in his autobiography how he had fallen victim in London in 1664 to the combined temptations of drink and brothels, and warned his readers not to follow his example.35 32 Ibid., 153–4, 158, 160, 166, 178. Gábor Haller also noted his impression of the ‘Zuchthaus’ at Franeker; ‘Haller Gábor naplója’, 9. 33 Márton Szepsi Csombor, Udvari schola, melyben Nyáry Ferencet […] minden szép erkölcsökre […] oktatja (Bardejov: 1623). 34 Gábor Bethlen’s instructions were published in Történelmi tár (1881), 197– 9; János Kemény Önéletírása és válogatott levelei, ed. G. Tolnai (Budapest: 1959), 109. 35 ‘Haller Gábor naplója’, 16; Miklós Bethlen, Önéletírása, 194, 221.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 135

4/14/08 2:52:07 PM

136

Under Eastern Eyes

HUNGARY AND EUROPE Throughout the text of Europica varietas, Csombor mentioned Hungarians he encountered on his trip, and compared and contrasted the physical geography, buildings and customs of different countries and cities with those of his homeland. Csombor’s assessment of Europe was therefore in part measured by its connections with, similarities to, and differences from, Hungary. This was presumably intended to interest his readers and to assist them to get a better sense of the distant lands he was describing. It also reflected how Csombor interpreted the new experiences he encountered abroad as well as his attitude towards his ‘beloved homeland’.36 For Csombor, foreign cities and countries became more comfortable and welcoming places because of the presence of Hungarians. Meeting fellow-countrymen or locals with any knowledge of Hungary formed a notable element of Csombor’s experience of travel. Csombor began his journey with a Hungarian travelling companion, and then met other friends in Poland who offered him advice on how to travel cheaply to Danzig. On the night before his departure from Danzig, Csombor said farewell to three Hungarian friends over dinner, and they sang some Psalms together to encourage him on his way.37 Later, Csombor was accompanied on the road to Strassburg by a German who had once lived at Kassa. At Heidelberg, Csombor made contact with sixteen Hungarian students who were studying at the university. He accompanied them to worship at St. Peter’s church in the city, and, on his departure from Heidelberg, Csombor was escorted by his compatriots for some way on his route.38 Csombor also carefully noted all sorts of connections between distant lands and Hungary. He explained to his readers that a church in Danzig had been built during the reign as Polish king of the former Transylvanian voivode, István 36 The disputation on metals which Csombor gave at Danzig in April 1617 argued that, setting aside his love for his sweet home, Hungary clearly held the richest gold deposits of any country in Europe. ‘Disputatio physica de metallis […] sub praesidio […] Adrianus Pauli… 29 Apr. 1617 Danzig’, in Szepsi Csombor Márton ismeretlen értekezése, ed. I.S. Kovács and P. Kulcsár (Szeged, 1972), 136. 37 Csombor, Europica varietas, 16, 22, 119. 38 Ibid., 325, 336, 344–5.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 136

4/14/08 2:52:08 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 137 Báthory. While at the academy in Strassburg, Csombor recalled that Albert Szenci Molnár, perhaps best known for his translation of the Psalter, had lived there. In addition, Csombor noted his encounters with individuals who also offered assistance to other visiting Hungarian students, such as Georg Rem at Nürnberg.39 Other Hungarian travellers demonstrated a similar enthusiasm for meeting up with fellow countrymen. For example, when Miklós Bethlen arrived in London he searched for a Hungarian friend with whom he hoped to stay. When the two came across one another completely by chance at an inn, Bethlen wrote that they embraced one another with such feeling as if they were brothers.40 Csombor also used his knowledge of his home region as his constant reference-point for describing buildings and the physical environment through which he travelled. He wrote of the church at Neuburg (Nowogrodziec) in Poland as built on a mound like the one in Telkibánya, while the statue of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf in Paris was described as like the one of the Hungarian king László at Nagyvárad (Oradea). On the road between Poissy and Pontoise, Csombor saw vineyards which he thought to be like those at Tokaj, while the vineyards around Heidelberg seemed to him more like those at Nagybánya. According to Csombor, the countryside of Normandy was also like home with fields of wheat, barley, beans and peas. Csombor later discussed with a nobleman at Nancy similarities between the towns, castles and people of France and Hungary. Hungary also provided Csombor with the basis for describing the scale of things he saw. He described the Thames river in London as ‘bigger than the Bodrog’ river back home, while Dutch cattle were the size of Hungarian oxen, and the Arsenal in Paris was larger than the whole citadel at Szatmár (Satu Mare). Hungarian prices provided the basis for Csombor’s discussion of, for example, the cheap fish to be found in the ports of Zeeland, and his enthusiasm for home cooking was reflected in his reaction to bread baked ‘Hungarian style’ at Strassburg.41 Csombor did, however, encounter some strange sights and customs which were beyond any 39 Ibid., 71, 332, 352. 40 Miklós Bethlen, Önéletírása, 192. 41 Csombor, Europica varietas, 45, 185, 211, 213, 245, 254, 268, 315, 325, 342.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 137

4/14/08 2:52:08 PM

138

Under Eastern Eyes

comparison with life in Hungary. For example, Csombor commented on the ‘very tall’ people of the Netherlands who were said to be able to skate on ice faster than a horse can run. Csombor was also very surprised to discover that the Dutch only cooked twice a week because of a lack of wood, and that Amsterdam’s houses were built on foundations of wooden stilts.42 For Csombor, Hungary was therefore an integral part of the variety of Europe, and its countryside, agriculture, towns, buildings, and way of life were all directly comparable with those of other countries. However, his perception of the familiar amid the unfamiliar at times unsettled Csombor and brought conflicting emotions to the surface. At Flushing, Csombor went into a little Reformed church where he saw a minister preaching whose appearance, gestures and way of speaking very closely resembled those of his own father, Mihály. According to Csombor, he almost thought that the preacher was his father, which ‘saddened me since I was so far from him and had long since wished to see him’. Again, when walking along a street in London in ‘great sadness’, Csombor saw three men he identified as Russians but whose green and violet clothes and tall yellow boots did ‘not greatly differ from ours’. Csombor was so affected by this sight that ‘I hardly knew where I was’. He added that ‘what great pleasure, or bitterness, it brings to be in a foreign land and to see only some small thing which is similar to that of home’.43 Csombor’s experience of travel to foreign lands was rendered less unsettling by the presence of fellow countrymen and by his perception of similarities between different countries and Hungary, but this intimate otherness of life abroad at times disoriented Csombor and stirred up strong feelings of homesickness.

DIVIDED BY RELIGION The continent across which Csombor travelled in 1618 was divided above all by religion. The tri-partite division of European society into Catholic, Evangelical and Reformed communities had solidified by 1600. During the 1600s and 1610s these three confessional blocs were increasingly being drawn into conflict, and in 1618 the issue of religious rights in Bohemia provided the spark for the outbreak of the 42 Ibid., 151–4. 43 Ibid., 184, 212.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 138

4/14/08 2:52:08 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 139 Thirty Years’ War. Csombor encountered actors in that unfolding drama when he met representatives from the Bohemian estates at Schäftersheim who were hurrying to the court of Frederick V at Heidelberg. These diplomats ‘spoke with us in a very friendly manner’ about their problems at home with the Jesuits.44 Csombor’s personal loyalty to the Reformed Church and to the international Reformed cause is evident throughout the text of Europica varietas. Religion was a bond which connected him with some people, including some beggars in Bohemia he heard singing the German version of the Genevan Psalter. On other occasions, religious divisions made social interaction impossible. When trying to find somewhere to spend the night in Sulzbach, Csombor was questioned about his religion and answered that he was a Zwinglian. To this, local ‘Papists’ replied, let ‘the devil take you among the Zwinglians’ and directed him to a brothel. Csombor wrote that he left Sulzbach to stay instead in a neighbouring ‘Calvinist town’.45 Csombor’s reaction to Catholic church buildings was also affected by his religious convictions. During the early days of his trip in Poland, he wrote of his first experience of observing Catholic worship in an ‘idolatrous church’. At Danzig, Csombor described Catholic churches as decorated with pictures of ‘Baal God’. Csombor discovered a placard in one of these churches which set out the alleged heresies of Lutherans and Calvinists, which Csombor commented sought to ‘prompt the simple-minded in their loathsome idolatry’.46 On some occasions, however, Csombor’s sharp sense of allegiance towards the Reformed Church was challenged by his enthusiasm for the architectural wonders of Europe. Csombor described several Catholic churches without offering any negative commentary on their statues. At Nancy, for example, he simply wrote that he saw ‘a wonderful, beautifully-carved statue of the virgin Mary’.47 However, Csombor was also quick to remind his readers that 80,000 of ‘our religion’ had been killed in France by Catholics in the massacres of St. Bartholomew’s day in 1572. Recalling the actions of Catholic mobs who killed people for their failure to recognise the Pope, idols and relics, Csombor wrote that even pregnant women and their unborn children had been cruelly sacrificed by 44 Ibid., 349. 45 Ibid., 354–5, 377. 46 Ibid., 18, 74, 76. 47 Ibid., 310.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 139

4/14/08 2:52:09 PM

140

Under Eastern Eyes

‘the fury of the servants of Antichrist’.48 Other Hungarian Reformed travellers shared this highly confessionalised view of the Continent. Albert Szenci Molnár was, for example, duly outraged by his perception of the appalling idolatry at the church at Loreto in Italy in 1596. In 1625 Gábor Bethlen was sufficiently anxious about any Catholic contamination of his nephew Péter on his travels that he was instructed not to visit any Catholic towns, churches or colleges, nor to speak with any Catholic priests unless permitted by his tutors to do so.49 Csombor’s Reformed sympathies were also obvious through his visits to Reformed academies and churches. He took up opportunities to hear famous Reformed figures give lectures and sermons, including Johannes Polyander at Leiden, and Abraham Scultetus at Heidelberg.50 Csombor was also aware of differences between Reformed churches and was critical of some of the standards of religious belief and practice he encountered. For example, he had no sympathy for the views of Arminians in the Dutch Church, who stood condemned by the 1618 Dordrecht Synod. Csombor was also unimpressed by the Reformed credentials of the English Church. While he acknowledged that the English adhered to ‘the Swiss Confession’, Csombor found that the Church in England retained bishops, and that during church services organs were played and ministers wore white surplices. Meanwhile in Zeeland, Csombor found more zealous Reformed brethren, most notably in the frontier town of Flushing near Spanish Flanders. Csombor wrote that ‘this town was so strong in its true religion, that if, apart from among the merchants, any Papist or Arminian entered their places they would be killed anywhere on the streets’.51 While Csombor did not commend the violent impulses of Zeeland’s Reformed community towards Catholics and Arminians, his neutral description of their murderous intent differed sharply from his strident commentary about the brutality which French Catholics had shown towards Huguenots. Csombor’s comments on relations between the Evangelical and Reformed Churches also provides evidence about his perspective on 48 Ibid., 249–51. 49 Szenczi Molnár Albert naplója, ed. L. Dézsi (Budapest: 1898), 16. Molnár later published ‘De idolo Lauretano’ as an appendix to Secularis Concio Evangelica (Oppenheim: 1618). Lukinich, ‘Adatok Bethlen Péter iskoláztatásához’, (1911), 716–18. 50 Csombor, Europica varietas, 72, 169, 218. 51 Ibid., 169, 195, 181, 183.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 140

4/14/08 2:52:09 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 141 religious divisions in Europe. Csombor noted that Lutherans and Calvinists in Poland tried not to argue with one another in order to prevent Catholics from taking advantage of their divisions. In Thorn (Toru≈) in Prussia, Csombor again described the good relations between the city’s Evangelical and Reformed communities. Indeed he commented that it was only noticeable who belonged to which religion by observing where they went to church. Csombor also remarked on the ‘great unity’ between Bohemia’s Hussites, Lutherans, and Calvinists, and thought that they had not yet been troubled too much by Catholics.52 These observations were marked by a Protestant irenicism, which was precisely suited to the situation of the town of Kassa, where Csombor taught from February 1619 until May 1620 and where Europica varietas was published. Kassa’s council stoutly defended the exclusive legal rights of Lutherans to worship in the town from any encroachment by either Reformed or Catholic clergy. Csombor therefore worked in an environment in which it was imperative that the majority Germanspeaking Evangelical community accepted that his Hungarian-speaking congregation under Reformed minister Péter Alvinczi could be regarded as fellow Protestants. These attempts to forge a common cause with Lutherans in Kassa were also part of a broader political struggle in Hungary. Alvinczi was a leading advisor to the Transylvanian prince Gábor Bethlen, whose armies occupied Kassa in September 1619, killing three Catholic priests in the process. As Bethlen’s armies advanced further across Royal Hungary against Habsburg forces, Alvinczi portrayed this struggle as a common Protestant cause against Habsburg support for Catholic interests. Relations between Protestants at Kassa, and Hungarian politics in 1620, both influenced Csombor’s depiction of the Catholic Church and in particular his description of relations between the Reformed and Evangelical Churches across Europe.53 52 Ibid., 11–12, 39, 360. 53 Graeme Murdock, ‘The boundaries of Reformed Irenicism: Hungary and Transylvania’, in From Conciliarism to Confessional Church, 1400–1618, ed. H. Louthan and R. Zachman (South Bend, Indiana: 2004), 150–72; idem, ‘Moderation under duress? Calvinist Irenicism in early seventeenth-century Royal Hungary’, in Between coercion and persuasion: Moderation in the European Reformation, ed. L. Racaut and A. Ryrie (Aldershot: 2005), 178–95; Tibor Wittman, ‘Az Europica varietas’, Irodalomtörténeti közlemények 60 (1956), 28–34.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 141

4/14/08 2:52:09 PM

142

Under Eastern Eyes

CONCLUSION Márton Szepsi Csombor produced a detailed account of his voyage across Europe which was carefully pitched to readers at Kassa and across Hungary and Transylvania. He wanted to inspire enthusiasm for travel to foreign lands and to widen the horizons of Hungarians. Csombor described the wonders of Europe which he had dreamt of since he was a boy but at the same time did not conceal the dangers of travel. The foreign lands through which Csombor travelled turned out to have many connections with his homeland and bore comparison with Hungary, and Csombor also visited many communities where people shared his religious convictions. By the time he crossed the English Channel, Csombor was already an experienced traveller, but his period spent in England was, as we have seen, far from successful. Csombor’s problems were largely caused by his inability to communicate with the ‘English angels’.54 Since Csombor only knew Hungarian, German and Latin, while he visited both England and France, he was largely reliant on his knowledge of Latin. On his way eastwards out of France, Csombor noted with relief that he began to encounter more and more people who could speak German. Csombor experienced the greatest communication problems while he was in England, and marvelled at the inability of the English to speak Latin. When he asked for directions on three London streets from merchants, tailors and traders, ‘I did not find a single person anywhere who was able to speak with me in Latin.’ Only when he came across an Italian was he able to make some progress. The Italian directed Csombor to meet a Hungarian ‘which delighted me’. However, this ‘Hungarian’ turned out to be a Bohemian who pretended to be a Hungarian, because ‘he wanted to be famed as coming from a distant land’.55 The inability of the English to communicate in Latin was also the reason for Csombor’s confusion between Canterbury and Cambridge. It was only a Latin-speaking clergyman in Canterbury who finally revealed how the problem had arisen (‘…haec civitas non est Cantabrigia sed Cantuaria’). Csombor’s requests for directions to ‘Cantabrigia’ 54 Csombor, Europica varietas, 193–4. 55 Ibid., 304, 196–7; ‘sohul nem találtam egy embert az ki velem deakul tudot volna beszéllni.’

iBracewell_A_book.indb 142

4/14/08 2:52:10 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 143 had evidently been interpreted by locals as a search for Canterbury. It was English ignorance of Latin rather than Hungarian backwardness which had caused Csombor’s problems.56 From the 1630s, an increasing number of Hungarian students travelled to England, and understanding of the country improved, partly thanks to Csombor’s book. However, in 1632 Gábor Haller made exactly the same error as Csombor had done. When Haller reported that a student called Péter Maxai had visited him in the Netherlands after a visit to England, he suggested that Maxai ‘had stayed with the Cambridge (‘Cantabrigia’) archbishop’.57 Even David Frölich’s 1639 travel guide was not entirely helpful when it described Canterbury and Cambridge. Frölich’s guide was intended to be full of useful information to assist other Hungarians travelling abroad, but he gave the name of the university town as ‘Cantabrigia’, and the name of the cathedral city as ‘Canterburg’.58 By the time Miklós Bethlen ventured to England in 1664, he had been well warned of the need to learn some basic English before arriving in the country, and he spent five or six weeks at Leiden taking tuition in English. Bethlen hoped at least to use his knowledge of the language to be able to buy something to eat or drink, as he had heard that the English ‘only speak their own language, and even ministers and professors think it torture if they have to speak Latin.’ During five days in Oxford, Bethlen was able to confirm that although some of the university’s professors offered him warm hospitality, they only ‘spoke Latin with difficulty’.59 During the early 1650s János Apáczai Csere described Europe in terms of cultivated Western nations who laughed at backward Hungarian visitors. He looked forward to a time when Hungarians would catch up with the West in their knowledge of Latin since, ‘there is hardly a remote village in Europe where it is not understood’. How Márton Szepsi Csombor might have laughed, and Miklós Bethlen, 56 Ibid., 217–18; ‘elindulvan jutotta az hires Cantuariumban, mellyet én itéltem, Cantabrigianak az hol Wittakerus és Perkinsus tanitottak.’ 57 ‘Haller Gábor naplója’, 14. 58 David Frölich, Medulla Geographiae Practicae. Peregrinantium inprimis usui, deinde historiarum et rerum hoc tempore bellicosissimo gestarum, gerendarumq.; pleniori cognitioni accommodata (Bardejov: 1639), 414, 416. 59 Miklós Bethlen, Önéletírása (1955), 188, 194; ‘csak az ő nyelveken beszélni, mert pap, professzor is, merő csigázásnak tartja, ha deákul kell beszélni.’

iBracewell_A_book.indb 143

4/14/08 2:52:10 PM

144

Under Eastern Eyes

who had studied under Apáczai, might later have laughed, as they recalled their own efforts to find anyone in Oxford, London or Canterbury able to speak to them in Latin. It was those who lived beyond the terrors of the sea in their geographic and linguistic insularity who nearly defeated the intrepid Csombor and who confused other Hungarian travellers. Who, then, were the backward, uneducated people on the margins of early seventeenth-century European civilisation— the Hungarians or the English? Csombor neither posed nor answered such questions. His text offered no attempt to depict his experiences of foreign countries by assessing their stages of cultural, social or intellectual development, nor expressed any concern that Hungary might occupy some intermediate position between Western civilisation and Oriental barbarism. For Csombor, foreign countries were both arenas of wonder and places of immorality, and he neither showered praise nor heaped criticism upon his own society by describing how entirely dreadful or remarkably wonderful things were elsewhere. Csombor did, however, constantly resort to comparisons and contrasts between his experiences abroad and life back home which were no doubt aimed to assist his domestic readers, but also reflected a strong desire to assert belonging to Europe, and in particular to be part of an international Reformed community. Csombor portrayed Europe as sharply divided by religion, and deployed a strong anti-Catholic rhetoric throughout his text. His criticism of those who stood without the world of Reformed orthodoxy was only tempered by a Protestant irenicism directed at readers in Kassa and elsewhere to encourage them to support a common, anti-Catholic front in Hungary and across Europe. Csombor’s commentary offers an accurate reflection of the state of European politics and society on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, and offers a persuasive portrait of how Reformed Hungarians viewed the rest of Europe during the early seventeenth century. Rather than revealing Hungary’s distance from centres of European civilisation, the travel undertaken by Csombor and Reformed nobles and other students during the early seventeenth century reflected and strengthened Hungary’s place within the international Reformed community. However, some degree of uncertainty about connections with other Reformed countries endured because of the growing power of Habsburg and Catholic interests in Hungary. By the 1660s, noble conversions to Catholicism and the weakening of the

iBracewell_A_book.indb 144

4/14/08 2:52:10 PM

‘They Are Laughing at Us’: Hungarian Travellers and European Identity 145 Transylvanian state left the Reformed Church ever more vulnerable to Catholic persecution. Opportunities for travel to foreign universities were increasingly constricted, and the extent and range of connections with other Reformed Churches declined during the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Whatever the limitations of Hungarian schools and colleges, it was the impact of confessional politics rather than any native backwardness which led to Reformed Hungary’s increasing isolation from the mainstream of early modern European intellectual and cultural life.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 145

4/14/08 2:52:10 PM

iBracewell_A_book.indb 146

4/14/08 2:52:11 PM

Travels Through the Slav World Wendy Bracewell

In 1842 the Slav scholar Josef Šafařík (1795–1861) published a handcoloured ‘Slav map’ as a supplement to his Slovanský národopis [Slav ethnography]. Šafařík’s depiction of the extent of the Slav linguistic community, made still more striking by the absence of any boundaries between the Slav dialects, had an electrifying effect. Stanko Vraz, a member of the Illyrian movement in Croatia, wrote from Zagreb: ‘When I brought a copy of this map, the local patriots and even the non-patriots almost tore it out of my hands. All of them cannot get over the fact that the Slav nation is spread so far.’1 In fact, pride in the extent of a Slav community was in itself nothing new. As early as 1545 the Dalmatian humanist Tranquillus Andronicus had described the Slavs as stretching ‘from the North Sea to the Adriatic, and from the Elbe to the Black Sea’, and similar formulations had become a commonplace in descriptions of the Slavs.2 In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the efforts of philologists began to give older notions of Slavic linguistic unity and common origins a new scientific authority; historians interpreted this community as cultural and spiritual as well as linguistic; and philosophers and political ideologues

1 See Josef H∫rský, ‘Vznik a poslání Šafaříkova slovanského zeměvidu’, in Josef Pavel Šafařík, Slovanský národopis, ed. H. Hynková (Prague: 1955), 218–88 (with a full-colour reproduction of the map). Vraz cited in Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: its history and ideology (Notre Dame, Indiana: 1953), 14. 2 Tranquilli Andronici Dalmatae ad optimates Polonos admonitio (Kraków: 1584), 33; facsimile in Govori protiv Turaka, ed. V. Gligo (Split: 1983). Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 147

4/14/08 2:52:11 PM

148

Under Eastern Eyes

foretold a splendid future and a mission for the Slavs.3 Travellers and travel writers provided some of the raw material for these researches but they also did much more to consolidate the politico-cultural ideology of Slavism, by attaching not only linguistic commonalities but also much more elusive Slavic cultural or spiritual affinities to a place on the map. Well before 1842, travellers had traced the coordinates of a Slav world in textual form, projecting a Slavic landscape of memory and of desire onto the physical space of Europe.4 Šafařík’s map was only the latest and most graphic in a series of topographies of Slavism. As with other travel writings, these accounts located their authority to pronounce on Slav identities in their narrators’ first-hand experience of the Slav world. The authority claimed in these eighteenth and early nineteenth-century travels had two, ostensibly separate aspects: the scholarly (based on scientific research); and the sentimental 3 Studies by Michael Boro Petrovich, The emergence of Russian Panslavism, 1856–1870 (New York: 1956), F. Fadner, Seventy years of Pan-Slavism in Russia (Washington DC: 1962), Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile controversy (Oxford: 1975), Susanna Rabow-Edling, Slavophile thought and the politics of cultural nationalism (Albany, New York: 2006) deal primarily with Russian Slavisms; see Kohn, Pan-Slavism for Slav ideas elsewhere. For the Polish case, Zofia Klarnerówna, Słowianofilstwo w literaturze polskiej lat 1800 do 1848 (Warsaw: 1926), Georges Luciani, Panslavisme et solidarité slave au XIXe siècle: la Société des Slaves Unis (1823–1825) (Bordeaux: 1963) (with some consideration of the role of travel and personal contacts), and Andrzej Walicki, Russia, Poland, and universal regeneration (Notre Dame, Indiana:1991). 4 A.S. Myl’nikov, ‘Die slawischen Kulturen’, in Reisen und Reisebeschreibungen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert als Quellen der Kulturbeziehungsforschung, ed. B.I. Krasnobaev, G. Robel and H. Zeman (Berlin: 1980) provides an introduction to a variety of ‘Slav travels’; Ante FraniΔ, ‘Motiv patriotizma u hrvatskim putopisima: putopisi Ilirizma’, Radovi: Razdio lingvisti∑ko-filološki 7 (1972–3), 37–82 pays more attention to ideological content, but only for the South Slav space. As a comparison, see discussions of Greek national topographies in Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the homeland (Ithaca, New York: 1995); Robert Shannan Peckham, National histories, natural states: Nationalism and the politics of place in Greece (London: 2001); Stathis Gourgouris, Dream nation: Enlightenment, colonization and the institution of modern Greece (Princeton: 1996), though in all these non-fictional travel writing appears primarily as an ideological technology employed by non-Greeks. Cf. for Russian travel writers and Russian national identity, Sara Dickinson, Breaking ground: Travel and national culture in Russia from Peter I to the era of Pushkin (Amsterdam & New York: 2006).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 148

4/14/08 2:52:11 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

149

(based on sympathetic feeling). The two could be difficult to disentangle, however, given that the Slav scholar frequently undertook research trips from motives of Slav affinity. Rather than representing a deliberate encounter with ‘Otherness’ as in the classic travel texts of discovery and exploration of new worlds, these accounts represent the exploration of a world that is represented as one’s own. The Slav travel account constructed the traveller-narrator not as an outsider but as a native, seeing and knowing Slavdom from within. Still, while the Slav world may have been thus mapped as a unified cultural space, it was rarely seen as an undifferentiated one, and travel writing explored Slav differences with varying results. The idea of a separate Slav world may have originated as an act of cultural resistance to being represented as Europe’s Others, but it did not necessarily imply a more positive, inclusive concept of Eastern Europe. On the contrary, Europe’s East remained the repository of Otherness even for some of Slavism’s most fervent evangelists, particularly when they measured themselves against the Slavs of the Balkans. Nineteenth-century ‘Balkanism’ was not simply a variant of pejorative Western discourses on Eastern Europe. It could also be way of escaping from them.

POLISH EXPLORATIONS: POTOCKI AND SAPIEHA Some of the earliest accounts of travels among the Slavs were produced by Poles writing in the shadow of the partitions of Poland. As well as showing the very different political turns Slavism could take, they also sketch out themes that would recur in later travels through Slavic Europe. One of the earliest was published in 1795 by the Polish Count Jan Potocki, now better known as the author of the fantastic Oriental tales of the Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse. Potocki had already published journals from his oriental travels to Turkey and Egypt (1788) and to Morocco (1792)—accounts of exotic marvels and intertwined cultures, incorporating tales within tales, journeys within journeys, in the style of the Thousand and One Nights and foreshadowing the themes of the Saragossa Manuscript. His account of a journey through Mecklenburg and Pomerania, Voyage dans quelques parties de la Basse-Saxe pour la recherche des antiquités slaves ou vendes, fait en 1794, has a quite different character: it is a scholarly tour assessing evidence for the ancient history of the Slavs on the ground, as well

iBracewell_A_book.indb 149

4/14/08 2:52:12 PM

150

Under Eastern Eyes

as through the written evidence of the chroniclers. Potocki, who had already published several compendia dealing with the early history of the Slavs, here assumes the role of an archaeologist and ethnographer, investigating monuments, customs, evidence of Slav elements in local toponyms and physiognomies, appending to his journal extracts from chronicles and manuscripts, as well as his own sketches of artifacts and archeological finds, including the supposedly prehistoric Slav idols of Prillwitz. Everything he saw seemed to bear evidence of the primacy of the Slav settlers in these areas, now part of the Prussian state, ‘from the times before Charlemagne’.5 Potocki explained his purpose in presenting his researches as a travel journal thus: My object in writing this diary is to spread the knowledge of Slav antiquities and to raise an interest in them among those who have it in their power to deepen this knowledge further, that is the sovereigns and governments who could initiate and conduct investigations and the private persons on whose land burial mounds are to be found or into whose hands some Slav antiquity was placed by chance. A scholarly study would certainly please scholars better, but it would run the risk of not being read and therefore failing the object I propose; that is why I have decided to write this diary (1).

Potocki presented himself as a scholarly populariser, but the appeal to ‘sovereigns and governments’ inevitably gave his travels a political cast. It seems over-optimistic, if not downright eccentric, to be soliciting Frederick William II’s support for research into Prussia’s Slavic past at the very moment in 1794 when his troops, along with those of Austria and Russia, were occupying Poland in the prelude to the third partition of the country. But Potocki’s proposals were addressed elsewhere. Following the partitions of 1793 and 1795, a party among the 5 Jan Potocki, Voyage dans quelques parties de la Basse-Saxe pour la récherche des antiquités slaves ou vendes, fait en 1794 (Hamburg: 1795), 30–1. His earlier work, Chroniques, mémoires et recherches pour servir à l’histoire de tous les peuples slaves (Warsaw: 1793), is a historical compendium and source commentary. For a good modern critical edition, see Potocki, Œuvres, 2 vols., ed. F. Rosset (Louvain: 2004); for a biography see François Rosset and Dominique Triaire, Jean Potocki (Paris: 2004).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 150

4/14/08 2:52:12 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

151

Poles hoped that the disappearance of Poland would be compensated by a great Slav confederation under the aegis of the Russian Empire. Potocki, like others around the Czartoryski family, saw Russia as the natural leader and protector of the Slavs, particularly against the German states. Autocratic rulership was needed in this task, not least to preserve these peoples from their own self-destructive tendencies—at least from Potocki’s perspective in the revolutionary 1790s. He prefaced his 1796 study of Slav history with an assessment of the character of the Slavs that recognised their generosity, hospitality and energy, but warned that they were also naturally endowed with a fierce licence, so that if things were to come to dread revolution, their caste of nobles would be destroyed; and the people under their rule would quickly fall into a state of barbarism little different from that described in Nestor’s chronicle.6

Potocki’s researches into the antiquity and extent of Slav settlements were thus directed more to a Russian sovereign than a Prussian one, appealing to Slav sympathies as well as to political expediency. At the same time, given the confiscation of the Potocki estates in Ukrainian Podolia by the Russian crown with the partition of 1795, offering his scholarly services to the Russian Empire was a way of recouping the Polish nobleman’s personal fortunes. Potocki’s ambitions were rewarded following the accession in 1801 of Alexander I of Russia, supported by his Foreign Minister (and Potocki’s cousin), the Polish statesman Prince Adam Czartoryski, with his plans for a Russian-led Slav Europe, a resurrected Poland as its cornerstone, to counter Napoleonic imperialism. (In his role as Russian Foreign Minister and as head of the Academy of Vilnius, Czartoryski himself was an active supporter of voyages of exploration: ‘One should send travellers into all parts of the hitherto unknown Slav territories, in the same way as they are now being sent to Africa.’ The knowledge produced by such travels across Slavonic Europe would contribute to political ends, just as with European expeditions to Afri-

6 Jan Potocki, Fragments historiques et géographiques sur la Scythie, la Sarmatie et les Slaves, 4 vols. (Braunschweig: 1796), 1:30.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 151

4/14/08 2:52:13 PM

152

Under Eastern Eyes

ca.)7 It would be his skills as an Orientalist rather than a Slavist, however, that brought Potocki preferment in the service of the Tsar. With Prince Czartoryski’s patronage, he would receive an appointment in the Russian Asiatic Department, and his subsequent accounts of travels in the Caucasus and of a diplomatic mission through Siberia to China are classical colonial texts of exploration in the service of ‘civilisation’ and Russian annexation. The cynical political undercurrents of these accounts are reinforced in his 1806 memorandum to Alexander I, Système Asiatique, laying out the principles by which Russia could achieve hegemony in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia as a counterweight to the Napoleonic domination of Europe.8 Potocki’s Slavs, with Russia at their head, were a political as well as a cultural and historical community, called to dominate these ‘Asiatic’ regions. Czartoryski and Potocki may well have inspired another Polish traveller, Prince Alexander Sapieha, who journeyed through Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and on into Greece, and who described his journey among the South Slavs in 1802–1803 (or was it really in 1804–1805?) in a work entitled Podróż po Słowia≈skich krajach w latach 1802gim i 1803cim [Journey around the Slav countries in the years 1802 and 1803] (Wrocław: 1811).9 Like Potocki, this French-educated aristocrat wrote his original account in French, but Sapieha then reworked his notes in Polish, addressing the book to a domestic audience. His political orientation was very different from that of Potocki. Sapieha’s hopes for Polish rebirth through the unification of the Slavs 7 Cited in Hans Koch, ‘Slavdom and Slavism in the Polish national consciousness, 1794–1848’, in Eastern Germany II. History (Würzburg: 1963), 228. On Czartoryski, see especially W.H. Zawadzki, A man of honour: Adam Czartoryski as a statesman of Russia and Poland, 1795–1831 (Oxford: 1993). 8 On Potocki’s geopolitics as seen through his travel accounts, see Daniel Beauvois, ‘Jean Potocki’s Voyages: From mythic Orient to conquered Orient’, in L’Hénaurme siècle: A miscellany of essays on nineteenth-century French literature, ed. W.L. McLendon (Heidelberg: 1984) and idem, ‘Un Polonais au service de la Russie: Jean Potocki et l’expansion en Transcaucasie, 1804– 1805’, Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 19:1–2 (1978), 175–89, as well as the political writings collected in his Œuvres, ed. Rosset. 9 On Sapieha, see especially Ljubomir DurkoviΔ-JakšiΔ, Jugoslovensko-poljska saradnja 1772–1840 (Novi Sad: 1971), and Jerzy Skowronek, Z magnackiego gniazda do napoleo≈skeigo wywiadu Aleksander Sapieha (Warsaw: 1992).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 152

4/14/08 2:52:13 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

153

were invested not in Russia but in Napoleon, whose imperial protection constituted a political tie among the Slav peoples ‘beyond that of the homogeneity of our race’.10 While Potocki had stressed the antiquity and extent of the Slavs, Sapieha proclaimed their special virtues and their mission, based on their qualities of patriarchal simplicity and closeness to nature. According to Sapieha, Slav virtues and Slav solidarity would lead to ‘the regeneration not only of Poland, but of all Europe’.11 Sapieha had made his journey through the Balkans to Greece as a clandestine agent for the French government, collecting information on the Christians under Ottoman rule following Karadjordje’s uprising in Serbia in 1804 (the dates given in the title appear to be a deliberate mystification intended to deflate the political implications of his book in the uncertain circumstances of 1810–1811, with Napoleon’s increased interest in the Balkans and the growing tensions with Russia).12 Sapieha’s published account of his journey is confined to his Dalmatian travels, and constitutes an exploration of the political and cultural potential of Slav reciprocity. Sapieha explained the motive for his journey in these terms: at the time of Kósciuszko’s revolt, an appeal had been made to the Slav peoples, proclaiming to them that a glorious people of their own race was being sacrificed to a foreign master. I wanted to ascertain for myself whether this had created any impression upon them and at the same time wanted to get to know those blood-brothers [pobratymców] who had never yet been visited by any Pole. The travels of Abbé Fortis whetted my curiosity. For these reasons I undertook this journey… (31).13

Sapieha was scarcely alone in being inspired by Alberto Fortis’s Viaggio in Dalmazia (Venice: 1774). Fortis’s picture of the ‘character and 10 Aleksander Sapieha, Podróże w krajach słowia≈skich odbywane, ed. Tadeusz Jabło≈ski (Wrocław: 1983), 32. Thanks to Aniela Grundy for verifying the translations of Sapieha. 11 Podróże w krajach słowia≈skich odbywane (Wrocław: 1811), 6 (omitted from the 1983 edition); see Skowronek, Z magnackiego gniazda, 229. 12 DurkoviΔ-JakšiΔ, Jugoslovensko-poljska saradnja, 50–7. 13 Page numbers in the text refer to Podróże w krajach słowia≈skich odbywane (Wrocław: 1983).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 153

4/14/08 2:52:13 PM

154

Under Eastern Eyes

customs’ of the Dalmatian Morlacchi or Morlachs, a people on the frontiers of Europe apparently untouched by civilisation, had sparked fascination and indeed ‘Morlaccomania’ in western Europe.14 Much of Sapieha’s route through the Dalmatian hinterland repeated Fortis’s itinerary, and he seems to have travelled—or at any rate, written—with the Viaggio in Dalmazia as his constant companion. Sapieha shared an interest in natural history with the enlightened abbé and, like him, he moves readily from notes on botanical or mineralogical specimens to human types, subjecting the inhabitants of the mountainous interior to a scientific, classificatory gaze, adopting the Italian term ‘Morlacco’ used by Fortis (but not by the locals) to identify them and echoing many of his assessments. For Sapieha, as for Fortis and other enthusiasts of the primitive, the so-called Morlachs represented a survival from an earlier, simpler, nobler age of humanity. However much such a perspective idealised the noble Morlach savages, it also excluded them from a shared world of history and made them into civilised Europe’s Others.15 The Dalmatian Giovanni Lovrich (Ivan LovriΔ) had already countered Fortis with arguments for the perfectibility of the Morlachs from a nativist Slav position.16 The later Polish traveller was also at pains to show that a shared Slavdom erased any distance between observer and observed. Morlachs and Poles, as Slavs, were members of a single family, Sapieha claimed, comparing humanity to the plant kingdom and citing Virey on the ‘natural history’ of mankind. He was at pains to prove etymologically that Poles and Morlachs derive from one and the same Slav line: Poles were the descendants of those Slavs (or ‘Lechs’) who 14 ‘Morlaccomania’: Arturo Cronia, La conoscenza del mondo slavo in Italia (Padua: 1958), 331–5. Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs (Stanford: 2001) discusses both Fortis’s ‘discovery’ of the Morlachs and the subsequent Morlach enthusiasm in west European writings as an aspect of the western civilizing mission in ‘Eastern Europe’. 15 Andrei Pippidi, ‘Naissance, renaissances et mort du “Bon sauvage”: à propos des Morlaques et des Valaques’, in Hommes et idées du Sud-Est européen à l’aube de l’âge moderne (Bucharest & Paris: 1980) makes this point forcefully, both with regard to western treatments of the Morlachs and more generally of Europe’s east. 16 Osservazioni di Giovanni Lovrich sopra diversi pezzi del viaggio in Dalmatia del signor abate Alberto Fortis (Venice: 1776); on Lovrich see especially Ivan Lovrić i njegovo doba (Sinj: 1979) and Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 154

4/14/08 2:52:14 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

155

settled the steppes (‘pole’), while Morlachs were ‘Sea-Lechs’. (In this he passed over both the local term ‘Vlach’, which to the Polish ear emphasised the possibility of their Latin origins, and Fortis’s more complex but less conclusively Slav speculations on their genealogy.) Most importantly, the Slavs, as a single family, shared reciprocal responsibilities: ‘The connections among the Slav peoples cannot leave a good Pole indifferent, just as the family can never be estranged from a good son’ (32). Sapieha thus claimed a sentimental affinity with the Morlachs that previous travellers, he implied, had lacked. Sapieha’s idealisation of the Morlachs’ patriarchal simplicity was not simply a conventional Romantic critique of modern civilisation: the Morlachs’ way of life had a special meaning for the Poles in particular. Polish misfortunes, according to Sapieha, had been the result of the failure to reconcile the imperatives of civilisation and progress with the preservation of ‘ancestral customs’ developed in harmony with nature. ‘What is Enlightenment without national virtues?’ cried the aristocratic traveller observing contemporary Polish political life (33). According to Sapieha, the faithful conservation of tradition and a love of fatherland, exemplified by the Morlachs who had preserved their national character unchanged even under foreign rule, would provide the Poles with ‘a shield that would not only keep the nation whole, but could ward off the blows of the world’s foremost aggressors’ (123)—a useful moral for the partitioned Poles. On the other hand, he desired for the Morlachs ‘education and instruction, but not at the expense of their virtues and ancestral customs’ (125). Polish autonomy in the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw was presented as an inspiration for the South Slavs, a blueprint for the Illyrian Provinces, and a model for Slav integration into a Napoleonic Europe. The result is essentially a programme of Slav political and cultural reciprocity avant la lettre: We bring our distant brethren the results of our progress, and of the misfortunes of civilization; in return we receive a revival of our ancient customs and pledges of our native virtues. We carry to them examples of our dedication to our common agent of rebirth [wskrzesicielowi wspólnemu, i.e., Napoleon], and in return we anticipate inestimable benefits for our native tongue and for the education of our people (32).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 155

4/14/08 2:52:14 PM

156

Under Eastern Eyes

There is the hint of a contradiction here, one that would become more and more evident in later Polish anti-modern Slav-centred critiques of Europe: idealising the Morlachs as Slavs uncorrupted by modern progress sat uneasily with claims for the more advanced and civilised Poles as a model for these and other Slavs to follow.17 While within Sapieha’s Slav cosmos the Poles represented civilisation, with all its attendant gains and losses, the place occupied by the Poles (and the other Slavs) in the wider framework of Europe was more ambiguous. Sapieha uses the language of East and West to explain the ambiguities of the Poles’ position: Poland had suffered ‘misfortunes from the East, as the result of the benightedness of fraternal nations, and from the West through property seized for the interests and security of its neighbours’, though when Poland’s victories ‘were a barrier against the onslaught of the barbarians from the East, the West esteemed its bravery and enlightenment’ (31). Sapieha goes on to evoke the gaze of the foreign observer in defining the Poles’ place in Europe: In considering this with an unprejudiced eye, what foreigner, what enlightened lover of humanity could look with indifference on a virtuous nation that brings honour to the human race? The philosopher, exhausted by the rottenness of a society in which he lives isolated, must rest his eye with pleasure on a corner of the world where base profit has not yet conquered nobility of spirit.

Yet despite these virtues, the Poles ‘are considered barbarians by people who are in no way worthy of them’ and by the foreigner who ‘does not know how to evaluate’ what he sees. Such observers accordingly place the boundary between barbarism and civilisation between Slav and non-Slav (124). Sapieha does not mention his foreign calumniators by name, but he might have had in mind not just a long tradition of western accounts of the Poles but also such recent travellers in Poland as the Frenchman Hubert Vautrin, whose 1807 travel sketch had repeated many of the standard negative stereotypes of the Poles as 17 On this contradiction in Mickiewicz’s Paris lectures see Walicki, Russia, Poland, and universal regeneration, 125–6.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 156

4/14/08 2:52:14 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

157

barbarian and Oriental (among many examples of Vautrin’s disdain, the Poles are said ‘to join French politeness to Scythian barbarity and Asiatic arrogance’).18 In a peroration on the virtues of the Morlachs, Sapieha then converts the stigma of Slav ‘barbarism’ and Morlach simplicity to the means of redeeming not only the Poles but also the rest of ‘today’s half-civilized world’ with a return to Nature and ‘patriarchalism’, and thus to true civilisation (124–125). It was this, in effect, that would lead to the regeneration of ‘all Europe’. Fine sentiments and ones that would also appeal to future generations of Romantic Slav patriots, but Sapieha is vague about exactly how this cure will be effected. Neither Potocki nor Sapieha would live to see how illusory their very different Slav dreams would prove. Sapieha died in 1812, savaged by a boar on his estate in Lithuania, as Napoleon’s army was marching on Moscow. Potocki’s Russian political ambitions had faded with Czartoryski’s political eclipse after 1807, and he had retired to his Podolian estates. He eventually took his own life, shooting himself in the head with a silver bullet made from the strawberry-shaped knob of a sugar bowl, just after the proclamation of the Polish Congress Kingdom in 1815. Neither man’s Slavonic travel account had lasting value, either as works of research or of literature. The two texts, with all their contrasts in politics and approach, are nevertheless important as examples of the early flowering of the Slav idea in partitioned Poland, and because of the ways they are symptomatic of later connections made between Slav ideas and understandings of Europe’s divisions.

SLAV TRAVELS AND NATIONAL DIGNITY It was no coincidence that the partitions of Poland were succeeded by manifestations of Slavism: the search for powerful allies and for national dignity was a response to weakness, division and above all the loss of the Polish state—encouraging a move towards another, novel 18 Hubert Vautrin, L’observateur en Pologne (Paris: 1807), 235; on similar German stereotypes, in travel writing and other genres, see Hubert Orłowski, ‘Polonische Wirtshaft’. Zum deutschen Polendiskurs der Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: 1996), especially 81–115.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 157

4/14/08 2:52:15 PM

158

Under Eastern Eyes

form of political legitimation, one based on ties of common blood and language. It was no coincidence, either, that discourses of Slav greatness, virtues and mission accompanied debates over Polish relations to Europe. The Partitions had destroyed Poland while Europe looked on, indifferent to the Polish self-image as antemurale of western Christendom and cornerstone of the European state system. It was not just the balance of Europe as a regulative idea that was at issue, but the problem of Europe as a cultural and moral community. What was the place of the Poles—or of the Slavs—in such a Europe? The question was underlined by more general theories of difference within Europe (and the world) that sought explanations not in variations in social or political organisation, but beyond history, in innate qualities attributed to peoples and races. Were the Slavs essentially passive victims (as Herder’s assessment of their agricultural way of life and their pacific nature implied)? Had they contributed nothing to the forms that reason had taken in the world, remaining so far outside history (according to Hegel)? Could they even be considered as a part of European civilisation (given Ranke’s exclusion of the Slavs from the Occidental world created by the German and Romance peoples)? Were they after all no more than barbarians?19 Theories of Slav autochthony in Europe or of a mission of European regeneration based on peculiarly Slavic virtues were in part responses to these questions. These themes would recur repeatedly outside Poland, in part because the problems that provoked a recourse to discourses of Slavism—political weakness and division, foreign rule and the prospect of cultural assimilation, developmental asymmetries, the resentment provoked both by external criticism and by the compulsion to imitate foreign models—were widely shared. Later recensions of the Slav idea would include wider and narrower versions, including both Russophile and Russophobe Pan-Slavisms, a more limited and pragmatic Austroslavism, various interpretations of Illyrism or Yugoslavism, and later neo-Slavisms. It was the 1820s–1840s, the period following the collapse of Napoleonic Europe, that saw the flowering of 19 On the theories of difference underpinning changing ideas of Europe’s divisions, and particularly on Hegel and Ranke, see especially Heinz Gollwitzer, Europabild und Europagedanke (Munich: 1951), 212–6.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 158

4/14/08 2:52:16 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

159

Slavism, along with other Romantic nationalisms. Well before 1848, with the Slav Congress in Prague and the conspicuous roles played by the various Slav peoples in European revolution, repression and reaction, the concept of a Slavic Europe, problematically linked to Russia and set in opposition to the West, had become common coin among those concerned with the history and destiny of the Slav peoples. The decades after 1848 saw the consolidation of separate national movements among the Slav peoples, proceeding at different rates according to circumstance. By 1867, as the second great Slav gathering for the Moscow Ethnographic Exhibition made clear, the idea of a politically united Slav Europe had become a chimæra, particularly if it meant subordination of the other Slav peoples to Russia. Playing the Slav was an effective way to resist German or Hungarian assimilationism or to vent frustrations against an indifferent or hostile West, but this was a luxury that came cheaper to those who were not at threat from an expansionist Russia. At the same time, the fashion for sentimental Slavism faded, though it did not entirely disappear, while Slavic studies remained an important aspect of national legitimation. Some Slav themes were particularly well-suited for treatment in travel writing, and played an important role in constituting Slavism as a cultural-political ideology in its early phase. The Slav tour could imbue particular landscapes with an emotional charge, invest monuments or places with memories of a shared past or hopes for a bright future, monitor evidence of progress or backwardness, relativise difference or register diversity. It could trace alternative maps of belonging, hopscotching over existing administrative frontiers and imagining a single Slav community regardless of political partitions. Slav travels could set symbolic frontiers, locating the Slavs—or particular Slav peoples—with reference to East or West. And not least, travel writing’s range of registers allowed the Slav travel account to mock absurdities and overturn ideological orthodoxies. These themes might take specific forms depending on local circumstances (and might be more or less evident according to the national context). They did not develop in isolation, however—particularly in the period before 1848, travel nurtured the personal contacts that spread the ideas of Slavism, and travel writing itself was a genre that lent itself to recirculation. Editors and translators tended to select pieces that treated their own territories, but not

iBracewell_A_book.indb 159

4/14/08 2:52:16 PM

160

Under Eastern Eyes

exclusively so. A patriotic readership could be expected to be interested in any aspect of the Slav world.20 The exploration of Slav affinities and search for Slav origins structured many of the travel accounts that appeared subsequent to the works by Potocki and Sapieha. From the 1820s–1840s, but also much later, travellers traced the contours of the Slav world, justifying their itineraries with the injunction ‘first know yourself’ and setting these Slav journeys in opposition to those in ‘foreign’ parts of Europe. Slav travellers could—supposedly—count on a sense of kinship and ‘Slav hospitality’ to make these journeys more delightful. They were also supposed to be able to communicate with one another without difficulty in their common Slav tongue, making travels through Slavdom more meaningful. The sentiments expressed in one patriotic poem, ‘with the Slav language/you can travel the four quarters of the Universe’, were echoed in any number of travel accounts.21 Travel writers also cited Kollár’s reworking of Terence’s epigram ‘Slavus sum, nihil a me Slavici alienum puto’ [‘As a Slav, I think nothing Slav foreign to me’], but in fact it was often the task of the early travel account to identify differences among the Slavs—so that they could then be shown to be superficial and no barrier to true fraternity. Especially in the period of Slav enthusiasm before 1848, such writings could be put to the service of nation-building initiatives aimed at evaluating, if not necessarily erasing, a variety of regional, linguistic or social differences within the larger Slav community. Whether the wider Slav or the narrower national identity was foregrounded in a particular travel text depended on context. In the travelogues that he wrote in the 1840s, the Croatian historian Ivan KukuljeviΔ Sakcinski unselfconsciously shifted the referent of his ‘we’ and ‘ours’ from ‘Slav’ (especially when writing from Italy or Vienna and setting the Slavs in contrast to Italians, Germans 20 One example: between 1837 and 1846 Ljudevit Gaj’s Illyrian journal Danica published translations of excerpts of travel accounts across the Slav world by I.I. Sreznevskii (on Dalmatia), Karel Havlí∑ek (Moscow), Karel Zap (Lviv), Václav Staněk (Prague to Belgrade), Jan Kollár (the Adriatic and Venice) and other writers (including non-Slavs), as well as travel letters sent to Danica by Croats, Serbs and Slovenes. Conversely, Matija MažuraniΔ’s Illyrianist account of Bosnia, Pogled u Bosnu, ili Kratak put u onu krajinu, u∑injen 1839–40 (Zagreb: 1842) was translated into Czech by 1845. 21 By Svetozar Hurban-Vajanský (1847–1916), cited in Kohn, Pan-Slavism, 19.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 160

4/14/08 2:52:17 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

161

or Hungarians); to ‘Illyrian’ (or ‘South Slav’ or ‘national’ following the ban on the use of the Illyrian term in 1843) when considering narrower reciprocities; to Croat, Serb and Slovene, when writing of obstacles to such reciprocities.22 However, as the all-Slav travelogue became routinised, and as differences between the different Slav peoples made themselves increasingly felt, this sort of account also became the vehicle for scepticism or parody, often with stereotypical expectations of fraternity being undermined by misunderstanding or hypocrisy.23 It is not only the Slavs who are on the road in these travel accounts. If in the eighteenth-century novel the coach is a device for moving the plot forward by throwing together a group of apparently unrelated people and then exploring their interactions, then in the Slav travel account the coach, the steamboat or the railway carriage is not simply a means for the narrator to move from place to place, but a locale in itself, where the traveller is compelled to rub up against the world. Chance encounters bring the Slav traveller into close contact with fellow Slavs, but also with non-Slav ‘foreigners’ and particularly with those who are hostile to the Slavs. The enclosed microcosms of steamboats and trains facilitate intimate encounters with those that the traveller might not deliberately seek out. They form the setting for little scenes of social and ethnic friction: the Vojvodina Serb Bogoboj AtanackoviΔ on a steamboat between Pest and Vienna in 1850, complaining that there are no Serbs to talk to, only Germans and Hungarians, ‘two or three young men in a circle, with their cigars in their teeth, and a few peacocky ladies and gentlemen, with whom you can speak only through a monocle, but no way of being merry and amusing yourself’; or the Dalmatian Serb Sava BjelanoviΔ, in a railway carriage full of Hungarians, wondering why his fellow-traveller, who has just been proclaiming Russia the enemy of civilisation, is so unwilling to admit he is ethnically a German.24 Even worse are the encounters with fellow Slavs who deny or try to hide their origins: fellow passengers or 22 On Ivan KukuljeviΔ, see FraniΔ, ‘Motiv patriotizma u hrvatskim putopisima’, 51–5. 23 One example of the sceptical and ironic Slav travelogue is the Croat Franjo Ksaverski Horvat-Kiš’s account of travel to a Sokol gathering in Sofia, in Viđeno i neviđeno: putni∑ke crtice (Zagreb: 1911). 24 Bogoboj AtanackoviΔ, Putovanje: njegov dnevnik iz god. 1849 i 1850 (Novi Sad: 1918); Sava BjelanoviΔ, Kroz slavenske zemlje (Zadar: 1897).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 161

4/14/08 2:52:18 PM

162

Under Eastern Eyes

ticket collectors who refuse to speak anything but German or Hungarian, no matter whether they are passing through Slav lands or not. In 1846 the Czech Václav Staňek has his enjoyment of the experience of railway travel across a newly-connected Slav world disrupted by hearing Czechs speaking German (‘uneducated Czechs who have learnt German normally speak German to foreigners, thinking that they will thereby appear more educated’), and by meeting a Magyarised Slovak who is uncomfortable speaking with him in ‘Czecho-slavic’ on the Danube steamer in case a Hungarian overhears and reports him to someone; Jozef Hole∑ek can’t even get the train conductor to answer his questions in Czech in 1883.25 These sorts of encounters can happen anywhere, and are by no means limited to public transport, though foreign encounters in hotels or tourist spots share many of the aleatory characteristics of the boat or train meeting. They remind the reader, however, how tenuously Slavdom was tied to territory, particularly within the confines of the multinational nineteenth-century empires. If the Slav travel account is a topographical device, it describes a Slav world that is marked less by crossing political borders than by negotiating ethnic boundaries: between Slav and German, Hungarian or Italian, for instance, or between Slav and Slav. One way to locate the Slavs in Europe, without emphasising Slavdom’s spatial frontiers, was by searching for their European origins. A striking example comes in the travel books by Jan Kollár (1793–1852), the Slovak Lutheran pastor who was so influential, together with Josef Šafařík, in formulating the myth and mission of ‘Slavness’.26 As well as his great cycle of sonnets, Slávy dcera (‘Daughter of Slava’, 1824– 1852) and his essays on Slav reciprocity, he produced two volumes of travel accounts of Europe.27 On his travels, Kollár sees traces of the Slavs everywhere he goes. This was because—according to him—the Slavs were the autochthonous inhabitants of central Europe: 25 Václav Staňek, ‘Cesta z Prahy do Bĕlehradu Srbského’, Poutnik (1846) [trans. David Chirico]; Jozef Hole∑ek, ∂erná hora v míru (Prague: 1883). 26 On the Slavism of Kollár and Šafařík, see especially Robert Pynsent, Questions of identity: Czech and Slovak ideas of nationality and personality (Budapest & London: 1994), 43–99. 27 Cestopisy: Cestou do horní Italie a odtud přes Tyrolsko a Bavorsko, se zvláštním ohledem na slavjanské živly roku 1841 konanou a sepsanou (Pest: 1843); and Cestopis Druhý (Prague: 1863).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 162

4/14/08 2:52:18 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

163

history and geography, language and customs and thousands of other circumstances prove incontrovertibly that in the most ancient of times, before the Romans and the Celts, the Wendo-Slavs inhabited not only all upper Italy, Venetia and Lombardy, but also Switzerland, the Tyrol, part of Bavaria, Reatia and Noricum, and that the Italian tree of life has its roots in Slav soil.28

This emphasis on autochthony echoes Potocki’s investigations, though Kollár’s tendentious assertions and dotty enthusiasms contrast markedly with Potocki’s more sober methods. (Kollár even discovered Slavonic pigeons on Venice’s St. Mark’s Square in his effort to demonstrate the antiquity and extent of the Slavs in Europe.)29 ‘Slav travels’ didn’t necessarily require the actual presence of Slavs, as Potocki’s voyage hints; an entire corpus of expeditions in search of the vanishing Slav world of Lusatia combines a search for origins with denunciations of the malevolent effects of Germanisation.30 Affirming the dignity of one’s nation by tracing its origins into the past was by no means peculiar to the Slavs. Nineteenth-century Greek and Romanian travellers could look back, if they chose, to classical antiquity, finding themselves at home wherever its influence held sway. (One who did so choose was the Transylvanian Romanian Ion Codru Draguşanu, whose 1839 journey to Rome included paying his respects to ‘our forefather’, Trajan, and climbing his column, a ‘sacred duty which, I believe, no Romanian can ignore if passing by this sacred place’—though the significance Codru Draguşanu ascribed to Rome was by no means shared by all Romanian travellers.)31 But while the Greeks and Romanians could link their nations to a clearly established source of prestige in the classical past, Slav travellers like Potocki or Kollár had to invent other sources of pride and dignity out of what scanty evidence they could patch together from linguistics and archae28 Cestopisy: Cestou do horní Italie, 204 (cited in Pynsent, Questions of identity, 66–7). 29 On the pigeons, and the ‘dove-like’ Slavs, see Pynsent, Questions of identity, 80–1. 30 See, e.g., Kod Luži∑kih Srba: putopisi, ed. M. CvijetiΔ (Belgrade: 1997); Podróże Polaków na Łużyce w XIX wieku, ed. A. Zieli≈ski (Wrocław: 1975). 31 Ion Codru Drăguşanu, Peregrinul transilvan (Sibiu: 1865), extracts in Romanian pilgrim, ed. A. Fabritiusin, Plural (Bucharest) 4 (2003), 140–1.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 163

4/14/08 2:52:19 PM

164

Under Eastern Eyes

ology. Magyar travellers, straining to hear echoes of their national origins among the remote peoples of the East and North, were perhaps most akin to the Slavs in these endeavours. Kollár is rude about this, decrying both the effort and the eastern origins: The Magyars, being a small nation, even go to other continents, into Asia, to Mongols, Tibetans and so forth, in order to find their ancestors and brothers or a nation on a par with them, and thus to gain a greater terrain and public for their literature.

In truth, however, his efforts were not much different, apart for his insistence on the Slavs’ European origins.32 What was novel in Slav travels in search of origins was the way that Sapieha, Kollár and other ideologues of Slavdom found legitimacy not so much in links to past glory, as in the expectation of the Slavs’ future contribution to Europe and humanity. Theories of the splendid future that awaited the Slavs owed a lot to organicist understandings of society and culture. In contrast to the peoples of history, the Romance and Germanic nations, and a European West that was ‘old’ and therefore worn-out and decayed, the Slavs were ‘young’, untouched by history and uncorrupted by civilisation, with their future before them. The argument first laid out by Herder in the famous chapter on the Slavs in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1791), that the wheel of time and the imperatives of European progress would eventually promote the peaceful virtues of the Slavs over the belligerent spirit of the Germans, recurs over and over in predictions of the future and mission of the Slavs. What this might mean in practice, and who among the Slavs would play the leading role in setting the wheel of time spinning, were issues that were intensely debated. The conclusions might vary, but they shared at least one common thread: the idea of a distinctive Slav contribution

32 Pynsent, Questions of identity, 73. A contemporary example of these travels is János Jerney, Jerney János keleti utazása a magyarok őshelyeinek kinyomozása végett 1844 és 1845 (Budapest: 1851), which investigates the Magyars’ origins in Moldova, the Caucasus, the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 164

4/14/08 2:52:19 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

165

to Europe’s future.33 Thus Sapieha, imagining Slav values redeeming not only Poland but also all ‘half-civilised’ Europe. And thus Kollár, comparing the roles of Slav and Germans in Europe: What is the greater virtue? Being mindful of the rights of others, or obliterating them? Which is the more meritorious contribution to humanity: fighting, shedding blood, enslaving, oppressing, death and destruction, the German way? Or: peace and hard work, farming and trade, the home and hospitality, freedom and life, the Slav way?34

Thus any number of later travellers comforting themselves with the same thought: ‘The Romance nations have the past, the Teutonic nations own the present, but the future belongs to the Slavs’ (in this case the words of a Slovene traveller gazing at the Niederwald monument to ‘Germania’ from a steamboat on the Rhine in 1903, more than a century after Herder had issued his promissory note for the Slavs’ future).35

MONTENEGRITUDE In travel writing, these ideas appear in the context of any number of Slav tours, but they are a particular feature of journeys to communities beyond the mainstream of Western civilisation and progress. It was by no means necessary to travel far beyond one’s doorstep to find examples of a timeless Slav idyll (or, from another perspective, poverty, isolation and an underdeveloped economy). Patriotic travellers celebrat33 See especially Alina Witkowska, ‘Les Slaves et la vieille Europe: Autour du concept de barbarie romantique’, in The Romanticism/Le Romantisme, ed. H. Dziechci≈ska [= Literary studies in Poland 5] (Wrocław, Warsaw, Kraków & Gda≈sk: 1980), 45–55 for a statement of the assumptions and an exploration of the arguments. Adam Mickiewicz’s course of lectures at the Collège de France represents one exemplary elaboration of the future role in Europe of the ‘barbarian Slavs’ on the basis of their ‘youth’. See Les Slaves: cours professé au Collège de France, 1842–1844 (Paris: 1914), especially the twelfth lecture, ‘Les barbares; l’homme éternel’ (30 April 1844), 330–3. 34 Cestopisy: Cestou do horní Italie, 205, more briefly in Pynsent, Questions of identity, 51. 35 Andrej Karlin, V Kelmorajn: potopisne crtice (Celovec: 1903), 132–3.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 165

4/14/08 2:52:19 PM

166

Under Eastern Eyes

ed their own rural hinterlands, but also such wild regions as Poland’s eastern borderlands, the Carpathian Tatras, the Krkonoše mountains or the Rila wilderness, as heartlands of Slavdom and unspoilt examples of the Slav picturesque or sublime, more meaningful to Slav travellers than similar sights ‘abroad’. ‘Even those who have travelled from Norway through the Alps to the Tatras have been amazed, enchanted’, wrote one typical Czech enthusiast. ‘Yet these are Slav mountains!’36 Alexander Sapieha’s expedition among the noble Slavic savages of Dalmatia was only the first of many travels that would develop the cult of a ‘Slav South’ especially among the western Slavs, similar to the English or German traveller’s Mediterranean South and sharing many of its characteristics—but claimed as ‘ours’, not really foreign, on the basis of a shared Slavdom.37 Russian travellers did much the same with the Orthodox South Slavs—but placed them in the ‘Slav East’. Different parts of the region tended to be allotted different characteristics in these travellers’ eyes (thus for example nineteenth-century Russian travellers tended to see Bulgaria in terms comparable to western Philhellenes’ perspectives on Greece: the cradle of Slav culture, now subject to foreign oppression; while they assessed Serbia in terms that were more mixed).38 Tiny Montenegro was an especially favoured destination for both western Slavs and Russians travelling in the Balkans. Western Romantics discovering ‘these least civilised people in Europe’ in the nineteenth century saw Montenegro as a bastion of liberty and heroic Christianity holding out against ‘the Turk’, while at the same time commenting on the barbarity of the means with which the Montenegrins defended their freedom (especially the practice of taking 36 Karel Drož, Tatry (Ružomberok: 1897), intro., n.p.; see also Burkot, Polskie prodróżopisarstwo, ch. 4; Václav Žá∑ek, Cesty ∑eských student∫ na Slovensko v době předbřeznové (Brno: 1948); Romantyczne wędrówki po Galicji, ed. A. Zieli≈ski (Wrocław: 1987). 37 Cf. John Pemble, The Mediterranean passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: 1987). 38 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 81–8, discusses nineteenth-century Russian accounts of Bulgaria, but these views cannot be taken as representative of Russian attitudes to the Balkans as a whole. On Bulgarian identity questions with reference to both Russia and the West, J.F. Clarke, The pen and the sword: Studies in Bulgarian history (Boulder, Colorado: 1988); and especially Diana Mishkova, ‘In quest of Balkan Occidentalism’, Tokovi istorije 1–2 (2006), 29–62.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 166

4/14/08 2:52:19 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

167

heads).39 For the Slav-inspired pilgrim, however, Montenegro had a larger and more personal significance. Not only was it the only selfgoverned Slav state beside Russia, but its heroism, patriarchal way of life and egalitarianism (as well as its integration of church and state under the rule of the prince-bishops) seemed to preserve a pre-modern way of life that could be claimed as quintessentially Slavic. Early visitors such as the Russian naval officer V.I. Bronevskii set the scene by depicting Montenegro as reminiscent of Russia’s mythical past, while later travellers such as the Russian Slavophiles Aleksandr Popov and Ivan Aksakov, the Serb Ljubomir NenadoviΔ, and the Czech writer Josef Hole∑ek presented Montenegro as a citadel of Slavness.40 Montenegrin virtues were many and varied; what they had in common, in many representations, was that they represented the diametric opposite of qualities associated with civilisation or, more tendentiously, the West. Thus, for example, the Russian mining engineer 39 Vialla de Sommiéres, Travels in Montenegro (London: 1820), 13. Jezernik, Wild Europe, 121–32, provides a discussion of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel to Montenegro but makes no distinctions between accounts by the English, French, Germans, Russians, Czechs or Serbs over a century and a half. 40 Russian travellers include Pavel Svin’in, Vospominaniia na flote (St. Petersburg: 1818); V.I. Bronevskii, Zapiski morskago ofitsera (St. Petersburg: 1836); E.P. Kovalevskii, Chetyre mesiatsa v Chernogorii (St. Petersburg: 1841); Aleksandr N. Popov, Puteshestvie v Chernogorii (St. Petersburg: 1847); Ivan Aksakov, articles from Den’ (1862), republished in his Slavianskii vopros, 1860– 1886 (Moscow: 1886), 51–87; Vikentii Makushev, ‘Poezdka v Chernogoriiu’ (1866), republished in his Zadunaiskie i adriaticheskie slaviane (St. Petersburg: 1867), with thanks to Sarah McArthur for copies of some of these, and other Russian texts. NenadoviΔ treated the Montenegrins (and particularly Njegoš) first in Pisma iz Italije (Belgrade: first published 1869), then more comprehensively in O Crnogorcima (Valjevo: 1889). Hole∑ek’s accounts of Montenegro include ∂erná Hora (Prague: 1876); ∂erná hora v míru, 2 vols. (Prague: 1883); Na ∂ernou Horu a ∂erná Hora koncem věku (Prague: 1899). Other Czech travellers who wrote about Montenegro in the nineteenth century include the biologists Antonín Fri∑ and Vilém Dušan Lambl, the painters Jaroslav ∂ermák and Ludvik Kuba, and Vítězslav Hálek, Ignát Hořca and Jan Vaclík; so did the Polish Jesuit Marcin Czermi≈ski. It should be noted that these travellers were all strongly influenced by the Montenegrins’ own national myths, promoted among others by Petar PetroviΔ Njegoš; ideas of Montenegro’s special claims to Slav virtue were by no means solely a creation of outside observers.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 167

4/14/08 2:52:20 PM

168

Under Eastern Eyes

E.P. Kovalevskii described Montenegro in 1841 as ‘perfectly isolated from Europe […] but if this isolation of Montenegro has distanced it from Western education and arts, it has also isolated it from Western delusions, weakness of body and spirit’ (and added that ‘here syphilis is unknown’); similarly their manliness differentiated the Montenegrins from ‘the European, the child of sickness and luxury’.41 A slightly different perspective saw the Montenegrins as pure, uncorrupted Slavs who had not (yet) succumbed to foreign influences. As a corollary, Montenegrin virtues were often phrased in terms of absences: these were Slavs untouched by alien ways, devoid of selfish egotism or destructive social hierarchy, lacking in material goods, innocent of capitalism, industrialisation and progress. This innocence was summed up by Hole∑ek in a striking image of Montenegro standing at the frontier of modern Europe like a virgin at the doors of a brothel.42 Absence and lack didn’t translate into inadequacy in these instances. The travellers described a society sufficient to itself, functional in all its practices (including head-taking). They rejected—or relativised—accusations of barbarism: ‘the Western press [‘lacmanska štampa’] […] has forgotten all the barbarisms which have taken place and are still constantly taking place among themselves and in every part of the world’, wrote Ljubomir NenadoviΔ, defending the practice of cutting off the Montenegrins’ enemies’ heads by comparing it to the cruel tortures used by the English or the Prussians. ‘When have you heard that the Montenegrins have ever tied their prisoners to the mouth of a cannon, like the English, and then fired it? The Montenegrins have never been inhuman towards their enemies.’43 Even the so-called civilised world could learn from these Slav heroes. By the 1870s it was perhaps too much to hope for a transfusion of Montenegritude into contemporary bourgeois Czech society, for example—as Josef Hole∑ek admitted—but travellers’ 41 Kovalevskii, Chetyre mesiatsa, 60, 124. 42 On Hole∑ek and Czech uses of the image of Montenegro, see František Sistek, ‘“Our brothers from the South”: Czech images of Montenegro and the Montenegrins before 1918 as an example of a positive discourse on the Balkans’, in Prague perspectives I: The history of east central Europe and Russia, ed. P. Roubal and V. Veber (Prague: in press). I have not seen Ján Jankovi∑, Boje ∂iernohorcov a túžby Slovákov (1839–1914) (Bratislava: 2004). 43 L. NenadoviΔ, O Crnogorcima: pisma sa Cetinja 1878. godine (Belgrade: 1929), 37–8.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 168

4/14/08 2:52:21 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

169

accounts could still use Montenegro to emphasise the virtues of holding true to one’s own Slav character rather than capitulating to foreign influence. If Montenegro could stand against the Turk, should not the Czechs be able to hold out against German domination? Under such circumstances, Slavocentric travellers would read change as deterioration rather than progress, and ‘Westernisation’ as degeneration rather than civilisation (or rather, the two amounted to the same thing). This was particularly the view of conservative Slavophile Russians. As early as 1847, Aleksandr Popov was lamenting that ‘a new danger, more terrible, more threatening than the power of the Turks, faces Montenegro: the moral influence of foreign principles’.44 By 1860, Ivan Aksakov, describing with bitter sarcasm the incongruity of frock coats, gloves and French small-talk at Prince Danilo’s court in rock-bound Cetinje, feared that ‘Montenegro’s whole principle of existence’ was being destroyed by the changes it was experiencing (‘a picture—alas!—well-known to all Slavs and to us Russians in particular’). He thought it would be better for the Montenegrins ‘to reject all pretensions to civil society, statehood, civilisation, Europeanism, and return to their earlier forms of existence, to become, as before, a free military encampment, the avenger of Slav injuries, the outpost of Slav liberty!’45 But the more liberal Czech Jozef Hole∑ek expressed much the same sentiments in the 1870s: he thought that, with civilisation, Cetinje had lost its ‘originality’—the real Montenegro now had to be sought elsewhere. It was not only ‘Westerners’ who were anxious to see Montenegro remain an archaic survival, regardless of the Montenegrins’ own aspirations.46 All in all, the treatment of Montenegro by these Slav Romantics paralleled the elevation of the ‘young’ Slavs by messianic polemicists such as Kollár or Mickiewicz—like the Montenegrins, the Slavs as a whole were innocent of the experience of Western history, i.e., progress, modernisation and civilisation. Their imitation of alien patterns

44 Popov, Puteshestvie v Chernogorii, 163. 45 Aksakov, Slavianskii vopros, 85–6; slightly less drastic reactions by Makushev, Zadunaiskie i adriaticheskie slaviane, 125, 150–1. 46 Hole∑ek, ∂erná hora v míru (cited acc. to Crna Gora na miru, trans. B. Borozan [Podgorica: 2002], 188). Cf., on ‘Westerners’, Jezernik, Wild Europe, 107.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 169

4/14/08 2:52:21 PM

170

Under Eastern Eyes

of development was not just a mistake, but a betrayal of their essential character. Whether or not this celebration of poverty and backwardness amounted to making a virtue out of a lack of alternatives, it definitely reversed the stigma of absence, deficit, failure and barbarism so often attributed to the Slavs.

SLAVISM AND THE WEST Praise of primitive Slavdom also amounted to a critique of Western modernity, something also already adumbrated in Sapieha’s account of the Morlachs. Travels among fraternal Slavs provided the occasion for indirect critique; nineteenth-century travel accounts about the centres of French, German and English civilisation made the same points more directly. Where some east European travellers were discovering ‘European’ material progress as a polemical contrast to their own economic backwardness and cultural inferiority, others were inclined to discover that these models did not measure up, either to the travellers’ expectations or to Western claims of civilisational superiority. Expressions of disappointment and disillusion proliferate, whether the subject is the vulgar taste of a ‘Europe of shopkeepers’ or the dismaying disparities of wealth and poverty brought about by Western economic and social transformations. England came as a particularly profound shock in this respect, with the slums of Manchester and Leeds demonstrating the human cost of the material progress achieved through industrialisation. In 1839 the Polish poet Zygmunt Krasi≈ski was almost reassured by the Sicilian street beggars who could depend on charity to keep them alive, unlike the beggars he had seen in London scrawling ‘starvation, come!’ on the streets, their only liberation in death. In Sicily income and industry have not yet become the one and only law. In England, for those who cannot work through their own fault or through fate, death seems a just reward or at least seems to be just. This is the difference between nature and mercantile civilization—in the first there is disorder, chaos and upheaval, but at the same time there is life—in the second there is order, reason, limitation and prescription for everything, but also egotism and near-death.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 170

4/14/08 2:52:21 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

171

Krasi≈ski went on to claim for the Poles the singular ability ‘to connect all ideas of civilization with the disorder of pulsing life […] for ultimately, who in old Europe is still young?—We, and only we!’47

Others made similar claims to the future for the Slavs more generally. From the early 1840s, ‘the Slav’ begins to make an appearance as the hero of the travel narrative, as for example in one of the first accounts of west European travels in Croatian, Antun Nem∑iΔ’s Putositnice [Travel Trifles] of 1845.48 A deliberately frivolous and divigatory account of an excursion to Northern Italy on the pattern of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, its Slav patriotism and sidelong critique of western claims to superiority give Nem∑iΔ’s account a serious core. As in Kollár’s 1843 travel account of Italy (which Nem∑iΔ had read before embarking on his own book), the traveller is alert wherever he travels for signs of his Slav predecessors and compatriots, identifies with the creative genius of the Slavs, and defends Slav honour against the assumptions of the ‘civilised’ Westerner. In Venice, taken for a ‘flemmatico Inglese’ by a pretty Venetian, Nem∑iΔ is shocked by her shock when she discovers that her admirer is in fact a ‘barbarian Slav’ (a nation which may be ‘barbara, ma molto eroica’ she quickly adds). ‘Better heroic barbarism, than civilized cowardice’ is Nem∑iΔ’s tetchy response. Right at the start of his journey, the traveller’s experiences trying to find a place in a crowded steamer bound for Venice mimic those of oppressed Slavdom, and his reflections hint at future changes: 47 Zygmunt Krasi≈ski, ‘Z sycylijskiej podróży kart kilka’, in Podróże pisarzy polskich do Włoch, ed. G. Maver (Rome: 1946), 37–44 (trans. Kate Wilson). Other Polish examples illustrating the range of critiques of the West include Lucja Rautenstrauchowa’s travel journals from France and Belgium, Ostatnia podróż do Francyi (Leipzig: 1841), characterised by aristocratic disdain for the bourgeois civilisation of post-Napoleonic Europe; J.I. Kraszewski’s Kartki z podróży 1858–1864, 2 vols. (Warsaw: 1866 and 1874), with his condemnation of western materialism and irreligion; and more generally see S. Burkot, Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne (Warsaw: 1988), 340–6; 374–82. Derek Offord, Journeys to a graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in classical Russian travel writing (Dordrecht: 2005) is an excellent treatment of Russian travellers in western Europe (despite the title). 48 On Nem∑iΔ’s narrative strategies, and the Croatian travel account in general, see especially Dean Duda, Pri∑a i putovanje: hrvatski romanti∑arski putopis kao pripovjedni žanr (Zagreb: 1998).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 171

4/14/08 2:52:22 PM

172

Under Eastern Eyes Look at those two Italians. Does that short one with the big belly not put you in mind of Jonah’s temporary quarters? See that happily snoring German in the corner? You were wearied by the witticisms with which he lulled his fellow travellers to sleep a little earlier. He himself laughed the sweetest—it’s only right that he now sleeps the sweetest too. Examine, I beg of you, those yawning and incessantly Goddamning Englishmen, with their legs sprawled over the seats, don’t they look like desiccated frogs? Do not, for God’s sake, think that they have paid any more just because they are occupying the space meant for four people. This is the sort of system that is in John Bull’s veins, and leads him to spread across the world at other people’s expense. But what will you, when the world voluntarily recognizes him as the arbiter of fine manners? Did my innate Slavic modesty not prevent me, I would cause him to pull in his octopus-like limbs, but as it is, Slavic modesty must either stand or count the stars from the deck. It is fortunate that a night does not last forever—at some point a dawn will break when that weary modesty will take rest.

Even with the further articulation of separate national ideas and identities at the expense of broader Slav ideologies through the later nineteenth century, ‘the Slav’ continued to provide a convenient persona for travellers depicting western Europe, even though there Europeans might more often be divided into individual nations—the French, the English, sometimes the Italians, more frequently the Hungarians (often qualified as ‘Asiatics’), and always the Germans. Romantic Slavdom not only served as a certificate of membership in the European family of nations, it also offered a solid vantage point (or a moral high ground) from which ‘barbarian’ Slavs could contemplate—and criticise—Western civilisation, as well as show their defiance of Western assumptions. Given that the conventional Romantic indictment of modern, bourgeois, secular and industrialised civilisation was hardly applicable to their own largely traditional and agrarian societies, the effect of the travellers’ fault-finding was to express a critical distance from everything that could be summed up as ‘the rotten West’. The catch-phrase emerged in precisely this period, the first half of the nineteenth century, as an aspect of the Romantic Slav perspective on Europe, and marks an important point in the reimagining of Europe’s symbolic

iBracewell_A_book.indb 172

4/14/08 2:52:22 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

173

map. The term is usually associated with the Russian Slavophiles of the 1840s, but similar usages circulate somewhat earlier among the Poles (thus we have already heard Sapieha in 1811 alluding to the ‘rottenness’ of Western society that ought to predispose the philosopher to think well of Polish traditionalism) and more generally among the western Slavs.49 The idea of modernity being little more than decay and corruption appeared in French Restoration and German Romantic thought as a reaction to the tumultuous events of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and not infrequently led to the conclusion that ‘Europe is dying’.50 It was the contrast with a young Slav world with its future still before it that helped locate the source of this decay not in Europe as a whole, but in a ‘West’ that was not only old but was already a putrefying corpse. The usage suggests that the invention of a modern notion of a monolithic ‘West’ as the locus of modernity, for good or ill, was the work not only of self-affirming Westerners or east European champions of domestic change, but also of east European critics of modernity.51 The opposition between a moribund West and the Slav nations appears in travel writing especially in the decades

49 For the origins of the idea in French and German philosophy, and in Russian usage (generally associated with Shevyrev’s famous 1841 article in Moskvitianin), see P.B. Struve, S.P. Shevyrev i zapadnyiia vnusheniia i istochniki teorii-aforizma o ‘gnilom’, ili ‘gniiushchem’ Zapadie (Belgrade: 1940). Even before his acquaintance with Shevryev, the young Karel Havlí∑ek was writing verses about the opposition between a Christ-loving Slavdom and the sophistical and decaying West (cited in Michael Henry Heim, The Russian journey of Karel Havlí∑ek Borovský [Munich: 1979], 22), though his West was more ‘ramshackle’ than ‘rotting’. See also Jovan SkerliΔ on Serbian attitudes to the ‘truli zapad’ in the 1860s in Omladina i njena književnost (Belgrade: 1966). 50 See, e.g., Philarète Chasles, ‘Littérature anglaise’, Revue des deux mondes 24 (1 Nov 1840), 363 (‘L’Europe s’en va!’). 51 Hans Lemberg, ‘Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffes im 19. Jahrhundert: Vom “Norden” zum “Osten” Europas’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 33 (1985), 74, notes in passing that equating Europe with the West was only possible from the ‘eastern’ location attributed to the Russians, though the same could be said of the Slavs in general; Christopher GoGwilt, The invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the double-mapping of Europe and empire (Stanford: 1995) gives a genealogy of ‘the West’ in nineteenth-century English usage, pointing to the influence of the Russian Nihilism of the 1860s as crucial.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 173

4/14/08 2:52:23 PM

174

Under Eastern Eyes

after 1848, in the atmosphere of reaction and crisis in Europe, in such different works such as A.I. Herzen’s Pis’ma iz Frantsii i Italii [Letters from France and Italy] (1855),52 J.I. Kraszewski’s Kartki z podróży 1858–1864 [Travel pages] (1866), or Ljubomir NenadoviΔ’s Pisma iz Nema∑ke [Letters from Germany] (1874). The term that was most commonly used to designate the Slavs in contrast to the West was ‘the Slav world’, a phrase that suggested not only a unified Slav culture and an entity entire unto itself, but that also evoked echoes of the confrontation between the Old World and the New, though in this case the old European West was being opposed to the young Slavs. The concept of a separate and distinctive Slav ‘world’ was probably most fully theorised by Russian writers.53 The phrase was popularised by Cyprien Robert in articles on ‘the Greco-Slav world’ between 1842–1845 in the influential Revue des deux mondes (which itself probably contributed to the currency of the term) and in his 1852 book Le monde slave (subtitled ‘its past, its present state, its future’). Well before that, however, ‘the Slav world’ was being used as shorthand to describe the totality of the Slavs, and as the framework for an itinerary appropriate to Slav travellers.54 What place did the East occupy in the new, Slav-centred map of Europe? Romantic contrasts of nature vs. society, culture vs. civilisation, emotion vs. reason put the Slavs in direct opposition to the German-Latin West, yet it proved surprisingly difficult to assign consistent cartographic coordinates to the ‘Slav world’. It was by no means always, unambiguously in the East. The Slav East did sometimes appear as the logical counterpart to the German-Latin West (and in French 52 Letters from France and Italy, 1847–1851, trans. J. Zimmerman (Pittsburgh: 1995). On Herzen’s treatment of Russia and the Slavs in this work, see Offord, Journeys to a graveyard, 167–96. 53 See Petrovich, Russian Panslavism, 67, 72. 54 The phrase was already in use in the first decades of the nineteenth century, e.g., by the Slovene philologist Bartolomaeus (Jernej) Kopitar; commenting in 1810 on a travel book by Friedrich Taube, he noted ‘the Slav world is great, but labourers are few, so one must be receive any study, even such an imperfect one, gratefully’, and pointed out that ‘without knowledge of the language, the travel account can easily turn out like that of Usbek in the Lettres persanes (but not always so pleasantly naïve)’, Kleinere Schriften (Vienna: 1857), 21.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 174

4/14/08 2:52:23 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

175

and German usage, this coinage contributed to the emergence of a more inclusive ‘Eastern Europe’ in the second half of the nineteenth century).55 The East was also Orthodoxy and the ‘Greco-Slav world’. But the East could also designate relations among the Slavs themselves, and in this sense the ‘Slav East’ referred to the Slav lands under Ottoman rule, with all the connotations of a Slav Orient. A consistent equation between Slavdom and Easternness was hard to make—and not just because of geography’s infinite relativity. Romantic Slavism did not neutralise the dichotomies of East and West, wildness and civilisation. It may have reversed the hierarchy of value favouring ‘the West’ and ‘civilisation’ when considering the Slav world in relation to the rest of Europe, but relationships within the Slav world were also imagined in the language of geocultural difference, often in highly contradictory ways. As a consequence, the road from the ‘Slav world’ to ‘Eastern Europe’ was not as straightforward as it may have appeared from France or Germany.

SLAV IDENTITIES AND ALTERITIES: RUSSIAN ORIENTATIONS The resulting contradictions between an ideal of a single Slav world and its divisions appear starkly in the writings of some of Slavism’s most active proponents. Travel accounts both by Russian Pan-Slavs and Czech scholarly Slavists provide vivid examples. Such accounts illustrate the ambiguities of the ‘Slav East’—but also suggest that the Euro-Orientalism that has been identified as animating French, German and English understandings of ‘Eastern Europe’ is not solely a project of Western imperialism (or of Western liberal capitalism), but also emerges from projects and purposes closer to home. In 1827, the Russian historian, Slav enthusiast and Pan-Slav publicist Mikhail P. Pogodin published a series of ‘historical aphorisms’ in the journal Moskovskii vestnik. These short texts anticipated several Slavophile ideas of the 1840s, sketching out a picture of a Europe ‘di55 See Lemberg, ‘Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffes’, and Ezequiel Adamovsky, ‘Euro-Orientalism and the making of the concept of Eastern Europe in France, 1810–1880,’ Journal of Modern History 77:3 (2005), 591– 628.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 175

4/14/08 2:52:24 PM

176

Under Eastern Eyes

vided historically between two parts, the West and the East’ (22).56 Pogodin was primarily concerned with the civilisational antithesis between Russia and the West, but he also understood Russia as part of a larger organic entity, for which he used the ‘world’ metaphor: ‘The Slavs form one single world’ (34). This world was located both geographically and culturally: ‘The East European tribes (i.e., the Slavs) form as a whole the midpoint between the European and the Asiatic ways of life’ (73). Pogodin’s vision of a Europe divided between East and West would continue to inform his analysis of relations between Russia, the Slavs and Europe throughout his career. ‘One must only understand that West is West and East is East’, he wrote at the start of the Crimean War: Our climate is different from that of the West, we have a different terrain, a different temperament, character, different blood, different physiognomy, different outlook, different ways of thinking, different beliefs, hopes, desires, pleasures, different relationships, different conditions, a different history, everything different!57

Pogodin’s journal of his 1839 tour through Europe, God v chuzhikh kraiiakh [A year in foreign parts] (Moscow: 1844), illustrated his aphorisms on Russia, the Slavs and the West through his travel experiences. Though the four volumes of his travelogue deal primarily with western Europe (Italy, France, England, the Low Counties and the German states), they are filled with Slav themes. Like Kollár, whose travel account had been published the previous year, Pogodin is alert for evidence of the Slavs’ presence in Europe wherever he goes—in the Vendée, for example, where the inhabitants’ Slav ancestry is demonstrated by their loyalty to their rulers ‘regardless of the times and the circumstances’, or in Meiringen, Switzerland, where even the clothes have something Slav about them (surely an echo of Kollár, who had 56 Later published as Historische Aphorismen (Leipzig: 1836): page numbers in the text refer to this edition. On Pogodin, see Ulrich Picht, M.P. Pogodin und die slavische Frage (Stuttgart: 1969); on his influence on Slavophile thought, Walicki, Slavophile controversy, 48–50; on his travels in western Europe, Offord, Journeys to a graveyard, 103–41. 57 Mikhail P. Pogodin, Sobranie sochineniia, 3 (Moscow: 1874), 252–3, cited in Petrovich, Russian Panslavism, 71.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 176

4/14/08 2:52:24 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

177

speculated the same about this region). There would be more traces of the Slavs apparent were it not for the Germans ‘who have erased the Slav name from the chronicles, from History, from the face of the earth’.58 On his travels in western Europe he describes encounters with a number of Slavs, either travelling themselves or in emigration (including Mickiewicz—3:128–32). His journeys begin, however, with two direct encounters with the Slav world, in Warsaw and then in Prague, which frame his subsequent travels, as his joyful return to Moscow concludes them. Warsaw and Prague reveal the principles behind Pogodin’s Slavism. In his view, it was ethnic affinity, expressed above all in the ties of language, that bound the Slavs together. An evening gathering of ‘Slav literati’ in Prague summed up his vision of the harmonious brotherhood of Slavdom: I found there almost all the tribes, twenty people in all. A Slovak— Šafařík; a Czech—∂elakovský, a Pole—Cybulski; a Great Russian— myself; a Little Russian—L. (There was also a Moravian and some Serbs, whose names I can’t make out in my diary.) Each spoke his own tongue, and all understood one another. This was a conversation such as even the Greek gods would have envied (1:137–8).

This sort of set-piece of pre-Babel harmony was a staple of Slav-centred travel writing: the implication was that ties of language were not just an aid to understanding, but indicated a deeper and more profound Slav communion. But although this moment of unmediated understanding among Slavs speaking their own tongues was the highpoint of Pogodin’s visit to Prague (‘a sweet moment in my life’), he had already undermined ideas of Slav linguistic equality in the description of his journey through Warsaw, only a few pages previously. His first impressions had been poor (only one Russian bath, and that disgusting) but his misgivings were unfounded: he spent a pleasant few days, mainly examining projects intended ‘to reconcile the new generation of Poles with the current order of things, and convince them of the 58 M.P. Pogodin, God v chuzhikh kraiiakh, 1839: dorozhnyi dnevnik, 4 vols. (Moscow: 1844), 3:70–1; 4:140; 3:131. Subsequent page references given hereafter in the main text are to this edition.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 177

4/14/08 2:52:25 PM

178

Under Eastern Eyes

inevitability of union with Russia’ (1:57). One of these was the promotion of Russian language learning. This was not intended to eradicate Polish; suppressing a language was never good. But Pogodin could not help musing on the advantages of Russian, which included ‘so many of the general characteristics of the individual Slav dialects that sooner or later, all by itself, without any special effort, it will become the Slavic literary language’ (1:60–61). Why this would be necessary was unclear, given the mutual transparency of the Slav languages he then went on to describe in Prague, but like Russian rule in Poland, Russian linguistic and cultural hegemony among the other Slavs was ‘inevitable’. In his travels through Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, Switzerland and other western countries, Pogodin compares what he sees to what he knows. ‘We Slavs…’, he writes here, and ‘we Russians…’, without much differentiation. In Naples he muses on European civilisation and enlightenment: Why do you Europeans pride yourself on your enlightenment and boast of your civilization? Where is it? Where is it? One thousand scribblers in France, a million in Germany, a hundred in Russia, and that at the expense of Mr. Smirdin59—there is your enlightenment. What does it consist of, when you consider the internal affairs of France, England, Austria…? Not to speak of Italy, of Spain, or of Sicily, of Ireland, of Turkey, under whose yoke 15 million Christians are labelled dogs? Civilization is a fine thing, with politics and diplomacy its flower! […] There are one or two precious fruits on this tree, but what of the rest? A whited sepulchre. [2:163–64]

His evidence of the inner emptiness of European civilisation is the Neapolitan ‘frutti di mare’, the main food, he claims, of the impoverished lazzaroni—‘marine rubbish, without taste, without smell, without life, without blood, something that crunches between the teeth, with which the unfortunate heir of Naples’ natural riches relieves his hunger or better, fills his stomach’—and he calls on Russia’s Hegelian philosophers and journalists to ‘taste the frutti di mare and then prove that 59 A.F. Smirdin, Moscow publisher and bookseller, famed for his generosity to authors.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 178

4/14/08 2:52:25 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

179

everything is fine, necessary and rational’ (2:166). Such Russians were included, damningly, among the self-deluding rationalists he apostrophises as ‘you Europeans’. The term ‘European’ has the force of a swearword for Pogodin when he considers either Western civilisation or Russian emulation. Yet soon after his visit to Naples, in Trieste, after describing the national movements of the South Slavs (‘Illyrians’), he meets a Serbian teacher and praises him as ‘a highly educated, European man’. When asked why he hasn’t left for autonomous Serbia, he replies that there is no place there for education or enlightenment. Pogodin agrees, but notes that Serbia needs outside assistance. It cannot draw up a constitution or find its way by itself: ‘A good, excellent, valorous nation—but still savage’ (2:182). Clearly the epithet ‘European’ could have more positive connotations, when applied in the Balkans—in much the same way that Pogodin applied it with reference to Africa and Asia, also populated by ‘savages’ who cannot compete with ‘Europeans’ (4:26). All sorts of Russians travelling in the Balkans in the nineteenth century self-confidently described themselves as ‘European’ in contrast to the local inhabitants who, implicitly or explicitly, were excluded from Europe.60 In the 1820s Pushkin could, not entirely tongue in cheek, describe going east from his place of exile in Moldavia to Odessa as ‘putting in my appearance in Europe,’ where ‘the restaurant & the Italian Opera reminded me of old times, and by golly they refreshed my soul’.61 While travels in central or western Europe might prompt soul-searching over Russia’s differences from the West, encounters in the Orthodox and Ottoman lands regularly evoked self-congratulation at the distance Russia had travelled towards Europe since Peter the Great’s reforms. Whether horrified at the situation of the Balkan Christians or charmed by the exotic flavour of local life, these Russian travellers found confirmation of their own European achieve60 On the European consciousness of Russians in nineteenth-century Bulgaria, see Todorova’s remarks, 81–8. Useful collections of Russian travel accounts of the region: Russkie o Serbii i serbakh, ed. A.L. Shemiakin (St. Petersburg: 2006); Ruski pǔtepisi za bǔlgarskite zemi: XVII–XIX vek, ed. M. Kozhukarova (Sofia: 1986). 61 To L.S. Pushkin, August 25, 1823, in Complete works of Alexander Pushkin, 15 vols. (Downham Market, UK: 1999–2003), 10 (Letters, 1815–1826): 135.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 179

4/14/08 2:52:26 PM

180

Under Eastern Eyes

ment in Balkan difference. Expressions of compassion for the plight of the Ottoman subject peoples and of Slav or Orthodox solidarity do not fundamentally alter the fact that these travellers represented Balkan societies according to dichotomies of European/non-European or civilization/barbarism that derived from the same Enlightenment discourses that animated Western perceptions of the region, and that the language of non-European wildness, immaturity and backwardness legitimated Russian involvement in the region, sometimes very explicitly. One difference, perhaps, is that the manipulation of degrees of ethnic and religious similarity, as well as of developmental difference, allowed Russians to claim a special role in the mission of liberating the region from the consequences of Ottoman rule and introducing it to Europe.62 The other difference is that these Russians were adopting western discourses that were still persistently used to challenge Russia’s place in Europe. Dostoevskii’s aphorism, ‘In Europe we were Tartars, but in Asia we are Europeans’, might equally well have been applied to the Balkans. Romantic Russian nationalists such as Pogodin tended to treat the idea of Europe more critically, aligning Russia not with modern European civilisation, but with a conservative Slav utopia that was the antithesis of ‘Europe’. Yet, oddly, the idea of Balkan Europeanness and non-Europeanness was also an issue for the conservative Russian nationalists and Slavophiles who published travel notes on the Slav world. For all the emphatic distinctions they made between the West and the Slav world, and for all their staged scenes of Slavic brotherhood, these travellers persistently drew distinctions among the Slavs. One scale was that of an idealised ‘Slavness’, defined according to criteria rather arbitrarily assigned and assessed by these Russian observers. Drawn primarily from an idealised image of Russian experience, these usually included such markers as the Orthodox religion, social collectivism, and a harmonious relationship between rulers and ruled.63 In general, this meant that the western Slavs, the Poles, Czechs and Croats, were understood as somehow less truly Slav than 62 For the Russian civilising mission in Moldavia and Wallachia, see Victor Taki, ‘Moldavia and Wallachia in the eyes of Russian observers in the first half of the 19th century’, East Central Europe 32:1–2 (2005), 99–123. 63 On this, see especially Petrovich, Russian Panslavism, 92–103.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 180

4/14/08 2:52:26 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

181

the Orthodox South Slavs. In his published travel account, the young Slavophile V.A. Panov concluded that the south-eastern Slavs had preserved Slav social principles and also Orthodoxy, ‘the pledge of the purity and greatness of the Slav tribe’ in ‘greater purity than is the case with the North-Western Slavs’. Comparing travel notes with Kollár in Pest, he also objected to Kollár’s understanding of Slav reciprocity, given the superior qualities of Russian history and nationhood: we have our own specificity [samobytnost’], our own literature; and when they start requiring us to renounce our own particular national character to accept a common one together with those other small tribes who 50 years ago considered themselves dead […] then, of course, this requirement is more likely to arouse revulsion in us than sympathy and reciprocity.64

The Austrian Slavs had become Westernised, according to A.F. Gil’ferding’s travel notes from the Habsburg and Ottoman lands in 1855–1857: In their social principles, in their religious ideas, in their entire intellectual sphere, these Slavs belong to a foreign world, the Protestant and Catholic West; and this foreign world, having killed off the organic development of Slavic life among them, in exchange has given them only conventional forms.

He exempted the Austrian Serbs for their Orthodoxy in a footnote, but would later go on to compare the experience of the liturgy in an Orthodox church in Austria unfavourably to that in Ottoman-ruled Herzegovina: ‘In Austria something constantly reminds you even in an Orthodox church that you are in Austria, and that even the Orthodox church is in the hands of an Austrian administration.’65 Yet even the

64 Panov, Puteshestvie po zemliam zapadnykh i iuzhnykh slavian (Moscow: 1844), 4; Vstrecha s Evropoi: pis’ma V.A. Panova, ed. T. Ivantyshynova and M.Iu. Dostal’ (Bratislava: 1996), 107. 65 A.F. Gil’ferding, ‘Razvitie narodnosti u zapadnykh Slavian’, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: 1868–1874), 2:85; idem, ‘Poezdka po Gercegovine, Bosnii i Staroi Serbii’ [1859], ibid., 3:32.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 181

4/14/08 2:52:26 PM

182

Under Eastern Eyes

Serbs of newly autonomous Serbia were subject to intense criticism for their Westernisation in travel accounts by these Slavophile Russians. Aksakov’s remarks on Montenegro, cited earlier, are matched by his strictures on Serbia, decrying ‘premature’ attempts to adopt ‘the external forms of the European bourgeoisie’ and the ‘forms of external administration as western Europe understands it’, acts which threaten to undermine Serbia’s ‘earlier direct, somewhat savage force of nationality’, and turn its ‘purely Slav’ popular parliament (skupština) into ‘some sort of sorry European representative system’.66 Although another of these critics, V.I. Lamanskii, thought the Serbs of Serbia retained their Slav nationality in a purer form than any of the Austrian Slavs (who often ‘speak and write in the Slav language much worse than they do in German’), and considered that these Serbs had an advantage over the western Slavs in that they could ‘better comprehend Russia and the tasks and vocation of the Slav world’, he also castigated the western-educated Serbian intelligentsia for ‘wanting to demonstrate their Europeanism to the western powers’ and for ‘being ready for the most desperate lies to the Europeans, just to show them that the Serbian people has nothing in common with the Russians’. This showed their ‘semi-education’, and their inferiority to the ‘simple Orthodox Serbs’ and the Serbian peasant, who ‘with his fine moral feeling and common sense profoundly grasps the enormous significance of shared faith and shared race’.67 All this was quite consistent with Russian Slavism’s conservative Russian-oriented utopianism. But what is remarkable is how often these very same travellers, like Pogodin, also evaluated the Balkan Slavs according to criteria of ‘Europeanness’ defined in terms of development and material culture identical to those applied by Russian Westernisers and west Europeans. Thus Panov, after attending the Christmas celebrations of an Orthodox Serb family in Dubrovnik in 66 Aksakov, Slavianskii vopros, 22–5. See also his letters in Russkie o Serbii i serbakh, 15–22. The most extreme expression of such criticisms was the so-called ‘Epistle to the Serbs’ written by Khomiakov in 1860, and signed by ten members of the Moscow Slavophile and Pan-Slav circle, including I.S. Aksakov and M.P. Pogodin; on this see Petrovich, Russian Panslavism, 96–101. 67 Vladimir Lamanskii, Serbiia i iuzhno-slavianskie provintsii Avstrii (St. Petersburg: 1864), 13–4, 47–8.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 182

4/14/08 2:52:26 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

183

his search for ancient Slav customs now lost in Russia, remarked of their ‘patriarchal way of life’ that it ‘would be perfect, if it could be joined with enlightenment’. (There was a degree of class awkwardness involved here: he consorted mainly with the city’s Catholic elite and so did not know many Orthodox in Dubrovnik, since they belonged to different social circles: ‘many did me various services, I met a lot of them nearly every day, and even spoke with them, but did not know where they lived nor even their names’.) In Belgrade in 1843, Panov was shocked by the previous year’s rebellion of the Constitutionalists, the deposition of the ObrenoviΔes and the election of Aleksandar KaradjordjeviΔ as Prince, all with the support of the Porte. He dramatised his reaction by describing Belgrade as a city of contrasts. One aspect was ‘Turkish’ (modes of dress made the Serbs indistinguishable from Turks, to his horror, while the city’s urban character was also Turkish: ‘badly paved streets, little unclean houses’), and he explicitly linked this ‘Turkish’ quality to the disorder, violence and ‘wilfulness’ of the rebels. The positive contrast was the ‘European character’ of some of the city’s buildings (including ‘some quite large Orthodox churches’) which had been constructed under the ObrenoviΔes, and which ‘clearly testified to me the good intentions of the previous regime’. The Serbs may have been ‘purer’ Slavs than the Poles or Czechs, but were they completely European?68 Gil’ferding on the other hand, like the Slavophile disciple that he was, heaped scorn on the Belgrade Serbs who had ‘taken on a certain foreign varnish and the false glitter of “civilization”’ but this revulsion against ‘civilization’ (always in quotation marks) didn’t prevent him from enjoying the ‘clean European bed’ a Bosnian Franciscan offered him in Busova∑a.69 (Otherwise Gil’ferding compensated for the rigours of travel in Hercegovina with an inflatable travel pillow made of elastic-rubber, surely itself a product of ‘civilization’. The innkeeper’s reaction: ‘By God, I’ve seen everything, but I’ve never seen a marvel like this—a man that has to lie on air’.)70 Gil’ferding cited with approval the remarks of Derviš-beg of Travnik, who had built himself a ‘real 68 Panov, Vstrecha s Evropoi, 93–4, 104–5. 69 Gil’ferding, ‘Poezdka po Gercegovine, Bosnii i Staroi Serbii’, in Sobranie sochinenii, 3:197–8, 259. 70 Ibid., 65.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 183

4/14/08 2:52:27 PM

184

Under Eastern Eyes

upper-class European house’ after his journeys in Austria, and who explained his attitude thus: I long ago saw that we Bosnians are stupid people, we know nothing and understand nothing, while the Germans and French live intelligently. I have taken what I could from them. Last year I went to Germany (i.e. Austria), to Osijek, Pest and Vienna. There I saw my fill of marvels: the ‘vapuri’ (steamboats), iron cars (locomotives), factories and such tall houses!

Gil’ferding told him he should go even farther west, to Paris or London: ‘There you would really see marvels!’71 On the other hand, Gil’ferding thought that the Orthodox Serbs of Sarajevo had learnt nothing from their travels in the West: ‘The occasional [Orthodox] Sarajevan has been twenty times in Europe and has even, perhaps, studied commercial sciences in Vienna, but none of this is enough to alter his external appearance or his psyche,’ as proven by their inconveniently traditional housing, their harsh treatment of women, and their failure to fund popular schooling.72 Gil’ferding’s view of the relative locations of the Russians and the South Slavs is summed up in his introduction to a collection of his travel writings on Bosnia, Herzegovina and Old Serbia: they were the record ‘of the impressions made on a European by these little known lands and their autochthonous population, as yet untouched by our education’.73 It was as though these travellers saw the world through two lenses, each calibrated to different, contradictory standards: one ‘Slav’ and essentialist; and one ‘European’ and developmental, even liberal. The image that was produced, however, was a consistent one, envisioning Russia’s leading role among the Slavs as example, arbiter and champion. Even while castigating Russia’s lamentable Westernisation and loss of Slav purity, the Russian Pan-Slavs—paradoxically—made Russia’s superior level of development on a ‘European’ model an addi-

71 Ibid., 261. 72 Ibid., 58–9. 73 ‘Predgovor redaktora “Zapisa carskog ruskog geografskog društva”’ [1859], in A.F. Gil’ferding, Putovanje po Hercegovini, Bosni i Staroj Srbiji, ed. and trans. M. Ekme∑iΔ (Sarajevo: 1972), 20.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 184

4/14/08 2:52:27 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

185

tional factor for their authority among the Slav nations. (The paradox was scarcely the sole prerogative of the Russians. We have already seen Sapieha make the same awkward reconciliation of Morlach simplicity and virtue with Polish civilisation.) One consequence of this Russian perspective was a determined resistance among other Slav patriots, who themselves used the vocabulary of East and West as a part of their defence against Russian hegemony. A case in point is that of the Czech poet and journalist Karel Havlí∑ek (1821–1856).74 As an ardent Slav patriot in 1843–1844 he travelled to Moscow, engaged as a tutor for Pogodin’s children (though he ended up in the household of S.P. Shevryev, co-editor with Pogodin of the journal Moskovitianin). In his Obrazy z Rus [Pictures from Russia], first published in journals as travel articles sent from Russia, he was moved by the Russians’ commitment to Slav reciprocity, and deplored the insidious influence of foreigners (especially Germans) in the Russian government and elite. Havlí∑ek’s Russia was both an inspiration and a warning for Czechs threatened with German cultural and political power. At the same time, however, Havlí∑ek was becoming disillusioned with Russia as a force for Slav emancipation, particularly through his exposure to Russian and Polish national policies in the Ukraine (issues elaborated more forcefully in his private letters). After his return from Russia his famous 1846 article, ‘Slav and Czech’, made his disappointment public. He supported his arguments against naïve Slavism with direct reference to his travels: not only had he been a Russophile, he had also visited both Poland and Russia—‘an experienced man is always believed more, and more readily’. I learned to know Poland and I did not like it. With a feeling of hostility I left the Sarmatian country, and in the worst cold season I arrived by sleigh in Moscow, being warmed mostly by the Slavic feeling in my heart. The freezing temperature in Russia, and other aspects of Russian life, extinguished the last spark of Pan-Slav love in me. Cosmopolitanism was always completely alien to me, and so I returned to Prague as a Czech, a simple determined Czech, even with some 74 On Havlí∑ek’s Slav politics, and on this journey in particular, see Heim, The Russian journey.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 185

4/14/08 2:52:27 PM

186

Under Eastern Eyes secret sour feeling against the name Slav, which a better knowledge of Russia and Poland had made suspect to me.75

But the texts in Obrazy z Rus already hint at Havlí∑ek’s ambivalences, in terms that echo Slavism’s paradoxical uses of discourses of European dualism. His perception of these fraternal Slavs as ultimately different appears as much as anything in his use of the vocabulary of cultural geography. Havlí∑ek placed the Russians (and the Poles) firmly in the East, both when praising their good qualities (‘a lovely, heart-felt sense of family rules everywhere in the east of Europe, among the Russians and also the Poles’) and their less attractive ones: ‘Trade is for them, as for all eastern peoples, warfare without bloodshed’ and, calling on another Orientalist stereotype, would attribute their ignorance of the concept of honesty and their tolerance of sharp business practices to the influence of despotism ‘in eastern lands’, something presented as alien to the Czech reader’s own experience.76 For Havlí∑ek, the deterministic language of Europe’s geocultural divisions helped justify Czech autonomy and distinctive national identity (and would be echoed by other Slavs who did not hesitate to invoke the spectre of an ‘Asiatic’ Russia when it suited their interests).77

SLAV IDENTITIES AND ALTERITIES: CZECH ORIENTATIONS One final example of the paradoxes of Slavism’s discourses of difference, here returning to the Balkan Slavs as seen as seen through the eyes of scholarly Slavism, in this case the work of the Czech Slavist Konstantin Jire∑ek (1854–1918). Jire∑ek had been born and raised in Vienna in a circle of Czech Slavists and imperial bureaucrats, but his family moved to Prague after the failure of the Habsburg ‘trialist’ experiment of 1871 that had briefly brought Jire∑ek’s father into the 75 Havlí∑ek-Borovský, Politické spisy (Prague: 1900) 1, 28–70, cited here from H. Kohn (ed.) Nationalism: its meaning and history (New York, 1965), 156. 76 Havlí∑ek, Obrazy z Rus (Havlí∑k∫v Brod: 1948), 61, 83. 77 E.g., Palacký’s letter to the Frankfurt Parliament (1848) defending Austria as ‘Europe’s shield and refuge’ against ‘Asiatic elements of all kinds’, cited in Kohn, Pan-Slavism, 77; or the Pole Frantiszek Duchi≈ski, who in his Peuples Aryâs et Tourans, agriculteurs et nomades (Paris: 1864), argued that Russians were Asians and not Slavs or Europeans.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 186

4/14/08 2:52:28 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

187

Hohenwart cabinet. (Government negotiations with the Czechs had aroused the vigorous opposition of liberal Germans; the claim was made that Bohemian autonomy would amount to a ‘Barbarenstaat’.)78 Early exposure to Slav scholarship in the family circle, reinforced by his travels through the Balkans, shaped Jire∑ek’s choice of an academic career in Slavistics. Despairing of a position in Prague because of conflicts between the Austrian German, ‘foreign’ German and Czech factions at the university,79 he accepted the offer of a position in the new Bulgarian state in 1879. Jire∑ek rose to the position of Education Minister, but left Bulgaria in 1884 when he was elected to a chair in history in Prague. His history of Bulgaria had been published in Czech and German in 1876 to great acclaim (it was this that had brought him the offer of the Bulgarian position). His later studies of Balkan history, published largely in German, reinforced his European-wide reputation. His more popular writings included several travel accounts, including a journey through Serbia from 1875 and a volume of travels in Bulgaria published in 1888 (both in Czech), and several anonymous travel sketches of Bulgaria written in 1879–1882 for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung.80 Jire∑ek described his travel accounts as ‘not feuilletons, but based on a detailed study of the countries and their population, with the most accurate possible portrayal of the physiognomy of the regions, their inhabitants and their cultural and economic life’.81 His Czech travel accounts have little of the earlier Romantic pathos of Slav solidarity, though he nods to the ‘sincere sympathies of the Czech people’ 78 See Jan Křen, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft: Tschechen und Deutsche, 1780–1918 (Munich: 1996), 148–9. 79 According to his autobiography, in Bǔlgarski dnevnik, ed. S. Argirov, 2 vols. (Plovdiv: 1930), 1:v–xxxii. 80 Konstantin Jire∑ek, ‘Srbsko, země a lid’, Osvěta 5–8 (1875) (as ‘Srbija, zemlja i narod’, trans. O. Šafarik, in Zbornik Konstantina Jire∑eka, ed. M. DiniΔ [Belgrade: 1959] 1, 21–69); Konstantin Jire∑ek, Cesty po Bulharsku (Prague: 1888); Bulgarian translation, Pǔtuvaniia po Bǔlgariia, trans. S. Argirov (Plovdiv: 1899; 2nd edition Sofia: 1974); ‘Dopiski na K. Irechek vǔrkhu Bǔlgariia v chuzhdi vestnitsi prez 1879–1882 god.’ [I], ed. and trans. S. Argirov, Rodina (1938), 183–92; and [II] Rodina (1939), 143–61. For Jire∑ek’s Orientalism and especially his articles in the Allgemeine Zeitung, see Mishkova, ‘In quest’. 81 Jire∑ek, Bǔlgarski dnevnik 1:xv.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 187

4/14/08 2:52:28 PM

188

Under Eastern Eyes

in following the development of these new Slav states. Though undoubtedly sharing these sympathies, Jire∑ek consistently portrays both Serbia and Bulgaria through the eyes of a European measuring the distance between his own society’s developmental norms and those of a half-civilised demi-Orient. The features that are selected as interesting for his audience are those that deviate most markedly from ‘our own familiar Europe’.82 These are for the most part matters of material life and culture. Thus, for example, in central Serbia Jire∑ek broaches a discussion of a matter of visceral concern to all travellers in terms of its ‘Europeanness’: That place which in Europe no dwelling place can be without, stands a little removed from the han [inn], and even in the best inns it fills the West European traveller with extreme discomfort. It usually stands elevated on posts. In many areas it offers the traveller a tragicomic spectacle: as soon as someone climbs the ladder to the outhouse, a battle-cry goes up in the yard and the pigs crowd beneath to gobble up their booty.83

In Belgrade and Sofia, Jire∑ek describes urban plans, buildings and public institutions, though in both cities he prefers to describe the old rather than the new: thus in Belgrade he discusses passport regulations in force ‘until recently’ (illiterate officials had accepted any printed or stamped document as a passport); in Sofia he concentrates on the city before its modernisation, while the new ‘European’ city receives only a few passages. In Belgrade he concludes by suggesting that the interior of Serbia is of greater interest, because ‘it is different to that which we have become accustomed to see, for here people and places have preserved their primordial, primitive condition, a condition we have been separated from in our country by a series of tumultuous centuries’.84 82 Jire∑ek, ‘Srbija, zemlja i narod’, 23, 38. Other contemporaneous Czech travellers in the Balkans preserve a more or less Romantic Slav discourse albeit, as in the case of Montenegro, with similarly ambiguous messages about belonging to Europe; cf. for example the accounts by Hole∑ek, or writers such as Jaroslav Jirásek or Jan Wagner (anthologised in Bǔlgariia prez pogleda na cheshki pǔteshestvenitsi, ed. V. Bekhin’ova [Sofia: 1984]). 83 Jire∑ek, ‘Srbija, zemlja i narod’, 46. 84 Jire∑ek, ‘Srbija, zemlja i narod’, 23, 38; idem, Cesty po Bulharsku, 23, 27–8.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 188

4/14/08 2:52:29 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

189

The ‘most accurate possible portrayal’ of these new Slav states for the most part concentrates on monuments of history, ancient and modern, and the more exotic aspects of popular life, constantly comparing and contrasting them to ‘European’ models. The narrator’s ‘we’, in these Czech texts, shifts its referent constantly between the Czech, the West European and the European, but consistently equates these in opposition to the Oriental, the Balkan and the Bulgarian or Serb (to the extent that the Bulgarian translation of Cesty po Bulharsku regularly translates ‘we’ as ‘the West’).85 Only in occasional passages is there a hint that the Czechs might occupy some third position, not quite equivalent to the French or German Westerner, analogous to the Slavs of the Balkan Peninsula. In Belgrade, for example, Jire∑ek registers the social position of immigrant Bulgarians, ‘gardeners, builders, dairymen, potters, and so on. In the summer they come from afar to Serbia to work, and they are in Serbia what the Slovenes are in Croatia, the Slovaks in Hungary, or the Czechs in Vienna’.86 Still, even the sympathetic Czech readers of these accounts were left in little doubt that an enormous distance separated themselves from the peoples of Balkan Peninsula. Regardless of the modernising changes that rendered Sofia ‘more European’ or park benches in Kragujevac ‘just the same as anywhere in the West’, these lands and people were described as profoundly alien in their habits of mind and life.87 Even where the forms were familiar, somehow they rarely betrayed anything more than superficial change, or laughable pretension. Jire∑ek’s anonymous newspaper sketches of Bulgaria were an exercise in propaganda, meant to influence German public opinion in favour of Prince Alexander, and were far more acerbic. The sharplydrawn characterisations and shrewd observations notwithstanding, the sketches reduce much of the complexity of Bulgarian politics to a simple formula of European order vs. Oriental anarchy. Thus in spite of Bulgaria’s ‘perfect copy of the most up-to-date Western constitutions’, it was ‘difficult for anyone to imagine a sadder caricature of

85 Compare for example Jire∑ek, Cesty po Bulharsku, 73 and idem, Pǔtuvaniia po Bǔlgariia, 159. 86 Jire∑ek, ‘Srbija, zemlja i narod’, 23. 87 Jire∑ek, Cesty po Bulharsku, 23–8 on Sofia; ‘Srbija, zemlja i narod’, 55 on Kragujevac.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 189

4/14/08 2:52:29 PM

190

Under Eastern Eyes

modern European parliamentarism’, in which political programmes were defined by ‘purely personal sympathies and antipathies, so widespread in the Orient’, where arguments were unsupported by facts, but ‘only with general words, as is usual in the East’; delivered with a ‘spiritually impoverished Byzantine phraseology’. ‘In vain did some people draw attention to and point out as an example the practice of the Western parliaments; they were simply ridiculed.’ This picture justified Jire∑ek’s conclusion that Bulgaria needed a ‘greater strengthening of the sphere of power of the government, and particularly the power of the Prince’.88 Similarly, a systematic comparison of Eastern Rumelia with Bulgaria contrasted Rumelia’s ‘perfectly southern-European character’, its links to the outside world, its industrious people, its ‘organic statute, not worked out by local people but by a European commission’, and its respect for Western opinion (‘what will Europe say?’), with Bulgaria, ‘where one feels that he has entered a country retarded by an entire century’; where the population occupies ‘the lowest level of economic development, while the peasants of the Sofia district, bear-like figures with filthy sheepskin coats and heavy fur caps, as ugly in appearance as apes, can be numbered among the most backward people on our continent’, led by ‘an urban community of semi-intelligentsia who, with a few honourable exceptions of course, have united in their character a marvellous amalgam of everything that is bad in Byzantine, Turkish, Russian and Western civilization’. Here the point was to reassure readers that a union of Rumelia and Bulgaria presented little present danger, but that if it did come about, Rumelia’s civilising influence would improve stability in the region. Jire∑ek’s overall portrait of Bulgaria was hardly flattering. Not even the attempt to affect a ‘European extérieur’ in dress won his approval: the Czech’s sharp eyes were able to tell that the Bulgarian sporting a top-hat betrayed ‘by unconscious movements of the head beneath the pressure of a new hat, that this head had only a short time previously been covered by a fez’. In short, everything was ‘a terrible hodge-podge of Oriental vulgarity and mis-comprehended fragments of European culture.’89 Jire∑ek’s diary notes that these sketches were a great success: Prince Alexander sent his thanks, and Count Khevenhüller, the Austrian diplomatic rep88 Jire∑ek, ‘Dopiski na K. Irechek vǔrkhu Bǔlgariia’ [I], 183–92. 89 Jire∑ek, ‘Dopiski na K. Irechek vǔrkhu Bǔlgariia’ [II], 143–61.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 190

4/14/08 2:52:29 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

191

resentative in Sofia, recommended them to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna.90 The sketches understandably made no mention of the author’s Slav connections (their anonymity and ‘Occidental’ authorial voice guaranteed them an authority that this information might have compromised with a German audience). But Jire∑ek’s diaries from the period suggest that the sentiments they expressed about Bulgaria reflected his own personal reaction to the country, regardless of his Bulgarian friendships, his contributions to the consolidation of the state and its educational system, and his commitment to scholarly study of Bulgarian history. Jire∑ek’s political conservatism meant he had little time for the Liberal leaders who enjoyed the support of the populace in the initial struggles over the government (though it made him a partisan of Alexander of Battenburg); the frustrations of an expert hindered in his work by prejudices against foreigners provoked outbursts against Bulgarian parochialism. The people here are ready to hurl stones at anyone, irrationally; no enthusiasm, no patriotism, only speculation; no sense for scholarship; stupidity and ignorance; no respect for deserving locals; my—lost career, I am losing my health, jostling, sacrificing myself—for what? How I wish I could go to Europe for a while, just to see people.91

In an important article challenging the notion of a Western hegemony over the production of Balkan self-images, Diana Mishkova stresses the source of such depictions as Jire∑ek’s: not the European centre but the European periphery, and a periphery that was itself being re-evaluated in terms of its European credentials. Mishkova is surely correct to see scholarly Slavism’s participation in the creation of a pejorative Balkanism as ‘an act of identification with the liberal, not just epistemological (ethnocentric or Enlightenment) map of modernity’. Jire∑ek’s

90 Jire∑ek, Bǔlgarski dnevnik, 1:122, 272. 91 Jire∑ek, Bǔlgarski dnevnik, 1:112. Nikolai Aretov, ‘Problematichnost i naprezheniia v slavianskata identichnost: Konstantin Ire∑ek i Bǔlgarite’, Slavianska filologiia 23 (2003), 208–20, has demonstrated how Jire∑ek’s behaviour provided the pretext for the emergence of ‘something like an “Occidentalist” discourse’ in Bulgarian circles.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 191

4/14/08 2:52:29 PM

192

Under Eastern Eyes

self-image was emphatically that of a Westerner and a European venturing among Others even when exploring a shared, Slav history, but when, in a moment of fury, he reaches for a German epithet to damn the Bulgarians (‘ein barbarisches und wildes Sauvolk’), is it entirely fanciful to hear in this an echo of German charactersations of the Czechs in Vienna?92 Central European scholarly Slavism was little different to Russian Pan-Slavism in being ‘paradoxically capable of accommodating a shared, often exalted Slavic messianism and an Orientalist distance undermining the idea of a Pan-European cultural belonging.’93 No wonder the Bulgarians—revealed to the world and to themselves in such terms—would develop an ambiguous sense of their own relation to Europe. And no wonder, either, that a cohesive Slav identity—let alone an East European one—was so elusive.

‘DOMOPIS’ The travel writing discussed here had a self-consciously ideological role: it set out to reveal the extent and antiquity of Slav settlement in Europe, to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the Slav world and to popularise the messages of Slavism. With their assumptions of a close congruence between narrator, subject matter and readership, travel accounts of the Slav world elaborated a topographical genre that might be termed ‘domopis’ or ‘homeland writing’, to coin a Slav-style neologism on the model of ‘putopis’, ‘cestopis’ or ‘podróżopisarstwo’— ‘road’ or ‘travel’ writing. These writings made it possible for readers to experience—even if only vicariously—a Slav community that existed far more in the imagination than it ever did in any institutional form. Slav domopis accounts, like Slavism itself, drew much of their force and legitimacy from the attempt to offer an alternative to the ways that the Slavs were represented by others. Even so, it is difficult to ignore the influence of Western models on the ways Slavism represented its own internally-generated differences and hierarchies. These travellers might invert the binary categories that had been developed elsewhere to define East and West, Slav and European, and reverse their values; they might combine them with other criteria to ambiguous or contra92 Jire∑ek, Bǔlgarski dnevnik, 1:215. 93 Mishkova, 46.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 192

4/14/08 2:52:30 PM

Travels Through the Slav World

193

dictory effect. At the same time, however, Slav domopis accounts necessarily move beyond these borrowed dichotomies. Precisely because travels in the Slav world developed within and against a context of preexisting Western discourses of alterity, they employed a three-way set of referents that located the travellers and their societies with reference both to the Slav world and to a wider horizon: us, them, those others out there. ‘Those others out there’, whether this meant Europe or the Orient, served as the point of reference that ultimately defined the wider hierarchy of value. However, the place occupied in this scheme by the traveller’s society, the other Slavs, and ‘those others out there’ was not entirely fixed and stable. The relationship between ‘us’, ‘them’ and ‘those others’ could vary widely, all the way from alignment with ‘fraternal Slavs’ against the West, to identification with other ‘Europeans’ against the Orient (including a Slav Orient).94 R.J.W. Evans has advanced a generous assessment of Slavism as representing ‘humanity mingled with tribalism’, a Slav cosmopolitanism joined with a concern for the specific and local in fruitful interaction.95 It’s worth remembering that in all of its nineteenth-century manifestations, Slavism was a project that developed in tension with the formal state structures governing the Slav peoples—even in the Russian case, Pan-Slavism never received consistent official government support, not excepting the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78. Without any state power standing behind an all-Slav idea, the tensions between the central-integrative and local-pluralist impulses were much less politically charged than they were in other projects of nationalist topography.96 Slav-inspired travel writing could both promote wider Slav cultural and even political connections, and at the same time lay the groundwork for more narrowly defined identities—in the same way that Slavism functioned as both supranational ideology and as midwife to individual Slav national movements over the course of the nineteenth century. But as these national movements gained power,

94 The formulation of ‘us, them, those others’ was suggested by Michael Harbsmeier at the workshop ‘Under Eastern Eyes’ in Sofia in 2005. 95 R.J.W. Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c. 1683– 1867 (Oxford: 2006), 110–1. 96 On centre-regional tensions in Greek national topographies, see Peckham, National histories, ch. 4 and 5.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 193

4/14/08 2:52:30 PM

194

Under Eastern Eyes

the character of the domopis account shifted as well, redefining the relations between traveller, implied readership and subject matter, the ‘domestic space’ being mapped out by travel. Like the maps of eastern Europe that succeeded Šafařík’s monochrome map of the Slav world, travel depictions of Slav homelands would become far more kaleidoscopic and variegated—and their topographies far more territorialised—with the consolidation of separate national movements.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 194

4/14/08 2:52:30 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery: Hungarians in Hungary and Abroad, 1750–1850 Irina V. Popova-Nowak

Gilbert Keith Chesterton once noted: ‘What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.’ The English wit thus grasped the nature of travel as a constant movement between two worlds—the familiar world that the traveller leaves behind and the new world that the traveller is exploring. It is this relationship between the travellers and their worlds that will be at the centre of this paper. Research on travel shows that the traveller’s movement between two worlds means ‘being nowhere’ so that the traveller ‘does not try to impose any power relations on the foreign culture but rather contemplate and rationalise it’. Travel, then, ‘is not the simple inscription of an established meaning over a neutralized, identityless other’.1 Other researchers point out the dialogical relationship of the traveller with the environment, meaning that an individual examines and explores objects of curiosity from different angles, connects them with his/her own world and transforms them into something familiar, thus defining and redefining his/her identity.2 In other words, travel is the negotiation of identity by bringing together multiple contexts of the traveler’s life and the host culture.3 The paper shows multiple travel agendas of Hungarian travellers that revealed their constant crossing of geographic and symbolic borders

1 Brian Musgrove, ‘Travel and unsettlement: Freud on vacation’, in Travel writing and empire, ed. S. Clark (London & New York: 1999), 31–2, 39. 2 Justin Stagl, A history of curiosity, 1550–1800 (Chur, Switzerland: 1995), 2–3. 3 On negotiated identity and mechanisms of inter-cultural communication, see Adrian Holliday, Martin Hyde and John Kullman, Inter-Cultural Communication. An Advanced Resource Book (London & New York, 2004).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 195

4/14/08 2:52:31 PM

196

Under Eastern Eyes

and contextualises them through modernising spatial practices; the ways that Hungarian travellers articulated their identities; and the challenges posed by Western narratives on Hungary.4 The paper shows how travel in Hungary and abroad articulated national identities through allowing travellers to internalise the imagined national community and establish and affirm personal connections with its members. The paper shows that Hungarians travelling in Hungary and abroad in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries challenged the spatial practices of traditional society and articulated and mapped their identities in a number of ways.5 The first part provides a brief overview of Hungarian travel habits and travel skills. The second part outlines the functions of travel in Hungarian society, for instance, travel as a part of academic research, education, professional training, and economic and political transformation. The third part discusses how travel both reflected shifts in Hungarian identities and shaped them, as well as the ways Hungarians reflected on the challenge of Western narratives of Hungary. The paper concludes with a discussion of the travel patterns of Hungarian nationalities.

ROADS, INNS, BOATS AND THE SCIENCE OF TRAVEL The geographical mobility of the Hungarian population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries increased significantly, due to the expansion of the road system and the modernisation of transportation.

4 In this paper the term ‘Hungarian’ is used when generally referring to the inhabitants of the historical Hungarian kingdom, but where it is necessary to distinguish between the nationalities of the Hungarian kingdom, the paper uses ethnonyms such as Magyars or Slovaks. 5 On travel and mental mapping, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: the map of civilization in the mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: 1994). On travel and articulation of identities, see Alexander Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestviǐ: Rossia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (Moscow: 2001). See also Rainer Elkar, ‘Reisen bildet’, in Reisen und Reisebeschreibungen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. B.I. Krasnobaev, G. Robel and H. Zeman (Berlin: 1980), 60; Winfred Siebers, ‘Beobachtung und Räsonnement. Typen, Beschreibungsformen und Öffentlichkeitsbezug der frühaufklärischen Gelehrtenreise’, in Europäisches Reisen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, ed. W. Jäger (Heidelberg: 1992), 16–34; Hans Erich Bödecker, ‘Reisen: Bedeutung und Funktion für die deutsche Aufklärungsgesellschaft’, in Reisen im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. W. Griep and H.-W. Jäger (Heidelberg: 1993), 93–109.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 196

4/14/08 2:52:31 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

197

Between 1790 and 1848, the length of the state road system grew from 700 km in 1790 to 1,770 km in 1848, while the total length of the road system including local roads is estimated at 4,000 km.6 The road network connected the imperial capital with Buda, Pozsony (Bratislava), and all important towns in Hungary.7 Wealthy travellers were able to use their own means of transportation (the middle classes used public transportation, for instance Austrian companies that initiated a regular passenger stagecoach service in 1749, and three years later started to run between Vienna and Buda, expanding to Transylvania in the 1750s). Austrian stagecoaches operated according to schedules, required advance reservations and guaranteed overnight accommodation and meals, thus structuring travellers’ behaviour and modernising it. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the expansion in the road system and the improvement in the means of transportation diminished the time of travel; for instance, the road trip from Vienna to Buda that took two days at the end of the eighteenth century would take thirty-one hours in the 1830s.8 In the 1830s–1840s, Hungarian ‘fast peasants’ and transportation companies presented a serious challenge to the Austrian transportation services and offered Hungarian and international travellers a cheaper and faster, albeit less comfortable travel alternative.9 Also in this period, Hungarian periodicals encouraged travellers to use national transportation companies despite their lack of comfort and unreliable schedules. The carriage in which Titusz Nagy travelled across the country in 1839 was ‘dirty and uncomfortable’ and resembled ‘a covered wagon of gypsies’. Yet Nagy was enthusiastic because it was a national transportation enterprise and poor-looking vehicles with lin6 Béla Czére, Magyarország közlekedése a 19. században, 1780–1914 (Budapest: 1997), 225–6, 80; János Hanzély, Magyarország közútjainak története (Budapest: 1960), 40–1. 7 Gyula Antalffy, A honi utazás históriája. (Budapest, 1944), 123–4; in English see idem, A thousand years of travel in old Hungary (Budapest: 1975). 8 [Z]sigmond Benczédy, Magyarország’ és Erdély Nagy-Fejedelemség’ Postaintézete. Segédkönyv levelezők’ és postatisztviselők’ számára (Košice: 1840), 21–3. 9 For instance, the vehicles of Kajetan Biasini ran between Pest, Debrecen, Nagyvárad (Oradea) and Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca), and greatly increased the speed of movement: eighteen hours instead of two days. Likewise, the peasants provided a faster service between Buda and Vienna (seventeen to twenty hours). Antalffy, A honi utazás históriája, 180; Czére, Magyarország közlekedése, 82.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 197

4/14/08 2:52:31 PM

198

Under Eastern Eyes

en-covered windows were much better than no national transportation at all, as they signified the potential for future improvement.10 On the other hand, Nagy boasted of his lack of punctuality making it almost a virtue: he claimed that ‘as a Hungarian’, he could be late for departure without imagining that the carriage might have departed without him.11 For Nagy, choosing a less comfortable national means of transportation was to assert his national identity, and the meaning of his travel is negotiated in terms of anticipating the economic growth of the country. Travel was something that went beyond the spatial practices of traditional society, and people providing services in the rural areas commonly perceived travellers as a nuisance, though travellers noticed different attitudes to guests among Hungarian, German and Jewish innkeepers. For Károly Berecz, Hungarians were not on the whole as welcoming and polite as were Jews.12 Sándor Petőfi tauntingly stated ‘You have to pay him [the innkeeper] to say a couple of words to you, but he will not serve you a meal even if you pay [...] If you ask something from him, he would say it is not available or that he has not made the fire.’ In two inns in the Bihár county, they gave Petőfi not what he asked, but what they liked, and did this as if ‘they were bestowing divine mercy’ upon the poet.13 Economic modernisation and river regulation projects in Hungary in the first half of the nineteenth century increased travel on navigable rivers.14 Regular steamboat navigation on the Danube was stimulated by the Austrian Imperial and Royal Steamboat Company founded in 1829. Between 1835 and 1842, the company expanded its navigation 10 Titusz Nagy, ‘Honi utazás’, Athenaeum, 1 f., Nr. 21 (14 March 1839), 321– 2. 11 Ibid., 322–3. 12 Károly Berecz, ‘Utazási képek Magyarhonban’, Athenaeum, 1 f., Nr. 76 (26 June 1842), 1210. 13 Sándor Petőfi, Összes művei, 7 vols. (Budapest: 1951–1964), 5:57. 14 Pál Vásárhelyi, ‘Néhány figyelmeztető szó a vaskapui ügyben’, Athenaeum, 1 f., Nr. 17 (1838), 257–63; Idem, ‘Traján’ művei az Aldunán’, Athenaeum, 2 f., Nr. 28 (1838), 441–5. On the regulations, see Kálmán Tőry, ‘Az Al-Duna szabályozása’, Vízügyi történeti füzetek 5 (Budapest: 1972), 31–6; Sándor Győri, ‘A Duna regulázásáról’, A magyar tudós társaság évkönyve 2 (1832–1834), 121–33; Elek Schmidt, ‘A vízszabályozás fejlődése és jelen állása Magyarországon’, Vízügyi közlemények 11 (1929), 17–30.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 198

4/14/08 2:52:31 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

199

to the Black Sea, its fleet grew from 5 to 24 ships, and the number of passengers travelling on the Danube grew from 17,727 to 211,401.15 At the same time, the Company was not able to satisfy local transportation demands, and had to face rising ideas of national economic interests and local initiatives such as the Hungarian Danube Steamboat Company, or the Száva and Kulpa Navigation Company, since the Austrian Steamboat Company seems to not have been interested in expansion in the region. Count István Széchenyi, one of the leaders of the Hungarian reform movement and a shareholder of Austrian Steamboat Company, encouraged his fellow countrymen to invest in transportation projects. He believed that travel was crucial for a country undergoing the process of reform and in need of developmental examples. Széchenyi believed that travel was also crucial for expanding the borders of secluded localities and estates, and enabling people to move freely around their country and explore its sites.16 He hoped to bring more international visitors to Hungary through improved transportation and navigation in particular, and to change the negative image created by western travel accounts of Hungary.17 Hungarian travellers saw the Austrian steamboats as a rather cosmopolitan environment. Ferenc Kazinczy, a Josephist who spearheaded the reformation of the Hungarian language, travelled from Pest to Győr in 1831 by steamboat, and wrote that the ship had an English captain and a swarm of international passengers. Kazinczy ‘national15 lsi Jegyzknyve az ausztriai cs. kir. szabaditku els Dunagzhajzsi Trsasg kzgylsnek, 1841-iki februr 26-ikn. Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtára, Kézirattár (MTAKK), 177/28, 18. Dilanz sammt den dazu gehrigen Rechnungs-Ausweisen der sterr. k. k. priv. ersten Donau-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft fr das Jahr 1842, 1844, 1846. MTAKK, K 178/4, 6, 8; Czére, Magyarország közlékedése, 73. 16 Gróf Széchenyi István hirlapi czikkei, ed. A. Zichy, 2 vols. (Budapest: 1893– 1894; = vols. 7–8 of Széchenyi, Munkái, 9 vols. (Budapest: 1884–1896), 1:42. 17 Gróf Széchenyi István hirlapi czikkei, 40, 43; Kornél Zelovich, Széchenyi és a magyar közlekedés ügy (Budapest: 1925), 15. On Széchenyi’s views, see George Barany, Stephen Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, 1791–1841 (Princeton: 1968); Robert Evans, ‘Széchenyi and Austria’, in History and biography. Essays in honour of Derek Beales, ed. T.C.W. Blanning and D. Cannadine (Cambridge: 1996), 113–41.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 199

4/14/08 2:52:32 PM

200

Under Eastern Eyes

ised’ this space through debating Hungarian politics with his fellow travellers. Kazinczy’s travel notes show that travel was not only a linear movement through geographic space, but an intense synthesis of multiple contexts related to his travel observations, prior life experiences, and the experiences of other travellers on the boat.18 The steamboat Kisfaludi that started to cruise Lake Balaton in 1846 had a symbolic meaning for the Hungarian public as a truly national enterprise. The ship was named after the prominent Hungarian poets Károly and Sándor Kisfaludi, sailed across an emerging national resort area and a summer centre of public life, had a Hungarian crew (despite a Dutch captain), and served Hungarian dishes and wines in its restaurant.19 The Kisfaludi linked localities around Lake Balaton through its regular trips and through its national features. Steam navigation on the lake also improved connections between Austria and Hungary: the coach service connected the Hungarian border town Sopron and Keszthely, where the passengers embarked on the steamboat and four hours later arrived at Balatonfüred.20 Travel was often a dangerous enterprise in terms of personal safety and health, and to make travel attractive, some Hungarian authors— experienced travellers themselves—attempted to rationalise it and provide detailed instructions on how best to prepare for a long trip. Their accounts, as well as Hungarian travel reports of the period, show that travel was a challenging enterprise in terms of physical exhaustion, getting food and accommodation, and personal safety and hygiene. According to Pál Illés (Edvi), a Lutheran priest and a teacher, the traveller was to equip himself with convenient and functional attire, as well as maps, a compass, a loaded gun (for those travelling by coach) and travel documents. Since many travellers resorted to travelling by foot both in Hungary and Europe, Illés provided advice on how to avoid exhaustion and pain when walking. He recommended walking for not more than six hours a day, and if the feet were tired, pálinka mixed with water was the best remedy. A thin slice of lard would help the

18 Ferenc Kazinczy utazásai, 1773–1831 (Budapest & Miskolc: 1995), 334–6. 19 Mór Jókai, Magyarhon szépségei (Budapest: 1894), 18. See also Antalffy, A reformkor Balatonja (Budapest: 1984), 15–7. 20 Antalffy, A reformkor Balatonja, 17.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 200

4/14/08 2:52:32 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

201

traveller deal with tight shoes and blisters.21 Illés also provided detailed advice on how to deal with potential health hazards while staying at local inns that often did not have any heating and had poor hygiene. The traveller should avoid drinking unboiled water and eating suspicious-looking meat.22 Illés reflected on the vulnerability of travellers detached from their familiar environment, and advised against making close acquaintances with unknown people who could be impostors, and against providing direct answers about the aim of the journey and its destination.23

EDUCATION, QUALIFICATIONS AND INFORMATION IN HUNGARY AND ABROAD In nineteenth-century Hungary, as elsewhere in Europe, education and professional activity were inherently connected to travel.24 Travel was a powerful education tool for the aristocracy, gentry and urban middle classes.25 In schools, the students often embarked on imaginary journeys across the country or its counties, directed by their teachers. Mátyás Bél, the rector of the Lutheran gymnasium in Pozsony between 1714 and 1749, challenged his students to widen their geographical world beyond the limits of their villages and to make descriptions of the counties according to a questionnaire which he elaborated.26 Má21 The untitled article of Pál Illés (Edvi) in Tudományos gyüjtemény 2 (1825), 89–90. On experiences of travel by foot, see Antal Reguly, Magyarországi jegyzetek (Budapest: 1994), 36, 42, 43; Gaspar Fejérpataky-Belopotocký, Vlastný životopis (Bratislava: 1975), 89–91. 22 Illés, loc. cit., 94. Very often, though, the only food the travellers could get in local inns in remote places were potatoes or eggs, see Reguly, Magyarországi jegyzetek, 43, 46. 23 Illés, loc. cit., 91–2. 24 Siebers, ‘Beobachtung und Räsonnement’, 20. 25 For instance, Ferenc Pulszky travelled to Italy via Austria and Southern Germany in the summer of 1838. Ferenc Pulszky, Életem és korom (Budapest: 1958), op. cit., 76–92. 26 Bél’s Compendium Hungariae geographicum (Pozsony: 1753) was the most popular textbook in Hungary and was reprinted in 1767 and 1777. On Bél, see Lajos Haan, Bél Mátyás (Budapest: 1879); Ján Tibenský, ‘Miesto Mateja Bela vo vývoji slovenskej vedy, myslenia a kultúry’, in Matej Bel, slovenský geograf (Bratislava: 1984), 11–47. On Bél’s pedagogical activity, see Ľubomír Prikryl, ‘Matej Bel a vyu∑ovanie zemepisu’, in Pedagóg Matej Bel (1684–1749) (Bratislava: 1985), 224–30.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 201

4/14/08 2:52:32 PM

202

Under Eastern Eyes

tyás Korabinszky, a map-maker, geographer and teacher, followed Bél’s method and made his students copy existing maps of the counties, add the information that was missing and embark on imaginary travels by using sticks in order to ‘travel’ along roads and waterways to all the places of interest, remembering historic sites, friends, relatives and celebrities living in or originating from these places.27 Thus these imaginary travels brought together multiple contexts within students’ minds and helped them ‘internalize’ the national territory. Like Bél and Korabinszky in the eighteenth century, Pál Illés brought together local, regional and national contexts in his textbooks published in the 1830s. The children were to learn about obstacles to travel across the land, postal roads and services, types of accommodation, historic sites, and were to use a map of Hungary for this purpose.28 His teaching methods allowed students to incorporate maps into their knowledge and to make the map a symbol of geographical mobility. Travel abroad was a part of professional education and continuous professional development: for instance, promising students of the Institutum Geometricum, a training institution for Hungarian engineers in Buda, went abroad to get acquainted with advanced technologies.29 Like the learned societies and national academies emerging in Europe and the Habsburg lands, the Hungarian Academy that started its work in 1830 viewed travel as a way of collecting scientific information. Before the Academy was founded, Hungarian scientists and map-makers had already established a tradition of touring the country for the purpose of gathering data on its history, natural history and geography. These research trips established and enforced connections between localities and national academic institutions and were a step towards the creation of a Hungarian national scholarly and scientific community.30

27 Mátyás Korabinszky, Geographisch-historisches und Produkten Lexicon von Ungarn (Pressburg: 1786), 4–5. 28 Illés (Edvi), Közhasznu népi oktatókönyv, 1 (Buda: 1836), 149–50, 169n., 182–4; idem, Népszerű földleirás, 3rd edition (Pest: 1844). 29 Ferenc Fodor, Az Institutum Geometricum. Az egyetem bölcsészeti káran 1782-től 1850-ig fennállott mérnöki intézet (Budapest: 1955), 29, 25–8; A’ kereskedési és azzal kapcsolatban levő tárgyak iránt kiküldött kerületi választmánynak jelentése (Pozsony: 1843), Part 3, 3–20. 30 József Márton, Görög Demeter életleírása (Vienna: 1834); Jozséf Molnár, Görög Demeter (1760–1833) (Debrecen: 1975); András Brestyanszky, ‘Magyar útazók’, Tudományos gyüjtemény 6 (1818), 116.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 202

4/14/08 2:52:33 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

203

To organise the collection of information about other counties on a more rational basis, István Vedres, the city engineer of Szeged, envisaged spending the income from his projected canals on the national economy and culture, and also on establishing travel societies. His book, published in 1807, suggested a comprehensive programme of travel organisation in the form of three travel societies—western (travel to western Europe), northern (travel to Europe and Russia), and eastern (the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Far East) in order to territorialise the knowledge of the world.31 The societies had to research materials related to Hungarian history, and examine cultures and technologies. To accomplish this mission, the travel societies were to form expeditions consisting of a geographer, philologist, physician, painter, hydraulic engineer, mechanic, technologist, agriculturist and a military expert. The expeditions were to gather collections and to report to the respective society.32 The plans of Vedres were never to become a reality, though in the 1830s–1840s, the Academy and Hungarian authorities financed several travel research projects and the publication of travel notes.33 The most significant research trips for the academic community and public opinion were journeys eastwards into the past of the Magyars that temporalised geographical space, as Nigel Leask puts it.34 In 1819, Sándor Csoma Kőrösi went to Asia to trace the route of the Magyars.35 In 1839, Antal Reguly embarked on a journey to Russia in order to study ethnic groups in the northern Urals and Siberia. Travelling for days in depopulated areas of Siberia, he was going deeper into historical time, discovering traces of paganism and pre-modern social structures.36 The temporalisation of geographical space is also 31 On travel as a tool of territorialised knowledge, see Stagl, History of curiosity, cit. supra. 32 István Vedres, Eggy nemzeti jószág, mellyet Magyar ország és a hozzá kapcsolt tartományok számára ‘s javára szerzett Vedres István (Szeged: 1807), 40–3, 44–5. 33 Imre Friváldszky, Balkányi természettudományi utazásról (Buda: 1838); A Magyar Tudós Társaság évkönyvei 8 (1845), 40. 34 Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the aesthetics of travel writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford: 2002), 46. 35 József Eötvös, ‘Emlékbeszéd Körösi Csoma Sándor lt. Felett’, A Magyar Tudós Társaság évkönyvei 7:1 (1842–1844), 48–51. 36 Leask, Op. cit., 44; Jenő Pinter, A Magyar Tudományos Akadémia és geographiai irodalmunk Hunfalvy János felléptéig, (Budapest: 1903), 4–19; See also A Magyar Tudós Társaság évkönyvei 7:1 (1842–1844), 66; and 8 (1845), 40.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 203

4/14/08 2:52:33 PM

204

Under Eastern Eyes

present in the account of János Jerney, who in 1844 went to Moldavia and Ukraine. After crossing the Moldavian border, he saluted this Etelköz, or ancient homeland of the Hungarian military leader Árpád. The Hungarian past in Moldavia became a part of the present through Jerney’s attention to Hungarians living there.37 Travel was also instrumental in stimulating debates around the modernisation of the Hungarian economy and the country’s developmental potential.38 When Széchenyi and Miklós Wesselényi went to England in 1822 to study horse breeding and to purchase horses, they both constantly crossed geographical, social and civilisational borders and found themselves moving between two worlds: the country that they left and western Europe. They recognised the achievements of Western civilisation, but acutely felt the developmental distance separating Hungary from the ‘civilised’ world. At the same time, they neutralised their acute perception of this civilisational border by noticing several sites in Europe, such as the French royal estates in Rambouillet, which were negligently cultivated.39 When Széchenyi travelled to England again in 1832 and 1833– 34, he carefully examined Western technological achievements. The Count’s diaries were filled with detailed descriptions of steamboats, steam mills, bridges, canals and the iron industry. Széchenyi approached Francis Barber Ogden, the Consul of the United States in Liverpool, with a long list of questions about the legal and practical issues of bridge construction, and talked to Swedish diplomats about canal projects, their costs and construction in Sweden. At the same time, the signs of Western progress made Széchenyi reflect on the backwardness of Hungary, and his diaries are rich in pessimistic remarks about Hungarian developmental prospects.40

37 Sándor Lukácsy, Magyarok úti kalandjai, (Budapest: 1995), 166–8; A Magyar Tudós Társaság évkönyvei 7:1 (1842–1844), 66–7. 38 [s. a.], ‘Magyar útazók’, Tudományos gyüjtemény 1 (1818), 114–5. 39 Miklós Wesselényi, Báró Wesselényi Miklós útinaplója, 1821–1822 (Cluj: 1925), 65, 104, 20–30, 86, 64, 74. 40 Gróf Széchenyi István naplói, ed. Gy. Viszota, 6 vols. (Budapest: 1925–39), 4:292, 294, 297, 319, 323, 329, 352, 465, 466. On Hungarian economy and factors inhibiting economic growth, see Andrew Janos, The politics of backwardness in Hungary, 1825–1945 (Princeton: 1982).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 204

4/14/08 2:52:33 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

205

SHIFTING IDENTITIES, CHANGING TRAVEL PATTERNS In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hungarian travellers mapped local communities and the religious, intellectual, social and ethnic groups whose borders the travellers crossed. Travel texts linked the country’s sites, and the structure of each text revealed the identity of its author. The travellers reflected on multiplicity of experiences in their country and abroad. The vast majority never recorded their experiences. Extended travel, especially travel abroad, was not a mass practice in Hungary, since the people who could afford it travelled either to spas or to Vienna on official business, according to Ferenc Pulszky’s recollection. If somebody ventured farther, ‘he all his life spoke about his adventures abroad’.41 Pulszky’s notes are also telling in terms of why travellers recorded their experiences—they were to preserve the memories of what was often an unrepeatable experience. Over the century, the social backgrounds of travellers changed together with their travel destinations and their identities, and two periods can be outlined in these changes. Between the 1750s and 1810s, Hungarians identified themselves in terms of class (nobility) and polity and territory, which was a common homeland for all nationalities and ethnic groups (natio Hungarica),42 as well as by geographic region, religion and social status, and to a lesser extent through language. The latter becomes a very strong element of identity in the last two decades of the eighteenth century following the language revival spurred by the policies of Joseph II, who tried to create an integrated centralised state with German as the language of culture and communication.43 The religious and economic reforms of Joseph II that affected religious groups, education, and the

41 Pulszky, Életem és korom, 1:75. 42 Tofik M. Islamov, ‘From natio Hungarica to Hungarian nation’, in Nationalism and empire. The Habsburg Monarchy and the Soviet Union, ed. R. Rudolf and D. Good (New York: 1992), 166–7. On Hungarian culture and society of the period, see Domokos Kosáry, Culture and society in eighteenthcentury Hungary, trans. Z. Béres (Budapest: 1987). 43 László Kontler, A History of Hungary (New York: 2002), 212.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 205

4/14/08 2:52:34 PM

206

Under Eastern Eyes

rural economy also helped boost social and religious identities.44 Socially, the travellers of the period included officials, aristocracy and gentry; in terms of religious affiliation, Protestants are very conspicuous among the travellers since their opportunities for higher education within Hungary were limited. Reflecting these realities, the travel texts of the period were focused on confessional and social groups, as well as portraying the Habsburg rituals of power. For a Protestant like György Radvánszky, deputy lord lieutenant of Zólyom County, frequent travel to Vienna was necessary to secure the safe and free celebration of their religious services and end the social and cultural ‘quarantine’ of Lutherans and Calvinists in Hungary. Radvánszky hoped that Maria Theresa would make changes in her policies towards Protestants, and encouraged her to visit Hungary during his audience on 13 February 1741, where the queen expressed the intention of enforcing the freedoms of this maltreated religious minority. His travel diary during the trip to Prague in 1743 for the coronation of Maria Theresa as Queen of Bohemia contained a description of Habsburg power rituals.45 When travelling to western and northern Hungary and to Vienna in 1789, Ferenc Kazinczy, a Calvinist, made Protestant communities very conspicuous in his travel text. He also recalled his interaction with other confessional groups such as Catholics, including the Bishop of Eger, who welcomed the Protestants to his residence very obligingly, as if they were Catholics.46 Kazinczy also created a vivid portrait of the community of intellectuals deeply involved in developing the Hungarian language, for instance, the writer András Dugonics, the translator János Bacsányi, the teacher and map-maker Demeter Görög, a writer Leo Szaicz, a ‘true Hungarian’ and a person who was also not hostile to Protestants. Another feature of Kazinczy’s vision is 44 On the policies of Joseph II, see Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. 1 (Cambridge: 1987); Paul Mitrofanov, Joseph II. Seine politische und kulturelle Tätigkeit (Vienna & Leipzig: 1910). 45 György Radvánszky travelled to Vienna in January–February 1733, February and April 1741, June 1753 and in 1757 in order to submit the petitions of Hungarian Protestants. Magyar Országos Levéltár (MOL), P 566, the papers of György Radvánszky, III. A, LIII. cs. (42 cs.), 34–51, 52–71, 84–7, 90–3, 97. 46 Ferenc Kazinczy utazásai, 59. See also Domokos Teleki, Egynehány hazai utazások, 10–2.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 206

4/14/08 2:52:34 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

207

placing Hungarian landscapes into the framework of the European Enlightenment.47 Like non-fictional travel reports, Hungarian works of fiction and poetry about travel helped establish the value of travel as a way of articulating the identity of the traveller. József Gvadányi’s poem ‘A village notary’s trip to Buda’ described a trip to Buda by Zajtay, a notary from Szatmár county. The notary went to the country’s centre on horseback through Debrecen and the puszta, which he believed was a sanctuary of the true popular and national spirit. On reaching Buda, the notary acutely felt the dividing line between the periphery, with its traditional values and language, and the ‘de-nationalised’ national centre.48 Gvadányi showed how travel reinforced national identity and mapped the areas of strong foreign influence within the country. When travelling abroad and familiarising themselves with foreign cultures, Hungarian travellers paid attention to the similarities between their country and Europe. For instance, István Sándor, the author of a Hungarian guidebook to Europe, symbolically ‘concealed’ the AustrianHungarian border by mentioning the sites and places in Austria related to Hungarian history.49 The signs of developmental classification appear in Hungarian travel accounts that covered journeys eastwards. Vincze Batthyány, who went to Moldavia, Wallachia, and Turkey in 1805, noticed desolation and uncleanliness, lack of developed political structures, underdeveloped culture, and traces of Turkish (identified by him as Asiatic) influence in Moldavia and Wallachia. When in Turkey, he was immediately aware of the sharp border between Turkey and ‘our part of the world’. In this environment, every encounter with the familiar world immediately caused a feeling of closeness: when Batthyány met Prussian officers in Turkey, they embraced each other as brothers.50 47 Ferenc Kazinczy utazásai, 49, 59. 48 József Gvadányi, Egy falusi nótáriusnak budai útazása, mellyet önnön maga abban esett viszszontagságaival egygyütt az el aludt vérü magyar szívek’ fel ferkentésére, és múlatságára e’ versekbe foglalt (Bratislava & Komárom: 1790), x–xi, 6, 8–9, 45, 53–5, 110. 49 István Sándor, Egy külföldön útazó magyarnak jó barátjához küldetett levelei (Győr: 1793), 16–7, 176–8, 309–10. 50 Vincze Batthyány, Reise durch einen Theil Ungarns, Siebenbürgens, der Moldau und Bukovina. Im Jahr 1805 (Pest: 1811), 92–3, 98–9, 102–3, 107, 108–9, 114–9, 126–7, 131, 133–4.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 207

4/14/08 2:52:34 PM

208

Under Eastern Eyes

In the 1820s–1840s, the Hungarian elite embarked on a programme of reforms that affected the country’s economy, politics, and language, and broadened the framework of the traditional understanding of nation as a noble estate.51 The reforms, though limited, resulted in changing the idea of the nation to include the territorial community of citizens bound by the constitution, speaking the same language and contributing to economic progress in a country that was a part of the Habsburg monarchy and of Europe.52 The reforms changed the elite’s perception of the Hungarian territory that they believed was to be integrated through roads and transportation. This changing vision manifested itself in a number of large-scale construction projects in the 1830s–1840s that included river regulations, roads and railroads, and an increased number of travellers. The social portrait of travellers changed to include increasing numbers of the gentry and urban middle classes, especially as far as travel across Hungary was concerned. This period also signified increased travel by non-Magyar nationalities, who resisted the attempts of the Hungarian-speaking political elite to encourage the assimilation of Hungarian nationalities. The increasing number of published travel accounts during this period sketched out technical projects, linguistic societies, educational institutions, clubs and national groups. A change in approach can be illustrated by the travel notes of Kazinczy, who described the dissemination of the language to the non-Hungarian speaking nationalities. When travelling to northern Hungary in 1831, he welcomed the initiative of the Calvinist Collegium and Lutheran gymnasium in Losonc (Lu∑enec), where teachers applied their efforts to acquaint Germanand Slovak-speaking children with Hungarian. Kazinczy was very pleased to hear how the children recited the poems of Kis, Berzsenyi, the Kisfaludy brothers and Vörösmarty without any accent.53 The journey across Hungary by Titusz Nagy in 1839 articulated the opposition between urban and rural areas that he viewed as different in terms of cultural development. Nagy’s text described reading

51 László Péter, ‘Language, the constitution, and the past in Hungarian nationalism’, in Európa vonzásában, ed. F. Glatz (Budapest: 1993), 196. 52 For an overview of Hungarian reforms of the 1830s–1840s, see Kontler, A history of Hungary, 230–46. 53 Ferenc Kazinczy utazásai, 1773–1831, 369–70.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 208

4/14/08 2:52:35 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

209

societies, educational institutions, theaters and casinos as new types of social club space, which had emerged in Pest and spread to the counties. His notes reveal his self-conception as a Kulturträger and resemble the attitudes of colonial travellers destroying ‘the ecology of otherness’54 since Nagy made rather superficial observations about the localities and provoked their bitter reaction. The local society of Győr, for instance, resisted the label of backwardness imposed by Nagy on their city and pointed to signs of improvements and progress.55 Nagy himself also noticed improvements and progress such as the new building of the Calvinist school in Debrecen—an occasion for some welcoming remarks. Its clean space free of dirt, which Nagy saw abounding in rural public buildings, was the embodiment of the nation’s potential progress in the sphere of education. Nagy implied that cleanliness and light (modern and rational) were to replace darkness and dirt (premodern and irrational) not only in public buildings, but in the Hungarian self-definition.56 Other authors focused on the language as a central element of their identity and mapped the areas where Hungarian was spoken (or not spoken) and the social and religious groups that used it, and reflected on linguistic borders and the difficulties of inter-ethnic communication.57 Elek Horváth lamented the use of the German language in Győr, welcomed the use of Hungarian in the Benedictine abbey in Esztergom, and marked the linguistic gender gap by pointing out that many Hungarian noble ladies could hardly speak their native language, and were not able to make themselves clear when talking to servants.58 Positive examples of families where all members spoke Hungarian were mentioned by the travellers with great satisfaction.59 54 Musgrove, ‘Travel and unsettlement’, 31. 55 István Zmeskál, ‘Győr és Nagy T. levéltöredéke’, Athenaeum, 1 f., Nr. 29 (11 April 1839), 463, 464. 56 Nagy, ‘Honi utazás’, Athenaeum, 1 f., Nr. 20 (10 March 1839), 305–9; Nr. 21 (14 March 1839), 306; Nr. 50 (23 June 1839), 821–6; Nr. 51 (27 June 1839), 840–2. 57 Reguly recalled he could not secure any transportation in the Slovak Revitza (Revistye) where nobody spoke Hungarian, and his attempts at non-verbal communication failed until he was ‘rescued’ by a Hungarian woman. Reguly, Magyarországi jegyzetek, 42. 58 Elek Hórvath, ‘Utazás Dunántul’, Társalkodó, Nr. 97 (5 Dec 1832). 59 F.F…dot, ‘Utazás Bánátban’, Társálkodó, Nr. 99 (12 Dec 1832).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 209

4/14/08 2:52:35 PM

210

Under Eastern Eyes

In the first half of the nineteenth century, new signs appeared on the symbolic map of Hungary, namely sites of economic growth, such as manufactures, thriving estates and means of public transportation. Travellers mapped zones of development and areas of backwardness, which often coincided with the territories inhabited by the non-Magyar nationalities, as did Baron Alajos Mednyánszky in his account of a journey through Upper Hungary in 1824. Other authors mapped the factories, manufactures and educational institutions in the region.60 Travellers in Upper Hungary noticed the striking poverty of the population and their pre-modern habits and attitudes. For many travellers, the borders of underdevelopment and ethnic borders to a great extent coincided, and backwardness was localised within the rural areas populated by Slovaks as compared to the predominantly German cities.61 Another popular travel destination of the 1840s was the Lake Balaton region, as an emerging national resort area. Mór Jókai, a prominent Hungarian writer, presented this area in terms of Hungarian social structure: he associated Lake Balaton with the middle classes (a táblabíró [court juror] or a középosztály [middle class]) as compared to the aristocratic beauties of Transylvania.62 His journey around Lake Balaton was a discovery of a very welcoming national community: If you are a Hungarian, it is impossible that you do not find an acquaintance there [i.e., at Balatonfüred], because everyone is Hungarian, and everyone knows one another, so everybody waits for the arriving carriage and it is impossible to arrive incognito.

Balatonfüred was a young town visited by European scientists, so Jókai encouraged Hungarians to cherish the riches of their country and turn Balatonfüred into an elegant spa, a social mixing space.63

60 Alajos Mednyánszky, Malerische Reise auf dem Waagflusse in Ungarn [1824], (Pest: 1844); Lajos Pongrácz, Magyar utiképek (Pest: 1845), 48–50, 110, 125. 61 See Elek Fényes, Magyar országnak, s a hozzá kapcsolt tartományoknak mostani állapotja statistikai és geographiai tekintetben, 6 vols. (Pest: 1836), 1:14, 105, 110, 140. 62 Jókai, Magyarhon szépségei, 6. 63 Ibid., 11–2, 12–4.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 210

4/14/08 2:52:35 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

211

In terms of travel abroad, Hungarian accounts outlined two geographically and symbolically polar destinations: travels to the West that were travels to the future, and travels to the East that were travels to the past. At the same time, travellers going eastwards, for instance to Russia, reflected on the civilisational diversity of their destination countries. Ágoston Trefort and Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky, who went to Russia in the 1830s, mentioned the constraints that the Tsarist autocracy imposed on people, but at the same time marvelled at the architecture of St. Petersburg.64 The latter made Trefort think that he was far from Russia, though the perceived Mongol facial features and architecture in Moscow reminded him of Asia.65 In the 1830s–1840s, questions of Hungary’s transformation were fervently debated within Hungarian political elite, and travel to the West became a motor for these debates. In the face of Western technological progress, the Hungarian reform-minded gentry and urban middle classes assiduously filled their travel accounts with the results of their study of foreign cultures and advanced technologies.66 They mentioned the fact that advanced technologies such as railways had become an integral part of Western life. Hungarian travellers were convinced that learning from the West and applying this knowledge were crucial for moving upwards within the developmental scale of Europe.67 Travel reports introduced the Hungarian public to the experience of advanced technology and politics and to the problems of the capitalist economy and radical social thought, such as Chartism and French

64 Ágoston Trefort, ‘Utazási töredékek’, in Budapesti Árvízkönyv 4 (1840), 225–59; idem, Önéletírása, (Sátoraljaújhely: 1991), 32–4. See also Miklós Mann, Trefort Ágoston élete és mûködése, (Budapest: 1982), 10–1; István Fenyő, ‘Az orosz irodalom fogadtatása a reformkor magyar hírlapirodalmában’, in István Fenyő, Két évtized (Budapest: 1968), 75–7, 78. 65 Lukácsy, Magyarok úti kalandjai, 138–44. 66 On the travellers of the Reform era, see Lukácsy, ‘Reformkori magyar utazók’, Élet és tudomány 10 (1965), 466–9. See also Fenyő, ‘A polgárosodás eszmevilága útirajzainkban 1848 előtt’, in Fenyő, Két évtized, 109–31. 67 Bertalan Szemere, Utazás külföldön (Budapest: 1983), 27, 36–40, 65, 135, 193–6, 236–7, 252–3. See also Fenyő, ‘A polgárosodás eszmevilága’, 115; József Irínyi, Német-, francia és angolországi uti jegyzetek, 2 vols. (Halle: 1846), 1:87, 93.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 211

4/14/08 2:52:36 PM

212

Under Eastern Eyes

political radicalism and utopian socialism.68 Travellers also brought back the ambiguity of being a European in the ethnically diverse and ‘self-regulated society’ of America, as opposed to Habsburg social and political constraints and Hungarian perceived backwardness. Sándor Bölöni Farkas, who travelled to the US in 1831, constantly contrasted Europe and the US in terms of political institutions and social structures, as well as economic development. In this context, his memories of Hungary are burdensome, since they underscored the way the country was lagging behind in terms of political and economic development. He recalled he was embarrassed to mention Hungary in conversations with the American public and tried to change the topic of conversation so that he did not have to talk about its backwardness, melancholy, and ‘millennial yearning’. His negative feelings about Hungary’s developmental lag did not prevent him from enjoying meeting Hungarians in America, especially as they shared his enthusiasm over American society with its respect for individual rights.69 Like Farkas, Hungarian travellers to western Europe were torn between middle class-based Western prosperity and the drastic social contrasts in their own country. Pál Hunfalvy, a prominent linguist and the founder of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society, noted excellent German communications and transportation, which made remote places accessible to the visitor, whereas one had to be satisfied only with occasional rumours in Hungary with its secluded localities.70 Those middle-class travellers who could not afford to go on a lengthy trip to Europe nevertheless referred to it when observing comparable Hungarian sites. Lajos Pongrácz, an anti-aristocratically minded writer, turned public attention to national landscapes and argued that Hungary (and Austria) in itself contained the same marvels, the 68 Fenyő, ‘A polgárosodás eszmevilága’, 120–4. 69 Sándor Bölönyi Farkas, Utazás Északamerikában (Budapest: 1943). English translation: Journey in North America, 1831, trans. T. and H. Benedek Schoenman (Santa Barbara, California, Oxford: 1978), 88, 90, 122–3, 206. See also Lukácsy, ‘Reformkori magyar utazók’, 466–9; Fenyő, ‘A polgárosodás eszmevilága’, 114. 70 Pál Húnfalvi, ‘Dresdai levelek’, Athenaeum, 2 f., Nr. 9 (1 Aug 1839), 129– 35; Nr. 17 (29 Aug 1839), 257–65; Nr. 21 (12 Sep 1839), 321–26; Nr. 25 (26 Sep 1839), 385–91; Nr. 26 (29 Sep 1839), 401–7; Nr. 50, (22 Dec 1839), 785–9.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 212

4/14/08 2:52:36 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

213

sight of which inspired his compatriots to go to Europe. Pongrácz imagined Europe through observing Hungary: he confessed he had never been to Switzerland, but imagined that the Swiss Alps looked like Tepla-Szkleno valley near Selmec.71 When travelling to or through Austria, Hungarian travellers saw the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire as semi-Western and a passage to the West.72 Almost every citizen of the Hungarian part of the Monarchy remarked upon the unfavorable and unwelcome attitude toward them on the Austrian side: a strict customs service, the arrogance of the German officers and of the citizens of Vienna.73 From the perspective of modern technologies and political structure, Austria seemed a margin of western Europe to the majority of Hungarian travellers. In terms of cultural traditions and natural beauties, the Habsburg lands proved a very attractive destination. Using Austrian guidebooks and his own impressions, László Telegdi in 1839 shifted the attention of his readers from the ‘traditionally’ beautiful but geographically remote Rhine to the equally gorgeous and more easily accessible sites along the Danube between Linz and Vienna—islands, maelstroms and waterfalls, wild romantic places, castles, cities, villages and abbeys.74 The abundance of details concerning the depth of the river and the navigable branches of the Danube indicates the novelty of this travel route and Telegdi’s concern for the advancement of navigation. Telegdi also sees similarities between Austrian and Hungarian landscapes, and for him the majestic views of Mölk (Melk) Abbey could compete only with Buda, Petervárad (Petrovaradin) and Esztergom.75 Unlike foreign travellers, who drew a sharp border between Hungary and Austria, Hungarian travellers found in Austria the signs of

71 Lajos Pongrácz, Magyar utiképek (Pest: 1845), 4, 90, 59, 75, 89, 78. 72 Károly Novák, ‘Utazás Triestig’, Athenaeum, 2 f., Nr. 13 (31 Jul 1842), 97–100; Nr. 14 (2 Aug 1842), 105–8. 73 Fejérpataky-Belopotocký, Vlastný životopis, 35–6. See also Jozef Miloslav Hurban, ‘Cesta slováka k slovanským bratom na Morave a v Cechách’, in idem, Dielo, 2 vols. (Bratislava: 1983), 1:33. 74 Telegdi used the [s. a.], Pitoreske Donaufahrt von Ulm bis Konstantinopel et.c. mit einer Stromkarte (Wien: 1838), and Donaufahrt von Linz bis Wien also published in 1838. 75 [László] Telegdi, ‘Dunaparti tájképek’, Társalkodó, Nr. 34 (27 April 1839), 133–4; Nr. 36 (4 May 1839), 141–2.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 213

4/14/08 2:52:36 PM

214

Under Eastern Eyes

similarity. Lajos Pongrácz, who made a short excursion to Austria from Pozsony, crossed the border and noticed that the road adjoining the state highway to Vienna was badly built—just like in Hungary. Austria was economically more advanced, but Pongrácz smoothed out the contrast between the two parts of the Monarchy by evoking historical memories of joint Hungarian and Austrian military campaigns.76 Among other Habsburg territories, Hungarian travellers commented on Bohemia. As viewed by László Szallai in 1838–1839 on his way to France, Bohemian intellectual life and literary activities resembled those in Hungary, especially the purification of the national language, research into national epic poetry following the German example, the publication of folk songs and translations from foreign poetry.77

FACING THE WESTERN CHALLENGE In the nineteenth century, improved transportation increased international travel to Hungary. The experiences reported in Western travel narratives expressed a sense of uneasiness over Hungary’s civilisational ambiguity. The international visitors could not classify Hungary in simple terms of barbarity or civilisation, and thus called it a region/ country in transition.78 In the first half of the nineteenth century, international travellers discovered a variety of these transition zones within Hungary and claimed they coincided with the ethnic/civilisational borders within the country. The most popular travel itinerary in Hungary was created by Edward Browne in 1669.79 Browne travelled in northern Hungary and then went down the Danube to the territories occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Almost all international travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries followed his itinerary. Foreign travel into south76 Pongrácz, Magyar utiképek, 24–5, 27–8. 77 László Szallai, ‘Úti naplómból’, Athenaeum, 2 f., Nr. 6 (21 Jul 1839), 81– 86; Nr. 12 (11 Aug 1839), 177–80; Nr. 24 (22 Sep 1839), 369–77. Tudományos Gyüjtemény 6 (1830), 123; Tudománytár 3 (1834), 117, 121. 78 Julia Pardoe, The city of the Magyar, or Hungary and her institutions in 1839–1840, 3 vols. (London: 1840), 1:156. 79 On travel destinations in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, see György Gömöri, Angol és skót utazók a régi Magyarországon, 1542–1737 (Budapest: 1994).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 214

4/14/08 2:52:36 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

215

ern Hungary and the puszta was occasional: John Paget and his companions were among very few travellers who dared to explore the plains of eastern Hungary in 1835.80 Western travellers heavily relied on their Hungarian sources of information on the economy, political structure, language and literature, and incorporated them into their travel accounts. The maps that international visitors used in Hungary were also local. Paget, for instance, used the maps of János Lipszky (1806) and János Csaplovics (1829). The map of Lipszky was so detailed that it allowed Paget to claim superiority over locals and ‘direct those who considered themselves well acquainted with the country’.81 One of the most influential Western accounts of Hungary in the West, and in Hungary itself, was that by Paget. It was so effective in describing Hungary, and Count Széchenyi as the leader of the reform movement, that some English engineers seriously considered finding employment there in order to carry out ‘plans for the formation of roads or channels or the improvements of the navigation of the rivers’ or participate in the ‘cultivation of the soil in the Banat or elsewhere’.82 Széchenyi had a good opinion of Paget himself, but concluded that ‘amongst a hundred [foreigners] there are hardly more than twenty [or even no more than ten] of any real use to us’. Széchenyi was caught on the raw by the Western idea of Hungary as a country overflowing with riches, ‘which the natives are too idle or too awkward to make themselves masters of’, and believed his country was capable of the greatest improvement if the laws, government and the habits of the population changed.83 80 Geza Birkás, Francia utazók Magyarországon (Szeged: 1948), 78–9. 81 János Lipszky, Mappa generalis regni Hungariae partiumque adnexarum Croatiae, Slavoniae et Confiniorum Militarium, magni item principatus Transylvaniae, geometricis partium dimensionibus, recentissimisque astronomicis observationibus superstruct (Pest: 1806). The ethnographic map of Hungary by Csaplovics, Ethnographische Karte des Königreichs Ungern sammt Croatien, Slavonien, der ungrischen Militärgrenze und der Seeküste nach Lipszky was a part of his major work Gemälde von Ungern (Pest: 1829). John Paget, Hungary and Transylvania; with remarks on their condition, social, political, and economical, 2nd edition, 2 vols. (London: 1850), 1:xii, 103. 82 A letter of William Needham forwarded by Paget to Széchenyi (18 September 1840), MTAKK, K 207/135. 83 The draft of Széchenyi’s letter to Paget (24 October 1840). In the letter remained unfinished, and it is not clear whether Széchenyi ever sent it. MTAKK, K 197/56, 58.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 215

4/14/08 2:52:37 PM

216

Under Eastern Eyes

As Széchenyi wrote in his work Credit in 1831, reforms and changes on the macro- and micro-level such as well-maintained roads, agriculture, lively trade, urban development, advanced sciences, noble patriotism, and civil virtues would make it unnecessary for Hungarian hosts to take their international guests to the showcase sites within the country.84 In his opinion, the negative image of the country abroad was the fault of the whole country, and to change the image it was necessary to develop the Hungarian kingdom and its material culture. Replying to Széchenyi’s comprehensive criticism of Hungarian society, Count József Dessewffy claimed his opponent had exposed Hungary’s problems to the whole world. According to Dessewffy, this critique and laughter were to be performed within the nation, whose members could laugh at the country’s defects to themselves, but could only smile about them in public, thus suggesting controlling the information communicated to international visitors.85 Despite political differences, the Hungarian liberals showed a similar desire to control communication with international visitors. Commenting on the work of Julia Pardoe, who wrote a detailed account of her trip to Hungary in 1839–40, the liberal Pesti hírlap stated that ‘except for the first five lines, this work is a total lie’ aimed at offending not so much the Hungarian mind, as its heart and character.86 Pesti hírlap blamed those Hungarians who provided foreign visitors (and Pardoe in particular) with false and deliberately distorted information. According to a Pesti hírlap journalist, Hungarians had to change the ways they communicated with international visitors and to supply carefully chosen information in order to change the image of the country. In other words, Hungarian hosts had to highlight positive elements in national identity and national life and communicate them to foreigners.87 Pardoe herself did not intend to offend her Hungarian hosts; on the contrary, the influence of Hungary was so strong that Pardoe started to collect the portraits of Hungarian writers, and was going to at84 István Széchenyi, Hitel (Budapest: 1930), 468. 85 József Desewffy, A ‘Hitel’ czímü munka’ taglalatja (Kassa: 1831), 28. 86 Pardoe, The City of the Magyars, 1:266–7; Anon., ‘Vezercikk’, Pesti hírlap, Nr. 10 (3 Jan 1841); Nr. 12, 17, 57, 100 (1841); Pardoe, The city of the Magyar, 1:247–8. Elizabeth Pardoe to Gábor Döbrentei (8 April 1840). MTAKK, Lev. 4° 2, 15. 87 Anon., ‘Vezercikk’, Pesti Hírlap, Nr. 10 (3 January 1841).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 216

4/14/08 2:52:37 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

217

tend a masquerade ball in Britain disguised as a Hungarian peasant.88 Despite the desire of Hungarian authors to limit the acquaintance of foreign visitors to only the best sides of the country, the travellers did not meet any obstacles in receiving information and in moving across the country. As another way of approaching the challenge of Western travel narratives and the gloomy portrayal of Hungary, some authors, for instance Károly Berecz, applied all their imagination to portraying the landscapes of Hungary as scenically as possible. Hungarian cities had a very hospitable atmosphere, and travel in Hungary was generally safe, so Berecz discredited Viennese stories of robbers in Hungary, where the ‘personalities of wild origin’ behaved rather peacefully. This work was an attempt to confront the Western narratives of Hungary’s backwardness with a story of splendid landscapes, and to add colour to the image of the country to be communicated to European visitors.89 Many other Hungarian authors also reacted painfully against the distorted images of Hungary created abroad. Some authors tried to rethink travel and turn it into an intimate acquaintance with the country rather than a sense of superiority based on superficial acquaintance. Samuel Bredetzky, who wrote in German and addressed Hungarian Protestants, noted that foreign travellers in Hungary following the route suggested by Browne in 1669 only covered limited areas of the country. Bredetzky claimed that foreign visitors did not understand the Hungarian language and were usually in a hurry to come back from Hungary to Vienna. Consequently, the vast majority of their travel accounts did not deserve any attention. Bredetzky responded to the challenge of Western ignorance of the region with his books, and urged the educated classes to rediscover their country.90 To disseminate the ‘true’ information on this terra incognita (Hungary) abroad and to overthrow foreign perceptions of it as only a part of Austria, József Orosz elaborated on the Hungarian constitution, history and to a lesser extent the economic situation specifically for the European reading pub-

88 Pardoe to Döbrentei (30 January, 8 April 1840), MTAKK, Lev. 4° 2, 15. 89 Berecz, ‘Utazási képek’, 1207. 90 Beyträge zur Topographie des Königreichs Ungern (Vienna, 1805–1807), Reisebemerkungen über Ungern und Galizien (Vienna, 1809).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 217

4/14/08 2:52:37 PM

218

Under Eastern Eyes

lic.91 Csaplovics drew parallels between Hungary and England and called Hungary a Europe in miniature.92 Other authors also tried to rethink the meaning of foreign travel within the country. Teréz Karacs, the daughter of Ferenc Karacs, a renowned map-maker of the period, suggested a travel of intimate acquaintance with the country as opposed to the foreign visitors’ superiority, dominance and arrogance. Karacs showed how travel helped to dismantle Western stereotypes and foster national identity. Countess Vilma Rózsaváry, the main character of her novel, was a ‘de-nationalised’ female who grew up in Vienna, but showed eagerness to learn more about her country and carry out progressive reforms. Karacs emphasized that travel across Hungary was instrumental in reconstructing Vilma’s identity and challenged the readers to rethink social rules and taboos imposed by class and gender.93 Western travellers and public opinion viewed Hungary as a passage to Constantinople and to the East.94 On the contrary, Hungarians, especially the Hungarian liberals who represented the gentry, saw their country as moving westwards, since Hungary was geographically a part of the continent and had a tradition of independent statehood, which were considered inherent ‘Western’ attributes.95 In this respect, looking for similarities with Europe in Hungary acquired a new meaning in the travel narratives—they became an indication of the country’s developmental potential. István Gorove was convinced that Buda-Pest would soon emerge as an intermediary between European civilisation and the East, and there was no nation that could perform this function better.96 Hungarian travellers who read foreign works about their country and persisted in asking their international interlocutors about Hungary were constantly frustrated in their expectations: the knowledge of the

91 József Orosz, Terra incognita (Leipzig: 1835). 92 János Csaplovics, England und Ungern. Eine Parallele (Halle: 1842), 1. 93 Teréz Karacs, Összes munkái (Miskolc: 1853), 2:4–5, 39. 94 E.g., H.A. Richard, Guide des voyageurs en Allemagne, en Hongrie at a Constntinople (Weimar: 1817), 455. See also N. K., ‘Az angol divat-utazók’, Athenaeum, Nr. 15 (19 Feb 1837). 95 Sz...ki, ‘Kelet és nyugot’, Athenaeum, Nr. 25 (26 March 1837). 96 Gorove, Nyugot, 1:21, 30.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 218

4/14/08 2:52:38 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

219

country was minimal and often distorted. Bertalan Szemere, who professed a great sensitivity to the apprehension of his country in Europe, presented his readers with the picture of a beautiful country rich in gold and silver like Peru, but depopulated, disorderly (no police), extremely cold snow covering houses so that the people could not go out, with wolves and wild bears frolicking in the snow like lambs, and with gangs of bandits wandering around.97

TRAVEL PATTERNS OF HUNGARIAN NATIONALITIES In the 1840s, when the Hungarian political elite strove to impose linguistic homogeneity on the country and promote the Hungarian language, they encountered the opposition of the non-Magyar nationalities, who created travel narratives of resistance.98 At the same time, the travel notes by the non-Magyar travellers, for instance Slovaks, followed the example of Hungarian travel literature. Slovak intellectuals were well aware that their national group lacked the tradition of independent statehood, and therefore referred to the rich cultural and historic heritage of the Czechs, Croats and Russians in order to reinforce their national identity and their national claims. Another strong element of identity was the landscapes of Upper Hungary. According to Jozef Miloslav Hurban, ‘the spirit of Slovaks is the spirit of the Tatra’, which is an ‘overwhelming, powerful, great, robust spirit, just as the Tatra is great, powerful, robust’.99 Ján Kollár, the proponent of Pan-Slav ideas, defined the nation as a community bound by language, its free usage, by moral qualities and by blood.100 Slavs taken as a whole fitted this definition despite their religious, political and language diversity, which was to be overcome

97 Bertalan Szemere, Utazás külföldön (Budapest: 1983), 21–2, 92–3. 98 Ján[os] Csaplovics, Rozgjmánj o zmadařowánj země Uherské, aneb o Nemadar∫ w Uhřich na Madary obracowánj, a translation from German (Prague: 1842), 5–6, 17–8, 20. 99 Hurban, ‘Cesta slováka’, in idem, Dielo, 1:33, 52, 85, 92–3, 254; 2:23. 100 Jan Kollár, Pamäti z mladších rokov života (Bratislava: 1972), 219; Robert B. Pynsent, Questions of identity. Czech and Slovak ideas of nationality and personality (Budapest & London: 1994), 54.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 219

4/14/08 2:52:38 PM

220

Under Eastern Eyes

by Slav integration or reciprocity.101 Kollár viewed reciprocity as an intellectual exchange and the construction of a community of Slavic intellectuals. Kollár’s trip to Slav-populated areas of Hungary, Italy and Germany in 1841 supported the idea of Slavdom and reciprocity through demonstrating the great similarities between different Slavic national groups.102 Unlike Kollár with his focus on the Slavic community as a whole, L'udevít Štúr and the younger generation of Slovak intellectuals championed the interests of their own national group within Hungary, and perceived themselves first as Slovaks, and then as Slavs.103 Štúr’s travel destinations included Slav-populated territories of Hungary such as Croatia, Transcarpathia and Slavonia, and articulated Slovak national interests within the Hungarian kingdom.104 His emphasis on specific Slovak interests did not imply a challenge to the territorial integrity of the Hungarian kingdom, and Štúr and his followers repeatedly affirmed their loyalty to the Hungarian kingdom.105 As an alternative to both Pan-Slav and Slovak identity, Jozef Miloslav Hurban suggested a connection with Czechs in Bohemia as a Habsburg framework for Slovak nationality and portrayed distinguished Czech scholars in the description of his journey to Bohemia in 1839. Štúr’s followers mapped their language circles and Slovak Lutheran parishes thus articulating an identity based on language and

101 Kollár, Über die litterarische Wechselseitigkeit zwischen den verschiedenen Stämmen und Mundarten der Slawischen Nation (Leipzig: 1844), 60. On Pan-Slavism, see Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism. Its history and ideology (Notre Dame, Indiana: 1953). On the Slovak national movement, see Peter Brock, The Slovak national awakening: An essay in the intellectual history of East Central Europe (Toronto: 1976); Leopold von Gogolák, Beiträge zur Geschichte des slowakischen Volkes, 2 vols. (Munich: 1963–9). 102 Kollár, Cestopis obsahující cestu do Horní Italie a odtud pres Tyrolsko a Baworsko, se zwláštním ohledem na slawjanské žiwly roku 1841 (Pest: 1843), iv–vii; Zlatko Klátik, Vývin slovenského cestopisu (Bratislava: 1968), 81– 109. 103 L’udevít Štúr, Politické state a prejavy (Bratislava: 1954), 49, 51, 61, 210–28, 80. 104 Klátik, Vývin, 141–5. 105 János Csaplovics to Gusztáv Szontagh in Századunk 4, Nr. 26 (1 April 1841), 205; Daniel Rapant, Slovenský prestolný prosbopis z roku 1842, 2 vols. (Bratislava: 1943), 297, 186–8.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 220

4/14/08 2:52:38 PM

The Odyssey of National Discovery

221

religion.106 They pointed to Slovak historical connections with Magyars and Czechs, whose heroes were included in the Slovak pantheon of national heroes.107 At the same time, Slovak intellectuals followed Hungarian travel literature and translated some published travel texts about Upper Hungary into Slovak. Karol Alexander Modrányi and Karol Zorkóci followed the route of Mednyánszky along the river Vág. Modrányi translated seventeen of Baron Alajos Mednyánszky’s essays from German and added seven of his own sketches about the cities of Upper Hungary. Zorkóci wrote two more essays, and the whole work was presented in the manuscript periodical Narodní zábavník. As Zlatko Klátik puts it, Slovak travel across their ethnic territory and ‘neighbouring Slav regions and provinces within the Habsburg Monarchy had a function of communication and information for the young followers of Štúr, and proved closely connected’ with the main objectives of the national movement and ideology.108 Meeting people of the lower classes during their journeys, Slovak intellectuals came up with the idea of simplicity of mind as an ideal of national existence, because ordinary Slovaks were convinced that the people needed no sophisticated philosophical theories, but rather religion and the ‘live, clear truth of the Slovak spirit—the spirit of humanity’.109

CONCLUSION The Hungarian symbolic map of the country, or the map of the country in the mind of individual, loaded with emotions, cultural, political and ideological values, had the national capitals, Upper Hungary, Transylvania, the puszta, Lake Balaton, the Danube and the Tisza, as its main highlights. The symbolic map of the world reflected the Hungarian idea of their country located between East and West, overcoming traces of Asianness and moving along the road of Western civilisation. This map of the world, the travel routes and the focus of the travellers’ attention, depended on the travellers’ identities. The jour-

106 Rapant, Slovenský, 2:339. 107 Pavol Dobšinský, Pút’ po otcine. Výber z rukopisných cestopisov mladých štúrovcov (Bratislava: 1981), 17, 35, 56. 108 Klátik, Vývin, 174–5. 109 Štúr, Politické state, 49. See also Dobšinský, Pút’ po otcine, 13, 20.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 221

4/14/08 2:52:39 PM

222

Under Eastern Eyes

neys across Hungary and abroad marked and at the same time transgressed the real and symbolic boundary lines of the country, the borders of the Habsburg Monarchy and its dominions, and the edges of civilisation/barbarity, which often coincided with ethnic borders within Hungary. Austria was perceived by Hungarian travellers as a part of Europe in terms of its culture and the richness of its museums, but it was only a passage to Europe as far as industrialisation and the development of political institutions was concerned. When travelling across Hungary, ‘people moved across physical space and from one social world to another’. The individual travel agendas pursued by each traveller made it difficult to assign meaning to travel experiences, and often invited criticism from other travellers. As a result of the increasing speed and relative ease of movement across this territory, Hungarian travellers redefined the ‘social world’s spatial dimensions’,110 and rediscovered the social groups of rural and urban areas. Like the maps which fixed frontier lines, guide books and travel accounts fixed the travel routes and sets of objects to be seen during the journey. The Hungarian gentry and urban non-noble professionals of the first half of the nineteenth century were moved by patriotism, understood as a ‘middling virtue determined by altruism, goodwill, discernment and uprightness’ linked to ‘a community-related moral-political attitude’, and intended to ‘organize and personalize’ their ‘country as a place of life for human beings protected by law’.111 Travel across Hungary ceased to be a part of the trip to Europe, and acquired its own value and attraction. Trips within the country were journeys ‘nationalising’ the landscape through quoting Hungarian poets, recalling celebrities and historical events. Travels abroad were the journeys to learn about the Hungarian past and looking into the Hungarian future. Like threads plaited into an intricate piece of lacework, the lines of travel routes and travel narratives were braided into the story of the nation and its territory.

110 James Sheehan, German history, 1770–1866 (Oxford: 1989), 463–64. 111 Stagl, History of curiosity, 209.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 222

4/14/08 2:52:39 PM

European Identity and Romantic Irony: Juliusz Słowacki’s Journey to Greece Maria Kalinowska

The most fundamental existential experience of the Polish Romantics was exile and homelessness—in many different senses, but primarily in the political sense. Siberia and deeper Russia were not the only destinations for such an exile. Paradoxically, western Europe also developed into a specific space of exile for Polish emigrants. The encounter with western Europe was very complicated for them. For example, Paris, where most Polish emigrants lived, appeared to be a particularly alien place. Most of them became refugees after the national anti-Russian uprising in 1830. Nearly all poet-emigrants had been brought up in the culture of the nobility, in a very stable system of patriarchal, patriotic and religious values. Although they were welcomed by western societies, they suffered from being deprived of their homeland and family bonds. In the great European cities, in the bourgeois and industrial civilisation of western Europe, they felt alienated. They refused to abandon their national—and individual—identity, which developed from the idea of freedom, but at the same time they could not find a place for themselves in the everyday life of western societies. The pursuit of the new unity of Europe and the Poles’ or Slavs’ place within it was particularly important for Polish Romanticism. The most essential problems of Polish emigrational thought included questions about the new dimension of Christian ideas as a foundation for the unity of Europe, and about Europe as a community of free peoples and Poland’s place within it. These circumstances (and others, for instance a strong Slavic identity) resulted in the ambivalences and antinomies of Polish Romantic travel and the Romantics’ approach towards western Europe.1 1 On various dimensions of Polish Romantics’ approaches to European societies, see among others: J. Krasuski, Obraz Zachodu w twórczo√ci romantyków

iBracewell_A_book.indb 223

4/14/08 2:52:39 PM

224

Under Eastern Eyes

It is no accident that among the Polish Romantic émigrés, the old topos of life as wandering was very popular.2 However, the causes of the Romantic perception of the human condition as a timeless journey cannot be sought solely in the political and social context. Polish Romantics perceived human existence as an endless wandering or pilgrimage. Early Romantics, under the influence of Byron, wrote about existential wandering as roaming through an uncertain world, being lost in the world of values and human feelings. Late Romantics, on the other hand, often understood human existence as a pilgrimage to the sacrum, which was perceived in a different way, often in a religious or national key. Amongst the Polish Romantic visions of existence as a journey, futile wandering through an alienated world was especially important for the early Romantics. This is well reflected in a poem by the outstanding Polish poet, Antoni Malczewski (1793–1826), who was under the strong influence of Byron. He participated in the Napoleonic Wars and his literary output belongs to the earlier period of Polish Romanticism, before the November Uprising (1830). Malczewski went on his Grand Tour in the years 1816–21, during which he visited Italy (where he is said to have met Byron). He also climbed Mont Blanc. After his return, shortly before his early death, he wrote his unusual, melancholic poem Maria (1825), which presented the gloomy, dark, night-time Ukrainian steppes. The far-stretching plains, where Malczewski came from, became the sign of his existential despair, the passing of time and impermanence. There was no way out of these steppes. Wandering in the world of human feelings involved being lost in space, but also in European culture; the dark, gloomy Ukrainian steppe became an image of despair, impermanence, uprootedness. Even sunny Italy could not remain free from melancholy. The journey to Italy did not soothe, and the white statues of classical culture, so numerous in the south, became for the northerner another sign of alienation and strangeness

polskich (Poznan: 1980); J. Jedlicki, A suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-century Polish approaches to Western civilization (Budapest: 1999). 2 R. Przybylski, Podróż Juliusza Słowackiego na Wschód (Krakow: 1982), 9; cf. J. Kamionka-Straszakowa, Zbłąkany wędrowiec: z dziejów romantycznej topiki (Wrocław: 1992); S. Burkot, Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne (Warsaw: 1988).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 224

4/14/08 2:52:40 PM

European Identity and Romantic Irony

225

in the world of feelings and nature, and in the words of an unreachable and illegible culture. Silence is a dominant quality in this poetic novel inspired by Byron. The silence magnifies the most important message of the poetic novel as a genre: a message about the individual’s alienation and aspirations in an unfriendly, estranged and dangerous world which is marked with exoticism and cultural alienation, illegibility and a dangerous mystery. Polish researchers draw attention to the fact that Malczewski created a mental landscape in his Byronic poem, and that landscape corresponded to the Romantic North. It could indeed be said that for Polish Romanticism and for the Polish pursuit of national identity (especially its early stages), the north–south dichotomy was more important than the opposition between the east and west of Europe. The south of Europe attracted the Poles with its climate, sun, and art; however, ‘real existence’ remained in the north. The dark, melancholic and contradictory North appeared to the early Polish Romantics more familiar than the classical and harmonious South, with which previous generations had identified themselves. This appeared in disputes about Polish identity as Slavs. One was the idyllic vision of a clement PoleSlav, while the other side saw the Slavs as belonging to the dark and violent North propagated by the early Polish Romantics. The wild and stormy North—like Ukraine in Malczewski’s Maria—becomes the inner, mental Romantic landscape. In his Byronic Maria, Antoni Malczewski refers to sunny Italy, filled with ancient monuments. Its picturesque and peaceful beauty is unattainable for the melancholic man of the North with his tragic history. However, it must be said that, paradoxically, despite the entire orientation of early Romanticism towards the North and the Middle Ages, it was the Mediterranean culture of Rome and Greece that was most familiar to the Romantics, mainly due to their university education in classical studies and the traditional pro-Latin leanings of Polish noble culture. It is the South in the sense advanced by Madame de Staël, but also as the ambit of Mediterranean culture and history (principally adopted through the pursuit of national identity), that was familiar to the Polish Romantics. This was also the result of the direct experience of travel. Romantic traveller-refugees found their place in Europe (in a metaphorical sense) by experiencing Rome and Greece as very fa-

iBracewell_A_book.indb 225

4/14/08 2:52:40 PM

226

Under Eastern Eyes

miliar. Though they had long known these cultures, they now rediscovered them in an individual way, as personal experience, through travel. Europe became their home through reminiscences of the past of Mediterranean culture and history, but also through the discovery of the profound, archaic, mythical sources uniting all Europe. According to the Polish Romantics, ancient Mediterranean culture (together with the Christian religion) was always the foundation of the unity of Europe. Yet this ancient culture was largely adapted in individual practice, through the direct experience of travel. Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883), another significant Polish Romantic poet and an emigrant, wrote about his solitude in Europe and about his longing for Europe during his voyage to America in 1852. In Europe, ancient monuments replaced his family feelings. Contact with Mediterranean antiquity became a remedy for the emigrant’s solitude.3 Another aspect of this familiarity with the Mediterranean world and this estrangement from nineteenth-century civilisation can be traced in the output of Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), the most outstanding Polish poet. Exiled from Poland to Russia in 1824, he managed to travel to the west (1829). As a refugee, he made his ‘Grand Tour’ in exile—across Germany, Switzerland and Italy to Rome. His was obviously an unusual Grand Tour: he set off as a refugee humiliated by Tsarist tyranny, and simultaneously as a proud Pole setting out on an ‘educational’ journey into the past of Europe—to its sources. This was a Pole who, while a student in the University of Vilnius, wrote of himself (and his generation) that he came from the area of the River Neman, that he was a Pole, and also a citizen of Europe (the poem Do Joachima Lelewela, 1822).4 Fascinated with Rome, where he felt at home, as a mature man he wrote to his daughter that in his youth, he and his generation had lived simultaneously in Poland and in Rome.5 This was due to a type of Latin 3 C. Norwid, Letter to Maria Trębicka, New York, 21–3 February 1854, in idem, Pisma wszystkie, ed. J.W. Gomulicki, 11 vols. (Warsaw: 1971–3), 8:207. Norwid writes that the ruins of Rome often replaced his family feelings. 4 On Mickiewicz’s idea of Europe, see J. Bachórz, Jak pachnie na Litwie Mickiewicza i inne studia o romantyzmie (Gdansk: 2003), 125–44. 5 Mickiewicz, Letter to Maria Mickiewiczówna, Paris, 19 December 1851, in idem, Dzieła, jubilee edition (Warsaw: 1955), 16:465–6.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 226

4/14/08 2:52:40 PM

European Identity and Romantic Irony

227

education characteristic of Polish noble culture, and to the modern classical education he had acquired in the University of Vilnius. In 1851 he wrote to his daughter that Rome was something utterly magnificent in the world. It was the Rome of Antiquity—both pagan and Christian— that impressed Mickiewicz so much. This was the Rome of works of art, the Rome of a great history still existing in this city as a palimpsest. During his unusual exile-tour, Mickiewicz was struck by the contrast between the European cities, particularly those in the Mediterranean, and St. Petersburg.6 The poet saw and described St. Petersburg, comparing it to other great European cities, particularly to those like Athens and Rome which had developed slowly and naturally in places protected by Nature and the gods, in compliance with Nature and the sacrum: In ancient time of Italy and Greece Beneath a temple men sought calm and peace, ‘Mid holy trees, a wood-nymph’s spring below, Or on the heights took refuge from a foe And thus was builded Athens, Sparta, Rome. […] And where some navigable stream flowed by, Towns, small at first, with ages towered high. These cities were by reverence inspired, Or for defense or trading were desired.7 (v.1–12)

St. Petersburg, built at the command of a tyrant, against the will of nature, men and the gods ‘on marshy grounds’, on fruitless soil, and on 6 ‘The so-called Digressions, the seven passages of verse that Mickiewicz attached to Forefathers’ Eve III, serve as a kind of epilogue to the drama, but can equally well be regarded as an independent sequence of poems, and are of particular interest to the modern reader with the thought-provoking insights they offer into the past, present and future of the Russian nation. The poet’s eye swoops down on the wintry landscape like a film camera as the cortege of deportees approaches St Petersburg, exposing in increasing detail the hollow grandeur of the tsardom and the unfathomable capacity for and acceptance of suffering of the Russian people.’ A. Debska, Country of the mind. An introduction to the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz (Warsaw: 2000), 81. 7 Mickiewicz, Forefathers’ Eve. III. Digressions. Petersburg, cited by W. Lednicki, ‘Mickiewicz’s Digression’, in Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. The story of a masterpiece, ed. W. Lednicki (Berkeley & Los Angeles: 1955), 115.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 227

4/14/08 2:52:40 PM

228

Under Eastern Eyes

the blood of his subjects, appeared to Mickiewicz to be an appalling imitation and caricature of the European cities.8 This path of development could even be seen as a Satanic when compared to that of the Mediterranean cities: And fierce and fickle as a despot’s mind. Men did not choose such lands; a tsar inclined To these vast swamps and bade his subjects rear A city not for their use, but for him, A tribute to a tyrant's cruel whim.9 ( v. 20–4) The architects repeat a famous phrase, That Rome displays the labors of mankind, While lovely Venice was by gods designed; But he who views St. Petersburg will find That such a pile demons alone could raise.10 (v. 45–9)

Rome and St. Petersburg—two cities which the poet visited during his journey in exile—show the axiological character of his concept of Europe: its ancient Mediterranean centre and its despotic peripheries. Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) and Adam Mickiewicz are the most significant Polish Romantic poets who influenced the Polish mentality, literature and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were both brought up in the multicultural and multinational eastern borderland of the former Polish Commonwealth (many other remarkable writers, such as Czesław Miłosz and Tadeusz Konwicki, also came 8 See Debska, Country of the Mind, 83–4: ‘It is said that in ancient Rome to erect a theatre for the emperors a river of gold was poured out, and the poet ponders on the cost of building this city: An ocean of our blood and tears was poured./[…]/How many guiltless murdered and reviled,/How many of our lands were robbed, despoiled,/Till Lithuanian blood, Ukrainian tears,/ And Polish gold did amply pay for wares/Of which all Londons, Parises, could boast,/To deck each building in the latest taste,/To wash the buffet floor with champagne jets,/And wear the parquet down with minuets.’ (Debska’s translation). 9 Mickiewicz, Forefathers’ Eve. III. Digressions. Petersburg, in Lednicki, ‘Mickiewicz's Digression’, 115. 10 Ibid., 116.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 228

4/14/08 2:52:41 PM

European Identity and Romantic Irony

229

from that area). Słowacki, born on the Polish-Ukrainian borderland, studied at the University of Vilnius, just like Mickiewicz, whose ‘small regional fatherland’ was Lithuania. Still, Słowacki’s encounter with the Mediterranean seems quite different in his travel writing, and especially in the poem Podróż do Ziemi Świętej z Neapolu [Journey to the Holy Land from Naples], which is the proper subject of my chapter. From 1831 to his death in 1849, Juliusz Słowacki lived in exile in western Europe (France, Italy, Switzerland) and his entire emigration involved wandering around Europe. In his travels we can distinguish between his journeys across western and southern Europe (especially Italy), and the great voyage (1836–1837) which followed the path of Romantic pilgrimages (the Romantic Grand Tour?)—from Italy, through Greece to the Holy Land and Egypt—to the sources of European culture, and far beyond this culture. Słowacki’s Podróż do Ziemi Świętej z Neapolu, like many of his texts related to this great voyage, reveals an antinomy between travel as a Romantic ironic voyage and an existential experience of eternal uprootedness. We can also perceive in it a profound tension between the concepts of wandering and pilgrimage. During his voyage Słowacki drew his inspiration from Chateaubriand’s, Byron’s and Lamartine’s wanderings and ‘pilgrimages’. The similarities concern both literary inspiration and the route of the journey as well as its experience. Yet Słowacki’s travel and his ironical poem on travel have their own unique character. As to the literary phenomenon, it is worth concentrating upon the genre of an ironical poem arising from a journey to the Mediterranean. Słowacki described his journey in the form of a digressive poem, which shaped his travel writing as a Romantic ironic voyage, where Romantic irony infiltrates both the real experience of travel and its literary record. The two worlds of literature and of the real journey absorb and influence each other. Słowacki’s poem and his entire journey become a constant ironic (in a Romantic sense) play with literary models and travel writing conventions. It must be underlined that the category of ‘Romantic ironic voyage’ applied here refers to both the literary form and the real travel experience. Słowacki creates his unique genre in the form of a digressive poem: an ironic poem springing from the literary creation of a Mediterranean journey, full of signs and symbols deeply rooted in European

iBracewell_A_book.indb 229

4/14/08 2:52:41 PM

230

Under Eastern Eyes

tradition. The artist presents himself as a typical Romantic traveller, and at the same time he retains an ironic distance from the model of a Romantic traveller. Hence, the journey itself and the Mediterranean world become non-negotiable elements of this genre structure, created by the poet, and revealing its own viewpoint, a unique message contained within the genre structure. This genre structure carries a meaning and has an artistic dimension which differs from a poem such as The Giaour by Byron, for instance, or Maria by Malczewski. In Malczewski’s Maria, which was in fact a Byronic poem, an individual is nothing but a traveller in the world and cannot settle down on Earth. His fate involves wandering understood as existential uncertainty and being lost in the world of values. The basis of European civilisation—ancient Mediterranean culture—encountered by Byronic heroes (as in Byron and Malczewski) exists only as ruins and in a degraded form. The individual, with his contemporary and shattered awareness, cannot communicate with such ruined and degraded Antiquity, cannot read out its signs, though he badly needs them. Darkness and silence fall onto the Greece of Byron’s poems and the Greece of the Polish early Romantic poems which grew from Byronic inspiration. Silence and darkness reflect the inner condition of the hero of the early Romantic poems. The artistic meaning and the message—‘viewpoint’—of the Polish digressive poem are completely different, however. The digressive poem, which belongs to Polish literature’s mature Romanticism, reveals the artist’s freedom and power over the literary world and the Romantic’s distance from himself. Moreover, it also shows art redeeming culture as a value. In Polish Romanticism it is Słowacki who is the only master of irony. In Słowacki’s travel writing we can perceive a connection between the digressive poem as a literary genre (developed by Byron) and the variant of the Romantic journey which can be referred to as a ‘Romantic ironic voyage’. Firstly, in Słowacki’s output we can see clearly exposed a relationship between the dynamics and variability of the narration and the experience of the journey itself. It seems there is a link between the dynamics and variability of a Romantic voyage, its speed and mood (and the Romantic perception of the world), and the variable pace of a digressive poem. We sense a constant irregularity in tone and aesthetic quality: from the sublime to the trivial, from the grave to the comic and the grotesque, as well as constant changes in the per-

iBracewell_A_book.indb 230

4/14/08 2:52:41 PM

European Identity and Romantic Irony

231

spective on the world: from a panoramic view to a microscopic focus, from the broad spectrum to the detail. This continuous aesthetic and thematic variability imitates the changeable and unexpected rhythm of a journey. Just like travelling, it reveals the pursuit of values. Secondly, the connection between the digressive poem and the Romantic voyage can be seen in the fact that it is an artist who is the traveller. While travelling across the Mediterranean, the artist encounters the most significant motifs of European culture, and as a Romantic ironist, he plays a game of identification and distance. But he also evokes all the accessories of a Romantic voyage, its practice and motifs, all in order to undermine them and show his Schlegelian ironic power over them. The motifs which make up this game of identification and distance comprise, among others: the ruins of ancient Italian and Greek monuments; auto-irony in the presentation of the poet meditating on the remains of Antiquity; ancient myths of artists in Mediterranean culture. Above all, an important feature of this type of poem is the creation of the lyrical subject (sujet lyrique)—a travelling artist for whom travelling and travel writing have a metapoetical dimension and are a reflection of his own condition. Słowacki’s poem is written in sestina verse and comprises eight cantos: I Leaving Naples; (second canto missing); III Steamboat (description of a sea crossing to Corfu and Patras by boat, in company with the famous Greek poet Dionysios Solomos); IV Greece; V Journey on a Horse; VI Night in Vostiza; VII Megaspileon Monastery; VIII Agamemnon’s Tomb; and IX, which completes the poem with images of Corinth and Acrocorinth. The titles themselves already indicate the route of Słowacki’s voyage, following the route of other Romantic travellers: after a visit to Corfu, along the bay of Lepanto, the Corinthian Bay (with dark and gloomy Parnassus in the distance) through Megaspileon to Corinth and Athens. He also visited Sparta and spent several days on Syros. It is, therefore, a description of a fragment of a real journey completed by Słowacki. However, there Greece—as Słowacki admitted in his correspondence—was overshadowed by Egypt, and the night at the Tomb of Christ in Jerusalem, which had a great influence upon the poet and his output, is not mentioned in his travel account. The poem reveals numerous, subtly drafted images of the journey (perhaps in the manner of Laurence Sterne); portraits of persons en-

iBracewell_A_book.indb 231

4/14/08 2:52:42 PM

232

Under Eastern Eyes

countered on the way (often satirical, as for instance the one of Dionysios Solomos); beautiful descriptions of Greece as a sacred land, the land of poets and gods; but also images of modern Greece. There are many allusions to nineteenth-century trends in travel and sometimes tourist attractions are depicted with a sense of humour. We must add here that there is no topos expressing reflections on the passing of earlier historical greatness, the usual opposition between the ancient glory of the Mediterranean countries and their depreciated modernity. Słowacki speaks of Greece—just as Byron once did—as the land of ancient gods, but also as a land still marked by God’s favour. We note an abundance of tones revealing everyday detail and the eternal Greek harmony between nature, art and myth. We experience finely signalled oriental exotics (traces of the Turks) and the philhellenic poetics of modern Greece. The poem is characterised by a peculiar ‘lightness’11 (created by the figure of the Romantic ironist ruling over the world he has created, and also by the system of verse), humour, juggling with the themes and motifs of Romantic travel writing. This travel writing also reveals an entanglement between Romantic dream and Romantic reality. Destabilised reality and the dream of visited countries, experiences in the present time and memories of the journey: all three time dimensions (so characteristic of the journey to famous countries) interweave here and influence one another. Despite the lightness of the entire poem, in which the poet juggles various themes of European culture, the subject matter is solemn and is related to the question of the mystery of death, the boundaries between life, death and eternal life. Leaving Europe (Naples), Słowacki sets out on his voyage in search of truth, as if he could not find the answer to his most important existential and metaphysical questions in Europe. If there is a topos of degradation of former greatness, it is not characteristic of the South, particularly not of Greece, where there are still numerous signs of incredible grandeur. Greece is not degraded but becomes a protected enclave and a remnant of a mysterious bond between man, nature and metaphysics. The Greek landscape as depicted by Słowacki is particularly full of traces of this unusual harmo11 See Przybylski, Podróż Juliusza Słowackiego na Wschód, 17.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 232

4/14/08 2:52:42 PM

European Identity and Romantic Irony

233

ny. It simultaneously carries the memory of history and the world of myth. For instance, the high mountain over the bay of Lepanto behind which famous Messolonghi stretches, reminds the poet of a great pyramid built by God, not by man. God sensed the greatness and glory of this country. In Słowacki’s poem, Greece connects various dimensions of existence: nature, history and the sacrum. The image of decaying former greatness is associated rather with west European civilisation, which becomes the civilisation of a great city, of finance and capital. Ironically, this civilisation is shown as helpless when it comes to questions of the meaning and higher level of existence. It is further away from its great ancient sources. For instance, the tomb of Virgil in Naples, where Słowacki sets out on his voyage, serves as an occasion to reflect on the loss of ancient cultural models (e.g. the form of a great epic) in modern times. The technical achievements of civilisation, commercial and financial successes are, concludes the poet with considerable irony, the ‘contemporary Aeneid’. Leaving Naples, the traveller is aware that he is leaving Europe. He compares Europe to a nymph carried away by Jupiter: he sees her blue eyes in Naples; the heart of Europe in Warsaw; Sebastopol, Azov, Odessa and St. Petersburg are the thorns in Europe’s foot; the head of Europe is in Paris with its ‘starched collar’ in London; and Rome is the scapulary of Europe. He perceives nineteenth-century Europe as an entity, but ironically surveys the ancient sources which have been lost by modern civilisation. The poem reveals an ambivalent approach to western Europe. Still, Słowacki’s entire literary output reveals the poet’s reticent attitude to France and Paris (he referred to it in 1833 as the modern Sodom), and his sympathy and interest in England, its continuous development, history and literature personified in the figures of Shakespeare and Byron. Słowacki’s historiosophical thought developed into the negation of freedom in the material and physical sense (embodied by the Great French Revolution), and the negation of the concept of freedom which prevailed in bourgeois-parliamentary France. In the 1840s, in the later mystical period of his life, Słowacki worked out a vision of a European revolution of the ‘Spirit’, a revolution in the spiritual sense: a great spiritual transformation of the individual and society, and the individual’s heroic and spiritual freedom. This concept shows the poet’s fascination with ancient Greece (particularly the heroism of Sparta), and his faith in the European mission

iBracewell_A_book.indb 233

4/14/08 2:52:42 PM

234

Under Eastern Eyes

of Slavs as a force bringing into Europe new spiritual values which arise from the profound consideration of Christianity and its social meaning. Aversion to modern Europe and to himself, sadness, melancholy and helplessness with respect to the mysteries of life and death all result in the poet’s decision to set out on his expedition to the cradles of European civilisation: to ancient Greece and to the Tomb of Christ in Jerusalem. In Słowacki’s journey we can perceive his fascination with Greece as the cradle of European culture (longing for Arcadia, admiration of Sparta and Greece as the source of myth), and as a country striving for independence, just like his own homeland. The category of freedom becomes the most important value of the Greek world with which the traveller identifies himself. The traveller feels no alienation from this world of struggle and striving for freedom. Słowacki creates a parallel between the history of modern Greece and modern Poland. He is envious of Greek independence, and the Greek refugees who can return home, to their fatherland. A few years later, he was to create his utopian vision of Poland-Sparta, which recalled the glorious past of Sparta and noble Poland and defined an anthropological ideal of bravery and valour. Słowacki—as he says—puts his questions to a Greek and to Christ. He sets off to interrogate the mystery of eternal life (related to Platonism: ‘Do you not dream in the grave?’, Słowacki asks), the significance of sacrifice, the sense of sacrifice for freedom. He goes to Greece and to Jerusalem, identifying himself with those fighting for freedom in Europe, with martyrs (Polish and Greek freedom fighters), and with the victims of violence. He sets off to inquire about the truth of the sacrifice and suffering of those humiliated by history and politics. He goes to Greece and the Tomb of Christ to ask the most important questions about existence and the significance of sacrifices for freedom. As if he could not find the answers in western Europe, which has lost all contact with its sources: Antiquity and Christianity. As if there were no traces of Antiquity in the West, as if there were no Christianity in Europe (as if the institution of the church was not enough). ‘I am going to ask Jesus’, says Słowacki, as if he not only needed a direct travel encounter with Greece, but he also needed to spend a night at

iBracewell_A_book.indb 234

4/14/08 2:52:42 PM

European Identity and Romantic Irony

235

the empty Tomb of Christ in Jerusalem. Aimless wandering becomes a pilgrimage. Ten months later, Słowacki returned to Italy and lived in Florence for six months. It was there that he wrote his most important works inspired by travel and Italian culture, but at the same time he continued to look for his own Polish and Slavic identity. Although he was deeply impressed by the great culture of Florence, Słowacki felt intensifying melancholy and alienation. He tried to redefine—in comparison with the culture of the Mediterranean—the specificity of the Polish national experience of history and the essence of Slavic northern myths. He saw that the archaic Greece which fascinated him most in Mycenae was similar to the North. He likened the tomb of Agamemnon to a dark druid’s grotto. The oldest Greek myths had much in common with the myths of the North: they showed a reality full of cruelty, clashes, battles and darkness. Such reality appeared at the beginning of European culture, and it made a traveller flee from nineteenth-century Europe in pursuit of the sources of beauty and faith. However, in the next stage of the development of his historiosophical thought, Słowacki, already in his final period of life, worked out the concept of the revolution of the ‘Spirit’ and the spiritual freedom which evolves from, but also transcends, the catastrophes and tragedies of history. Translation by ANNA WRÓBEL

iBracewell_A_book.indb 235

4/14/08 2:52:43 PM

iBracewell_A_book.indb 236

4/14/08 2:52:43 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality: The Travels of Nicolae Iorga Andi Mihalache

THE WEST AS MUSEUM The point of simply departing is to arrive, but the story behind a journey is curiosity. And the study of learned journeys confirms once more that the emergence of modern self-consciousness arises from differences, which are not necessarily novelties. On the contrary, the Oriental traveller, accustomed to thinking about time in terms of physical distances, travels to the Western medieval and ancient past not to discover it, but to resuscitate it, as an alternative present. The monuments seen through the lens of prior reading exist, then, not so much in terms of the history of which they are the repository, as through the way in which we ‘inhabit’ them. As evidence of a prestigious history, ancient or medieval ruins were analysed by Western travellers, who themselves interpreted them through readings, cabinets of curiosity, collections and so forth. This in turn provoked the curiosity of Easterners, the topoi suggested by readings becoming obligatory stopping-off points on the itineraries of cultural tourism. A city or monument described by Goethe or Chateaubriand would—as a consequence of such descriptions—duly be visited by east European travellers. By consecrating the points of interest of a European tour, Western travellers educated the imaginations and expectations of others, who seemed to recognise the West through self-identification with a series of cultural symbols such as galleries, museums, monuments and even the points where famous travellers had previously paused. Western travel literature had already inventoried ‘the places to be seen’, and the West was thus presented as a prescribed route, as in a museum. For that reason, we are left with questions such as: When a traveller goes west, what arrives first: himself, or his imagination? Does the West recognise itself in those artifacts and sites through which it invites others to discover it in its respective

iBracewell_A_book.indb 237

4/14/08 2:52:43 PM

238

Under Eastern Eyes

manifestations? Or is it the Easterners who, eager to relate to an older, more glorious past, read the West in a monumental key? For we look at and think about monuments in order to understand the world we come from, the space to which we feel an allegiance. Travel naturally inspires reflections on the spaces travelled through, but also produces representations of its starting point. Travel literature poses the problem of successive representations, superimposed, often a priori, anachronistic, mediated by the tastes of the moment, by other exemplary travel experiences, by the given constraints of a genre which stimulates different ways of seeing, and may even inspire people to travel. Travel, then, does not mean going in a given direction. It means déjà vu and anticipation, a collection of tableaux in motion. Like art, travel limits itself to a restructuring of the sphere of the visible through the intermediary of the imagination: that faculty which we possess of imagining things and places, even in their absence. Its relationship with heritage is particularly evident in a Romantic context, where the relationships between truth and artistic creation are re-evaluated, and Plato’s ancient definition of art—as a poor copy of nature—is rejected. For the German Romantics, for example, art was no longer a modest imitation of the real, but direct, intuitive and total knowledge of existence as a whole. Considered from this point of view, the impressions left by historical monuments became much more profound, suggesting to the spectator a direct, real involvement in the dreamt-of past.

NICOLAE IORGA (1871–1940) The above considerations were inspired by, and may—I hope—serve to introduce a reading of the travel writings of the Romanian scholar Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940). A prolific and illustrious writer, specialist in Romanian, Balkan, Byzantine and Ottoman history, doctor honoris causa of the universities of Rome, Paris, Oxford and Geneva, cultural activist, orator and journalist and, briefly, Prime Minister of Romania (1930–1931), Iorga produced a massive œuvre, marked by a confrontation between modernity and tradition, and also by his contradictory, passionate and melancholy personality. Iorga came of age as an intellectual and a public figure at a time when his country, having freed itself from Ottoman rule and become an independent kingdom in 1881, was establishing its political and cultural self-image and beginning to

iBracewell_A_book.indb 238

4/14/08 2:52:43 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

239

act as a focal point for the aspirations of Romanians in the neighbouring empires, notably in Transylvania and in Russian Bessarabia.1 From the early 1890s, Iorga studied and researched archives in France, Germany and Italy. He made his name first by publishing historical documents and works on medieval history; and then, from the beginning of the twentieth century, as a nationalist pamphleteer, agitator of the Romanians of Transylvania, and literary entrepreneur, pursuing a generally traditionalist, neo-Romantic cultural orientation, stressing the cult of originality and the popular spirit, and criticising superficial cultural imitations and foreign borrowings. His thought, however, should not entirely be associated with a right-wing, passéist, xenophobic hostility to change. Aspects of his doctrine were shared with, and indeed borrowed from, modernist and socialist currents of thought, notably the critic and theoretician Constantin DobrogeanuGherea.2 In turn-of-the-century Romania, nationalists and socialists found common ground in denouncing bourgeois theories of the autonomy of art, which neglected the interests and the tastes of Romania’s majority peasant population. Starting from the premise that meaning is derived from continuity of tradition, Iorga criticised the Romanians’ abandonment of what he saw as their ancestral values, and tried to affirm their sense of obligation towards a patriarchal style of life. His motivation was not so much

1 English-language treatments of Iorga’s life and work focus on his historical writings and nationalist politics: Maria-Matilda Alexandrescu-Dersca-Bulgaru, Nicolae Iorga—a Romanian historian of the Ottoman Empire, trans. M. Lăzărescu (Bucharest: 1972); William Oldson, The historical and nationalistic thought of Nicolae Iorga (Boulder, Colorado: 1973); Maurice Pearton, ‘Nicolae Iorga as historian and politician’, in Historians as nation-builders: Central and Southeast Europe, ed. D. Deletant and H. Hanak (London: 1988); Katherine Verdery, ‘Moments in the rise of the discourse of national identity’, in Romanii în istoria universală, Vol. II-i, ed. G. Buzatu, I. Agrigoroaiei and V. Cristian (Iaşi: 1987), 89–136 and especially 106–9; Ambrus Miskolczy, ‘Nicolae Iorga’s conception of Transylvanian history’, in Historians and the history of Transylvania, ed. L. Péter (Boulder, Colorado: 1992), 159–66; Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, Nicolae Iorga: a biography (Iaşi, Romania & Portland, Oregon: 1998). To my knowledge, nothing on his travel writings has been published in English. 2 George Călinescu, Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent, 2nd revised edition (Bucharest: 1982), 601.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 239

4/14/08 2:52:44 PM

240

Under Eastern Eyes

love of the archaic for its own sake, but might be related to a more general attempt to demonstrate that Europe’s Orient had produced, in spite of all obstacles, a culture as viable as that which had developed in western Europe.3 He saw these two civilisations as being complementary rather than comparable. His nationalism insisted on preserving what was specific to Romanian culture, but also sought to modify and adapt it, above all in order to make it translatable.4 He did not seek to denigrate the West, but rather to situate the history of the Romanians (and other east European peoples) in respectable relation to it. In Iorga’s conception, long periods of interaction between different parts of the world had produced a series of cultural and behavioural ‘frames’, and he sought to uncover them wherever he went. He viewed the world with an ethnographer’s eye, seeking out the atemporal particularities of each country. 5 Looking at Iorga’s travel writings6 from the theoretical viewpoint proposed by Erving Goffman, one might consider his monumental vision of Western civilisation in terms of ‘anticipated alterity’.7 In order to produce an articulate indigenist ideology, Iorga’s generation sought to question the traditional stigmatizing self-conceptions of Romanian ‘backwardness’, and posit a role as viable challengers to the West.8 As 3 In Iorga’s writings, East and West are united by Christianity, Latinity and the anti-Ottoman crusades. This does not, however, amount to an Augustinian universalism. Any Christian notes in Iorga’s thought evince not a cosmopolitan foundation but rather an ecumenical outlook, an attempt to reconcile identities without renouncing them. 4 Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: 1988), 262. 5 Nicolae Iorga, ‘Două concepţii istorice’, in Discursuri de recepţie la Academia Română, ed. O. Păun and A. Tănăsescu (Bucharest: 1980), 58–80. 6 Barbu Theodorescu, Nicolae Iorga (Bucharest: 1968), 79–98. 7 Erving Goffman, Stigmate. Les usages sociaux des handicaps (Paris: 1975). Sorin Antohi, Civitas imaginalis. Istorie şi utopie în cultura română (Iaşi: 1999), 254 applied Goffman’s theories to the Romanian case. Undervaluing ourselves, we in fact establish our own set of norms, whereby, indirectly, we delegitimate our superiors, accusing them of being incapable of understanding us. The ‘secondary benefits’ accruing to the stigmatised include, for instance, the disproportionate value accorded to unexpected but otherwise modest achievements (258). 8 Alex Drace-Francis, ‘Dinicu Golescu’s Account of my travels (1826): Eurotopia as manifesto’, Journeys. The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 6:1-2 (2005), 24–53 proposed a distinction between interiorisation of the gaze of the other, and the use of self-stigmatisation as a discursive strategy.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 240

4/14/08 2:52:44 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

241

part of this strategy, Iorga resorted to what I will call here ‘the unifying function of metaphor’.

IORGA THE IMPRESSIONIST A standard tourist excursion gives little attention to the ambience in which the vestiges of the past can be seen. Such journeys are, rather, associated with the achievement of a certain aim. Iorga on the other hand, developing a method which may be called impressionist, sought to broaden his and his readership’s horizons by bringing home not just verbal clichés, but painted or written sketches. His work—and other more general aspects of Romanian national ideology—is frequently subsumed under the category of Romanticism, understood not just as a particular chronological segment of modern culture, but also as an atemporal attitude. In using the term here, we refer not just to a period which the school books place in the first half of the nineteenth century, but a timeless propensity,9 which in the present case happened to manifest itself between 1871 and 1940. But what kind of a traveller was he? Ordinary travellers, innocent, abroad, and open to any old observation, tend not to remark upon the atmospherics of historical vestiges. More usually, they date their journey, associating it with the visit to such an objective, and the narrated order of such experiences does not usually correspond to the real succession of events. The tourist prefers monuments to people.10 His transports have a restful, holiday function; tiring encounters with the local population are as a rule avoided, and dialogue is subordinated to the arbitrary collection of fixed images.11 The impressionist—a category in which we place Nicolae Iorga—is a completely different beast: a tourist with a highly specialist training, with a little more time at his disposal, and sincerely disposed to broadening his horizons to take in human beings too, not bringing home mere verbal clichés, but inclining towards written or painted sketches.12 On the road to Câmpulung Muscel, he notes:

9 Marian Popa, Călătoriile epocii romantice (Bucharest: 1972), 11. 10 Tzvetan Todorov, Noi şi ceilalţi. Despre diversitate, trans. A. Vlad (Iaşi: 1999), 465. 11 Ibid., 465–6. 12 Ibid., 467.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 241

4/14/08 2:52:44 PM

242

Under Eastern Eyes here and there by the side of the embanked road appear the heroes of the painter-poet Grigorescu: little shepherds and shepherdesses, in bright white clothing and with fine light in their eyes, standing in their proud simplicity like sons of emperors after a costume change, lost in the forests condemned by some witch who will yet perish tomorrow by the vengeful hand of innocence, and then they, the shepherds and shepherdesses, with their crooks and distaffs, will come forth truly, to the joy of the multitude, as tawny princes and lily-white princesses.13

What Iorga is describing here are not so much untrodden territories and their inhabitants, but the impressions produced by them upon him, through sounds, tastes, unexpected images, customs, phantasms.14 Such writings do not, then, come to any kind of dénouement, they rather leave us to understand that their author will return to relate some other adventures. A conclusion is thereby promised and delayed at the same time, thanks to the picturesque assimilation of objects, details and colours.15 In the final analysis, the fairy-tale, not by accident, has crystallised itself as a species of endless journey.16 The writing down of remembered experience does not necessarily presuppose self-interrogation. Iorga clearly addresses another reader whom he wishes to impress not so much by the simple inventorisation of things seen, but particularly by his presence on the spot, and by the intense experiences which his journey occasioned. He acknowledged the nineteenth-century historian, politician and traveller Mihail Kogălniceanu as his predecessor—‘at the Romanian Academy, we have his notes on Spain, a hundred pages of manuscript of which only a few bits and pieces have been published, and not the best ones’17—and did not fail to mention one of his great childhood favourites, Hugo’s Orientales. His travels do not end upon arrival at the desired destination, but continue in writing, as the world’s vast spaces are reconciled with the 13 Nicolae Iorga, Drumuri şi oraşe din România, 2nd edition (Bucharest: 1916), 59. ‘Grigorescu’ = Nicolae Grigorescu (1838–1907), one of the founding figures of modern Romanian painting, noted for his open-air scenes, studies of village life and of certain human typologies. 14 Ibid. 15 Mircea Muthu, Literatura română şi spiritul sud-est European (Bucharest: 1976), 181. 16 Ibid. 17 Nicolae Iorga, Câteva zile prin Spania (Bucharest: 1927), 169.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 242

4/14/08 2:52:45 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

243

images chosen by memory, and ordered into a story by the norms of narration. Impressions gathered on the road come together in short passages, without a well-defined beginning or end. As Gilbert Durand once said, it is the anthology that generates the museum.18 The purpose of the journey is of no apparent importance, descriptions are deliberately isolated and individualised, like specimens in an exhibition display case. To sum up, the Romanian historian’s journey begins with his personal reading and ends up as a series of notes intended for reading by others. ‘Read before setting out,’ Iorga advises us. ‘That at least is why I spent time and effort writing and publishing books like those Five lectures on Venice, like In France, and others like that on Contemporary Greece, on Serbia, on the journey From Bulgaria to Constantinople, on the Scandinavian lands, on Spain and Portugal, on America.’19 People tell stories so that their memory survives them, but also that things be known, that experience once acquired may be held forever and transmitted through the gift of the word.20 The more so as at home we are fatally static, prisoners of a dominant reality, pleasant or otherwise; and it is only when we go off somewhere that we learn to make selections, and to present ourselves in favourable freeze-frames. Maybe that explains the extremely passéist disposition of the Romanian traveller. France, usually associated by Romanians with the latest novelties and fashions, inspires in Iorga a flash of autobiographical melancholy: ‘France [...] we are heading towards her. Twenty-two years have passed since I last saw her, and I feel as if I am turning once more towards myself, towards somebody younger, happier, more infatuated with everything, as I was then.’21 Although he made the claim that ‘I took notes on the way, stopping to write in riverside meadows’,22 we should perhaps question the spontaneity of his impressions. We cannot know which of his sentences were composed during or immediately after the journey, and which ones he wrote up afterwards. The historian may have retrospectively attributed to their composition the status of experiences corresponding to a given moment or landscape. 18 Gilbert Durand, Aventurile imaginii. Imaginaţia simbolică. Imaginarul, trans. M. Constantinescu and A. Bobocea (Bucharest: 1999), 114. 19 Nicolae Iorga, Peisagii (Cluj: 1998), 265. 20 Muthu, Literatura română, 180. 21 Iorga, Note de drum (Bucharest: 1913), 33. 22 Idem, Orizonturile mele. O viaţă de om aşa cum a fost (Bucharest: 1984), 234.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 243

4/14/08 2:52:45 PM

244

Under Eastern Eyes

THE UNIFYING FUNCTION OF METAPHOR The better to endure it, we avoid direct contact with the real when it doesn’t suit us; we approach it parabolically. Analysing Iorga’s discourse, we can see that, beyond the ornamental stylistic register, his mode of reasoning and argumentation may be described as metaphorical. In Greek metaphora means ‘transfer’, ‘transport’.23 As a figure of speech, it involves an abbreviated comparison between two things which are to be seen not as synonymous, but as images which evoke one or more characteristics of the object compared.24 In the context of travel literature, and the symbolic East–West geographies they map out, metaphor functions not just as an instrument of the poetic imagination, of ‘invention’. It is, in the succinct definition offered by the Romanian literary critic Tudor Vianu, ‘the result of an implicit comparison’.25 As it then moves from literary usage into everyday speech, it begins to play an important role in defining immediate reality, and may even cause people to act in accordance with the representations which it sustains.26 According to Iorga, the feelings we entertain about our own nation, whatever they may be, cannot be verified unless we know the life of others.27 He did not affirm this merely out of a desire to know the other, but in order to grasp, in an organicist spirit, all kinds of analogies, syntheses, and genealogies. By using metaphor to depict the transhistorical relationship of the Orthodox East with the Catholic or Protestant West, Iorga sought in a way to compare without drawing conclusions, and bring out coincidences, superimpositions, identities. It is a discourse based on the presupposition of a deeper unity among things, beyond the apparent differences between them.28 First of all, any discordant elements, such as might impede the reconciliation of Europe’s two poles, are avoided or eliminated; a few opposing 23 Gh.N. Dragomirescu, Dicţionarul figurilor de stil (Bucharest: 1995), 198. 24 Ibid., 199. 25 Tudor Vianu, Problemele metaforei şi alte studii de stilistică (Bucharest: 1957), 9. 26 Olga Brednikova, ‘Fence and gates: Images and metaphors of the modern Russian border’, Caietele Echinox 5 (2003), 156. 27 Nicolae Iorga, Generalităţi cu privire la studiile istorice, 4th edition (Iaşi: 1999), 242. 28 Vianu, Problemele metaforei, 19.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 244

4/14/08 2:52:45 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

245

elements are then retained, which suggest both specificity and commonality.29 Awareness of the resemblance between the two terms of comparison—the Balkans and the West—co-exists with awareness of the distances between them.30 Its pretext is similitude, while its raison d’être remains difference, or more exactly the sublimation of difference. One might even say that the role of metaphor is to avoid frontal comparisons, to bring the unknown into a framework supplied by the already known.31 It conciliates between two realities, obliging them to engage in dialogue, albeit selectively, through the intermediary of the common features—in this case, Latinity, Christianity, the Gothic style—and thus making them comparable, but not identical. Iorga is, then, working within the Romantic episteme, focused on the reassociation of different fields of thought and a refusal to draw a line between science and art, between reason and fancy.32

INTERVIEWS WITH THE PAST Our first incursions in time, the completely imaginary ones, are associated retrospectively with childhood, while the fact that their imagery remains active into old age often goes unobserved. Hugo’s Orientales, which the historian says he read when he was only six, gave him ‘dreams of battles and of distant places’.33 ‘My journeys [...] seemed to unpick times as much as places’,34 he added on another occasion. They give shape to a profound heterochronia, betraying a need to live in several ages at once, to seek in the past and elsewhere for the model of a unitary and harmonious world.35 A journey, for all its apparent provision of access to the palpable vestiges of the past, actually remythologises the object territory and compromises the probity of the witness: even if the visitor is a trained historian, he is not ‘demonstrating’ the truth of the monument by checking it against exterior evidence, 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 28, 29, 40. 32 Ibid., 43. 33 Nicolae Iorga, Drumuri şi oraşe din România, 147. 34 Idem, Orizonturile mele. O viaţă de om aşa cum a fost, 154–5. 35 Toma Pavel, Arta îndepărtării. Eseu despre imaginaţia clasică, trans. M. Mancaş (Bucharest: 1999), 14, 26.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 245

4/14/08 2:52:45 PM

246

Under Eastern Eyes

there is little allusion to the documents of the time and the context of its production. The verification of its authenticity proceeds instead through its exaltation, through situating it in an essentially subjective and anachronistic framework of meaning. It is what the traveller’s imagination sets down on the page, rather than what his dry reason manages to correlate with established chronology: we are offered a theatrical impression rather than a forensic demonstration. This is what some people have called ‘internal verisimilitude’, the sufficiency of an image to itself.36 From this point of view, then, ruins are the imagination’s closest ally, for they provoke its capacity to complete the incomplete, to reconstitute and repopulate the distant tableau of various golden ages. In order to understand Iorga’s travel writing, we should try to distinguish between the lucid observations made in the posture of the (young and somewhat callow) art critic, and the reveries of the mature historian, melancholy and obsessed with temporal regression. In the first guise, he makes no attempt to discern archetypes, and accepts the historicity of the cultural and aesthetic canon. Individual objects are understood in terms of their particular evolutionary moment: ‘art, like any living thing, does not stand still; so is it logical to try and immobilise it, tying it to past ideals?’37 Even more explicitly, he makes the bold affirmation that ‘the calm ease of statuary from the time of Phidias is, rather, a sign of inferiority, of a lesser mastery of the craft of sculpture’.38 In the second, everything from the places seen is always somehow posthumous: the people are always somebody’s ancestors, they are never related to the contemporary world, their visages seem always somehow to have stepped down from some famous picture. ‘The faces, some of a select beauty, are of that same type which give character to the painting of Murillo, in the somewhat late age in which Spanish art found, of a sudden, both its true subjects and its true masters.’39 Even in the Haţeg region of Romania, among the fortresses of the Dacian king Decebalus, where nature has hardly saved any buildings for

36 Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Filosofia imaginilor, trans. M. Constantinescu (Iaşi: 2004), 175. 37 Nicolae Iorga, Amintiri din Italia (Bucharest: 1895), 202. 38 Ibid., 199. 39 Idem, Câteva zile prin Spania, 15.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 246

4/14/08 2:52:46 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

247

modern memory to admire, Iorga observes, unperturbed, that ‘there is nothing here today that would not have been just so in the time of the Shepherd King’;40 ‘behold, true Dacians, new Dacians after two thousand years, Dacians bearing the speech of smashed Rome like a trophy, the villagers from here are Dacians.’41 The traveller Iorga’s archetypes do not seek to freeze the past but to reinject it with meaning, to render it usable for his reveries. The monuments of his imagination do not move in time; on the contrary, it is our imagination which is made to troop past these eternal and apparently impassive witnesses. Worn by time, it is the monuments which lead history on, in the absence of their makers in bronze or stone: A flood of thoughts rushes into my mind at the sight of the tower of the ancient basilica of St Mark; what various people, what differing scenes has the splendid golden lion looked down on from the heights of the grey tower! In other times a Venice, living Venice, the doges in golden-threaded clothes are attending the liturgy, in the midst of the senators and inquisitors, whose stalls still await his presence under the black marble canopy, the soldiers of the Republic filing past under the shadow of the porticos, halberds in hand, finely-wrought daggers at their hip, foreign ambassadors, Persians with pursed hats, peaceable burghers of Nuremberg, Genoese envoys, come to bow before the majesty of the brave and trusty Doge, of the white-bearded senators, the frowning inquisitors.42

Here, imagination is not the same thing as fiction. On the contrary, it works as an accessory to the desire for the concrete, the need to bring the past as close as possible, to partake ‘live’ of those histories which so arouse our passions. ‘How many tragedies must these bare walls have seen, how many beseeching voices must have resounded against them’, he writes, recalling what he saw in Nero’s residence. ‘The master of the Roman world trod upon these fragments of mosaic’, Iorga thrills, advising his readers to ‘use your minds to reconstitute the houses, as they once were.’ And to suspend our disbelief he directs our gaze to40 Idem, Pagini alese, 2 vols. (Bucharest: 1965), 1:192. 41 Ibid., 195. 42 Idem, Peisagii, 71.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 247

4/14/08 2:52:46 PM

248

Under Eastern Eyes

wards the elements of daily life, and takes us and our thoughts to the banquets of those days: ‘Peacocks’ tongues, Pontic pheasants, [...] oysters from the Persian Gulf, the wines of Lesbos and Mareotis.’43 He even ‘sees’ the Emperor Tiberius, in the very midst of feasting, ‘with his marble face, his nose struck hard and straight forward, his fixed gaze and disdainful lip, as in the superb statues of him arrayed in the Vatican’.44 As Tudor Vianu observed: in the middle of this landscape which beckons us with the breezes of eternity, the merry laughter of the patricians of the region’s ancient race breaks out suddenly. A living note is thus introduced into the landscape of place, as an element of contrast which serves to deepen the motionless solemnity, which otherwise stands cordoned off from sensation and change. Such techniques permit us to categorise Iorga as a Romantic landscapist, in the tradition of Chateaubriand.45

Imagination compensates for human failings and defies the norms of the profession, enabling us privately to relive our favourite snapshot of ancient or medieval everyday life.46 For Iorga, fancy works in the service of truth, of plausible reconstruction. ‘I can picture it as if it were yesterday’, he assures us at one point.47 Wherever he goes, history is resuscitated, replayed. Iorga is not satisfied with the idea of ‘leftovers’ from the past; rather, he uses the fragments to recreate the spectacle of the whole; to reawaken, through exercises of visualisation, scenes from the past to which he pays close attention, exactly as if at the theatre, with the passion of a spectator seated in one of the front rows. Maybe this is why his narration passes sometimes from the past perfect to the present indicative or gerundive, which both suggest ongoing action: a stylistic procedure dear to the Romantics, who try to empathise with the object of narration, and seek to involve the audience in the remembrance of the event.48 For Iorga, history seems to be true 43 Ibid., 82. 44 Ibid. 45 Tudor Vianu, Arta prozatorilor români, 2 vols. (Bucharest: 1966), 1:219. 46 Florin Faifer, Semnele lui Hermes. Memorialistica de călătorie (Bucharest: 1993), 224–5. 47 Iorga, Note de drum, 9. 48 Vianu, Arta prozatorilor, 2:352.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 248

4/14/08 2:52:46 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

249

only when we can participate in it, albeit retrospectively, in our reveries, as clandestine, belated and powerless spectators. Hence his opposition to restorations, ‘painted and polished according to the norms of Viollet-le-Duc’,49 his sympathy for John Ruskin and for the British practices of conservation: ‘respect for what has gone before is the primary quality, visible from the very start, of English life. And even that is not enough. What was is, and all are determined to make it be so in the future too.’50 For the Romantic Iorga, the restoration of monuments is a mere pseudonym for modernisation, while modernisation is a dictatorship of technique. In his opinion, technique robs man of the authenticity of experience. Through its illegitimate erasure of many of the vestiges which certify the passage of a building through time, restoration appears to hide the past from us, sheltering it from its passionate seekers, who feel the need to sense it live and feel its ‘pulse’. And in his conception, a visit to an old Venetian house means a conversation with history, as you awake the latter with your indiscreet steps: You hammer now on the old wooden gate, with its massive metal ornamentation, the iron handle a work of art in itself. An unseen hand opens it for you: it could be your contemporary, but it could equally be her ancestor from four or five hundred years ago.51

As he travels, Iorga remarks upon a mass of detail, minutiously, surprisingly and verbosely; but one could not say that his inventory of the things appearing in his path is a democratic one. It is not Europe that he has in front of him on his wanderings, but his own land. He does not really go out into the world so much as go out to meet it. He has an extremely personal way of returning to Romania, straight through the gates of the great Western cities, so to speak, turning time back to those mythical intervals, such as in the Middle Ages, when the history of the Romanians temporarily crossed paths with that of the Republic of Venice: ‘the streets have remained exactly as those walked down by the Moldavian emissaries, who came here at the time of Stephen the

49 Iorga, Câteva zile prin Spania, 70. 50 Idem, Peisagii, 132. 51 Idem, Pe drumuri depărtate, 3 vols. (Bucharest: 1987), 1:579.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 249

4/14/08 2:52:47 PM

250

Under Eastern Eyes

Great’.52 In travels of this kind, the past is always an extremely close presence, almost hanging around purposely in order to be brought back to life. We are aided in this process by works of art, which in Iorga’s conception constituted not just documents for the historian’s investigation, but living witnesses,53 capable of reviving disappeared worlds: ‘[…] Historical recollections became a livelier reality than ever before the land on which past events had taken place, before the footprints, however ignored and undervalued, which managed to speak to the historian.’54

FAR FROM HOME, CLOSE TO ONE’S ORIGINS It has been said of another Romanian historian that the discovery of connections with the Western world was an act of differentiation, a way of overcoming a complex of humble origins, the sentiment of isolation, of a peripheral existence.55 It is no surprise that Iorga’s world has Rome at its centre, and Latinity (and its perpetuation through French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian culture) as its historical object. As a result, many of his journeys are presented, in writing, as the verification of a mythical, learned topography. Even on the Danube, in the direction of the Serbian frontier, the historian notes that: here too, in her times, Rome made peace, that good peace of fruitful labour. The tablets with the inscriptions of the Emperors in clear and fine Latin characters can still be found on the rocks. The main roads today, on one side and the other, are linked to the roads which the Roman spade in the bold hands of soldiers opened up for the first time. The holes sunk into the stones by their tools can still be seen.

52 Ibid. Stephen the Great, Prince of Moldavia (1457–1504), renowned for his successes in battle with the Ottomans, his numerous foundations and the length of his reign. In the modern national pantheon he came to symbolise the struggle for independence and national unity. 53 Maria-Ana Musicescu, ‘La place de l’art dans l’œuvre de N. Iorga’, in Nicolas Iorga. L’homme et l’œuvre, ed. D.M. Pippidi (Bucharest: 1972), 349. 54 Iorga, Orizonturile mele. O viaţă de om aşa cum a fost, 233. 55 Mircea Martin, G. Călinescu şi „complexele” literaturii române, 2nd edition (Piteşti: 2002), 36.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 250

4/14/08 2:52:47 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

251

Mementoes which called and still call for the remaking of lost creations.56

To those living with a feeling of time lost, origins proved extremely important as a pretext for evading an uneven history: they cannot be captured in periods, on the contrary, they appear to generate them. Romanians have frequently ignored recent history, which seems to be ‘dirty’, politicised, shameful or, since we all know it, superfluous; and embarked instead on a passionate search for origins and their originality. They seek in the distance for the sources of their identity, extra-territorialising them. The latter then appear more objective and more valid, and in this way the history of a small Balkan country gets to start thousands of miles away, even in the Italian Peninsula. Just as spatial depth may correspond to temporal profundity, so, in this case, looking West can be a form of recollection.57 Distance then becomes not the concrete manifestation of ‘there’, but the embodiment of ‘once upon a time’.58 Iorga uses the temporal adverb to describe the West, more particularly the Roman vestiges of Italy, despite the fact that national ideology also accredits the Dacians north of the Danube as ancestors of the Romanian people. Defeated, however, by the imperial armies in 106 C.E., the latter are presented by Iorga as unlucky predecessors, jinxed, in any case somewhat less relevant to the present, for the glory of a young nation, in search of prestigious antecedents. Despite its natural complicity with its subject, melancholy is used here as a medium of self-distancing:59 In the name of the pagan gods whom you have worshipped without success, peace be unto you, defeated ancestors, who have left an inheritance of misfortune to the nation which set out from you, the nation which amidst the citadel of the undefeated Decebalus endured serfdom until recently, and has not yet fully freed its spirit even unto this day when I speak your name in the grim silence of your forest.60 56 Iorga, Peisagii, 36. 57 Pleşu, Pitoresc şi melancolie, 74. 58 Ibid. 59 On melancholy as exacerbated self-awareness, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, Saturn şi melancolia. Studii de filosofie a naturii, religie şi artă, trans. M. Tătaru-Cazaban et al. (Iaşi: 2002), 293–304. 60 Iorga, Pagini alese, 192–3.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 251

4/14/08 2:52:47 PM

252

Under Eastern Eyes

His familiarity with the historical monuments of Rome, rather than with those of his native country, gives him the illusion that we always knew what we remember now, that our story was not a recently told one. A journey to the West thus becomes an emblem of distance, while the backward gaze, towards the East, an advocate somewhat anaemically, of distancing. In the terminology of Anca Manolescu,61 the West in east European travel accounts is not a situated territory, but rather a situating one, in that it is in relation to the West that we choose a physical framework for claiming our antecedents, our continuity, our exclusivity and also, paradoxically, our participation in larger entities such as Europe. If elucidation is, apparently, the natural continuation of presupposition, the visible is not the perfect antidote of fancy. Far from offering us certitudes, the seen can push the hypothetical into the radicalised domain of the imaginary. To give a concrete example, in Delphi, in Greece, Iorga sees Romanian ancestral identities, Dacian and Roman, regional and universal, reunited: ‘[A]mong the stones dedicated to the powerful within the sacred enclosure, one gives homage to “Trajan the Dacian”.’62 What comes out of this, from a speculative point of view? Greece, occupied in antiquity by the Romanians’ Roman ancestors, and then, in its imperial, Byzantine, phase, the temporary master of parts of Italy, succeeds in symbolically unifying the Romanians’ Latin ethnic origins with their Orthodox religious ones. Byzantium, which the states of the region attempted to continue on a smaller scale, is an alter ego in which Iorga believes that we can negotiate with the West as equals. Only his evaluations oppose again not two presents, but an Eastern past, specifically the medieval one, and the Western present, that of the twentieth century. Sensations and impressions are again given priority over the objects which occasion them, as completely different things provoke the same sentiment.63 Inclined towards snapshots and impressions, the neo-Romantic Iorga exercises metonymy in all its possible variations, while at the same time subordinating it to a more

61 Anca Manolescu, Locul călătorului. Simbolica spaţiului în Răsăritul creştin (Bucharest: 2002), 85. 62 Iorga, Peisagii, 253–4. 63 Popa, Călătoriile, 104.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 252

4/14/08 2:52:48 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

253

diffuse, conciliatory, metaphorical set of purposes.64 In France he once more discovers what preoccupies him most, Latinity: [...] In Arles, one finds not just powerful, grandiose Roman monuments, but Rome itself, which has established itself here for ever, and lives on. You are on classic ground, and all subsequent evolution is determined, not just in its forms—human and artistic—but also in the materials from which later constructions have arisen, in those enduring, exclusively determining basic elements.65

And at Evora, on Portuguese soil, he not surprisingly sees everywhere ‘the deeply implanted footprint of Rome, not just in particular monuments, but in people’s souls, habits’. 66 As a rhetorical device, his enumerations serve to yoke together the two regions of Europe, ‘neighbouring’ them through the prism of Latinity, Christianity, and so forth.

THE WEST AT HOME Iorga’s obligatory comparisons abroad between East and West take different forms at home: his need for self-reconciliation manifests itself in his seeking and finding replicas of the Gothic churches of France in little home towns. In Moldavia, Iorga points out to us ‘the lace-bedecked walls of the so-called Gothic churches’,67 together with ‘scenes worthy of the better Italian painting of the seventeenth century’,68 or the ‘Gothic’ gate of Neamţ castle.69 These small metonymic reflexes serve to outline a larger scene, where the (Balkan) part no longer alludes to the (Western) whole: the Orient is speaking about itself, but metaphorically, in the terms of reference of the West. Iorga’s prose is full of such equivalences: Iaşi appears to him to be ‘a Romanian Uppsala or Ravenna,’70 while Elisabeta Boulevard, a well-known Bucharest thoroughfare, was built ‘mindful of the Parisian boulevards opened up by 64 On metonymic metaphor, see Dragomirescu, Dicţionarul, 200. 65 Iorga, În Franţa. Drumuri ale unui istoric (Bucharest: 1921), 150. 66 Idem, Călătorii peste hotare, 2 vols. (Bucharest: 1980), 2:104. 67 Idem, Peisagii, 7. 68 Ibid., 27. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 17.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 253

4/14/08 2:52:48 PM

254

Under Eastern Eyes

Baron Hausmann’.71 The effects and the persistence of the images of abroad reveal themselves thus in the use to which they are put in figures of speech which, although used to describe the native country, obliquely preserve the myth of the West at home. For despite Iorga’s obviously metonymic style of evaluation (the Gothic in Romanian architecture, French Romanticism in literature), his intention is not to portray the Balkans as an annexe of Western history, but to underline the reciprocal borrowings, and a rather diffuse idea of cultural synthesis, in which all regions participate with the best they have to offer. The essential point is the exchange of characteristics, and Iorga’s writings sketch out, in reality, a vast metaphorical construct, of continental, supra-regional dimensions. In his writings dedicated to his travels through Romania, references to Western culture exist, but the not in the same proportion as the frequent allusions made to Romanian art, on his journeys abroad. Comparisons are made, rather, between the different Romanian provinces: Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania. On the roads of his Fatherland, Iorga is more interested in everyday life, particularly in its exotic nature (as only a non-resident can appreciate the picturesque nature of a place),72 and the Romantic antithesis between the achievements of the ancestors and the defects of our contemporaries, or the unhappy contrast between the beauties of nature and the generally ruined or poorly conserved monuments. Although he salutes Romanian monumentality, Iorga more frequently bemoans its inconsistency. For him, Romania is often a failed landscape. The metaphor of equal value between East and West, so dear to Iorga, yokes together two or more characteristics and even establishes affiliations between them, particularly in the field of art, where each country, however poor, has something to offer, which can be given a superlative evaluation. This is a typically Romantic procedure: to approximate the real in such a way as to favour the less-endowed.73 Referring to the Santa Fosca Church of Torcello, near Venice, Iorga places the two civilisations in an equal relationship: ‘in the little church connected to the great foundation by a peristyle with delicate chiostro columns, not unlike the ones which were added in the instance, unique 71 Idem, Drumuri şi oraşe din România, 94–5. 72 Andrei Pleşu, Jurnalul de la Tescani (Bucharest: 1996), 12. 73 Popa, Călătoriile, 341.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 254

4/14/08 2:52:48 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

255

in our country, of Bălteni, near Bucharest’.74 Iorga gives rhetorical credence either to the idea of a totally individual evolution, which shelters us from unfavourable comparisons, or to that of historical compatibility between East and West. Here are a series of quite remarkable comparisons he made between the history of Romania and that of Spain.75 In Navarre, around Pamplona: […] the churches keep their great height, with a tower stuck on the front—Austrian influence brought them to Moldavia too.

On Burgos: […] in the midst of this fertile county, at Burgos, the leaders of the recovery, the reconquista against the Moors—like the Tartars forced back in Moldavia—established their residence already in the eleventh century. First knights—legend records a Diego Porcellos, a Lain Calvo, a Nuno Rasura—then earls and finally kings. These Castellans, men of the Castle, like the Moldavians as to the Wallachians, emerge from the narrow pass of Navarre.

On Aragon: Aragon, a country named after a river like Moldavia […] a culture forms around political power, but, if it imposes a language, Castilian, it cannot create an art except the popular art of the little churches of the North—a local creation, as in the art of Moldavia. Four hundred and fifty years ago, the kings left for the south, like our princes from Argeş to Târgovişte.

On Valladolid: Increasingly one can see the folk character of this former capital shorn of its rights, like our Suceava, at the end of the sixteenth century, only to get them back momentarily after 1600, just like the latter. 74 Iorga, Peisagii, 99. 75 Idem, Câteva zile prin Spania, 11, 13–5, 17, 36, 154–5.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 255

4/14/08 2:52:48 PM

256

Under Eastern Eyes

On Madrid: not a single chip in the wall to testify to sieges suffered and enemies repulsed. Even our Bucharest [...] is an old centre compared to this capital of whose name nobody even knows the origin.

On the Church of San Juan de los Reyes, Toledo: […] rows of nooks, like in the fifteenth century Moldavian churches, succeed one another in the massive fortress-like building of the choir and the altar.

On Spanish and Moldavian art: […] one can say that from French and German Gothic on the one hand, and Arabic art on the other, the Spaniards made a synthesis, just as we, in architecture made one from the general lines of Byzantium, from Gothic ornamentation in Moldavia, of the doors and windows, and the Eastern ornamentation, as in the churches of Wallachia, a synthesis which is truly ours.

Portugal suggests the same kind of analogies to him: at Evora, ‘the museum is full of Roman remains, large plaques with clear and fine lettering in dispersed fragments. They appear more numerous than they actually are. For, preserving for ever in the wake of the antique stoneworkers—as in our Haţeg region—a love for artistic labour and for commemoration through it, across the Middle Ages with its trembling and exhausted Gothic, for three centuries since 1500 commemorations have been done in the same way, and frequently in the same language’;76 ‘on a little island covered with wild trees the Almourol castle (1209), with one central tower and three more at the sides, perfectly preserved, tall, in the same proportions as Neamţ fortress, its walls with the crenellations intact’.77 His images are grafted on experience, but also impregnated with intellectual activity, with affective projections which bring the surrounding world to life in surprising config76 Idem, Călătorii peste hotare, 2:104. 77 Ibid., 89.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 256

4/14/08 2:52:49 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

257

urations, and adjusted to the values the writer tries to communicate to his public.78

DISTANCE AND LANDSCAPE Accustomed to thinking about time in terms of physical distances, we sometimes attempt to recover a given past by situating it before us, in both the geographical and temporal senses of that phrase. We imagine, easily, not a perimeter which we can anticipate mathematically, but a ‘there’ towards which we imagine ourselves travelling, as if in search of shelter. At the end of each experience there might be a museum, a monument, a statue, functioning as end points, as apotheoses of the past and, at the same time, of the concrete. Visualising certain temporal ‘others’79 in this fashion, we travel not towards the West but towards its history. Paradoxically, this protects us from the problem of the future, reinventing it as the problem of origins. In these circumstances, Romanians, although possessed of an acute sense of the superiority of Western civilisation, associated the West rather with the ancient or medieval past than with the present, and travel to it was nothing other than a return to a segment of lost time. ‘Oh, there is a great deal of Middle Ages here! You can find it anywhere, respected even in the renovations imposed by wear and by the once unimagined needs of our time’, Iorga exclaimed at Oxford.80 In terms of both its itinerary and its cultural expectations, a journey has an anticipatory component, through which we pre-organise the road not yet travelled. And this is done under the influence of private reading, and the sensation of déjà vu: Everywhere, in the towns where I stopped, I sought to distinguish the primordial act, the point from which everything else started, the old generative cell, and once this was found, then everything else became intelligible and interesting.81

78 Wunenburger, Filosofia imaginilor, 9. 79 Ibid., 54. 80 Iorga, Pagini alese, 2:255. 81 Idem, Orizonturile mele, 234.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 257

4/14/08 2:52:49 PM

258

Under Eastern Eyes

Travel is, indeed, a way of redramatising the world, but also a compromise between what we perceive now and what we already knew we had to observe: the image, which always succeeds in imposing itself, is situated at the mid-point between the spectacle and its reception. Hugo’s Orientales appeared in 1829, in other words before the painter Delacroix had travelled to the East.82 Later on, however, the poet drew systematic inspiration from painted landscapes depicting the region, and cultivated a consistent Orientophile imagery.83 Descriptive painting, then, offered the Romantics a methodology of meditation, suggesting not only pretexts for contemplation but ways of doing it. Seeing the world in this way, through a picture frame, and organising space according to this convention, fortress ruins would immediately attract, as their natural counterpart, a most predictable sunset. Reading Hugo, and claiming him as a predecessor, the neo-Romantic Iorga manifested something of the same attitude, allowing for the evolution of European aesthetics. When, towards the end of the nineteenth century, painting ceased to attempt to represent surface realities, turning towards allegory, description also turned towards metaphor and deciphering the hidden meanings of things.84 In Romanian culture this transformation can first be found in the work of the poet Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889), a modern Romantic, in whose work description does not limit itself to the rectangle of the picture frame, but tends towards fantasy and evasion.85 Iorga, one of his great admirers, followed him closely in many things, but preferred the Romantic and pacifist impressionism of the English to the heroic and revolutionary landscapes of Delacroix. Rather than seeking inspiration from present-day events and the drama of man conscious of his new social aspirations, Iorga’s landscape tends to reflect a nature which speaks with the voice of times past, more specifically with the accoutrements of the Middle Ages: Gothic architecture, castle ruins and so forth.86 82 Viorica S. Constantinescu, Exotismul în literatura română din secolul al XIXlea (Iaşi: 1998), 88. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., 87. 85 Ibid. 86 Aleksander Wojciechowski, Arta peisajului din Renaştere până la mijlocul secolului XX, trans. I.A. Ionescu (Bucharest: 1974), 54–6.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 258

4/14/08 2:52:49 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

259

Prior to impressionism, depth in a painting was constructed statically, from a single observation point.87 Without breaking completely with the geometric tradition of the Renaissance, the landscapists of the second half of the nineteenth century were experimenting with a biocular vision (in fact still monocular, but mobile).88 In this way, Iorga’s lines dedicated to the site of the city of Pompeii make up a broad, synthetic landscape, where the cosmic element (the distant line of the horizon, the last rays of sunlight) signified, together with the telluric element (the tiny lizards moving about in the grass of the ruins), the same idea of dusk, to which he was so attached. The reason? If antiquity and the Middle Ages, with their men and their deeds, belong to a definitively closed and lost past, subsisting only in documents, their architectural remains enable man to experience an ending that is still going on. Like many Romanian writers travelling to the West, Iorga makes little mention of maps. The only guides they refer to are their domestic readings; the more prosaic aspects of the journey are passed over in silence. Iorga heads towards Nuremberg ‘more out of romantic sentiment than in the belief that my researches [...] might be somehow repaid’.89 It is a slightly accentuated aestheticism, a product of the opinion that insignificant details, such as the physical discomfort of the journey, need not be preserved for posterity. The account can then concentrate on symbolic landmarks, the monument, the landscape and the individual contemplating them must come together into a whole, a bequeathed tableau. If a map presents the world as a flat surface, homogeneous and synoptic, a landscape is exactly the opposite, a single arbitrary perimeter cut out from an infinite spatial frame, without reference to universal criteria. In close connection with landscapes is the idea of immensity, a philosophical category of reverie, which lives in the wake of grandeur and manages to extract the nostalgic from the prosaic world.90 And the works of art which the traveller Iorga seeks with such assiduity are its finest pretext. They are the best-known products of this dreaming in the ‘limits’ of infinity.91 Summarising, we might

87 Ibid., 66. 88 Ibid. 89 Iorga, Orizonturile mele, 153. 90 Gaston Bachelard, Poetica spaţiului, trans. I. Bădescu (Piteşti: 2003), 211. 91 Ibid., 212.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 259

4/14/08 2:52:49 PM

260

Under Eastern Eyes

say that a monument’s power of attraction comes from its distancing, its aura given by the number of miles we travel to reach it. Distance, another type of infinity,92 is then, for the monument, what plot is to a story. Travel to the West might either restrict itself to a list of proper names—Paris, Versailles, Florence, Michelangelo—or enable the manifestation of what Iorga called ‘a desire for the extraordinary’,93 a mixture of baroque images and Romantic beauty.94 Taken home, the incredible constitutes the substance of the memorable deed, subsequently entrusted to print. And the relationship between distance and exemplarity95 is nowhere better exemplified than in this relationship of the Easterners with the West. What we imagine from home, however real, impressive and frustrating it might appear, helps us to emerge from history and to evaluate that gaze which, upon arrival ‘there’, we turn towards the place of our birth. In the words of Toma Pavel, we see in travel an art of distancing, from ourselves in the first place, but with the intention of knowing ourselves and accepting ourselves as we are. Paradoxically, the real differences between East and West are not magnified but attenuated by the real or symbolic geographical distances, and the illusion of cultural equality96 between the two extremes of the European continent is thus sustained: the monumental, through whose prism Iorga and many others perceive the West, became an eternally valid methodology, with which, on the traveller’s return home, the towns and villages of Romania may be read.

PICTURESQUE AND EXOTIC Painting, and especially landscape, confers new meaning on travel through a complex category, the picturesque. The latter might be considered as a formal, mediated experience, lacking in spontaneity, a way of abandoning common sense in favour of a cosmetic vision.97 We can perhaps illustrate this concept best by looking at a corner of nature

92 Pleşu, op. cit., 70. 93 Iorga, Peisagii…, 261. 94 Zaciu, ‘Prefaţa’, xiii. 95 Pavel, Arta îndepărtării, 258. 96 Ibid., 262. 97 Pleşu, Pitoresc şi melancolie, 134.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 260

4/14/08 2:52:50 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

261

through the prism of the painter who first represented it and made it famous in one of his paintings. In distinction to the beautiful, which we do not perceive clearly, but understand only in association with other objects, beings or surroundings, the picturesque is a capricious realm, agreeable, selective, and dissociated from awkward and contradictory empirical data.98 Applied conveniently to Romanian territory, it facilitates an unspoken indulgence in respect of its shortcomings. The picturesque is an ensemble of contrasts in which importance is given not to the opposition between different aspects, but to theiradmixture.99 Agglomerations of objects, situations or practices which are not homogenised or polarised in any way, come together to constitute the picturesque; the audience is invited to accept them as such, rather than submit them to the critical gaze.100 Through selection and association, it works as a kind of relativisation of place, resulting from the passing gaze of the traveller.101 Iorga has difficulty accepting the West as actuality, setting store rather by its monuments, in other words its history, and seeking thereby to push it into as distant a past as possible, where the distinctions between West and East appear more bearable and even perhaps favourable to Romania. Using metaphor, comparison’s wealthier and more pleasing relative, he sketches a scene of the West in terms specific to the East; the former, identified with a Roman civilisation, seems to announce, or even paradoxically to preface the latter. Defining themselves as the descendants of the Roman Emperor Trajan, the conqueror of the territories north of the Danube, the Romanians travelled to the West, particularly to France, Italy and Spain, countries with a comparable past and a neo-Latin language, in order to return to their beginnings, giving themselves a symbolic opportunity to re-enter history in possibly more auspicious circumstances. For one of the great complexes of Balkan modernity, frequently present in the lamentations of our intellectuals, is that of a lost time, failed origins, lost directions, the idea of having disappeared from history as a result of the Ottoman domination. Coming to the West then has an almost 98 Ibid., 139. 99 Popa, Călătoriile, 348. 100 Ibid., 354. 101 Ibid., 359.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 261

4/14/08 2:52:50 PM

262

Under Eastern Eyes

magical motivation, constituting an attempt to rebuild a broken or falsified genealogy. As a result, in the Occidental picturesque, one can identify a good accommodation of the monument in its natural frame. In the Balkan exotic, on the other hand, Iorga accentuates the strident notes, the unadaptable, the untranslatable, the universal, the lack of hierarchies.102 It is a kind of aesthetic assimilation of the temporal disjunctures, a subterfuge which postponed the conclusions, permitting the impression of a special kind of parity between East and West. This exoticised autochthonism,103 permits a kind of forced yoking of the negative aspects remarked upon abroad with similar ones at home, allowing blameworthy aspects to be shrugged off with the assertion ‘it’s no better in the West’. In fact, his entire œuvre oscillates between the effort on the one hand to integrate the Balkans into world history, to emphasise correspondences, reciprocal borrowings and cultural relationships (Gothic elements in Orthodox architecture, Byzantine influence in Italy) between East and West; and, on the other, to avoid potentially humiliating comparisons with the West, when in search of the permanences of Romanian history. Even though Iorga’s interest in world history was probably greater than that of any other historian of Romania, he still evinced the belief that the two parts of our continent evolved according to their own logic, each having its moments of culmination and its less fortunate periods. In this context, he applied to Romanian history a series of terms usually used for the West (but for different periods): ‘Knights’, ‘Crusaders’, ‘Empire’ and so forth.104 Irrespective of the particular purpose of departure for the West (educational, curative, diplomatic, academic), the subjects treated by the travel narrator and the meanings accorded to them always obtain symbolic importance. By symbolic, we refer here to the process whereby the individual distances himself from the concrete, replacing it with an image, a word or a thing with a great capacity for synthesis and rep-

102 See, for example, the description of Skopje in Vederi din Grecia. 103 Constantinescu, Exotismul, 147; Muthu, Literatura română, 206 argues along similar lines. 104 These are among the subtitles given to various volumes of his ten-volume history of the Romanians: Istoria românilor (Bucharest: 1936–1939), in French as Histoire des Roumains et de la romanité orientale (Bucharest: 1936–1944).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 262

4/14/08 2:52:50 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

263

resentation.105 For instance, the style of the painting in the church of Saint Nicholas at Curtea de Argeş is likened by Iorga to that of Giotto106 and invoked as a proof not only that the history of the East begins from the West, but that the West also owes something to the East, a common ancestry compensating for the evident inequalities of the modern age. Iorga’s West displays itself thus under the sign of a ‘monumental picturesque’, with tragic and sublime accents, and a strong sense of empathy, of complicity even, with the scene in front of his eyes. The East on the other hand is satisfied merely with a ‘picturesque of contrasts’,107 decorative, emerging from the hesitations between defensive, bucolic evasion in nature or legend, in the Romanian rural world and in the relative distancing from the object of reflection, his fellow men, placed in a more sceptical category, that of the exotic.108 In contrast to the resignation of the nineteenth-century Romanian Romantics, for whom it was enough merely to bemoan their country’s exoticism and failure to adapt to the Western present, the reveries of their successors in the following century included strong critical elements, and the idyllisation of the agrarian world, intentionally exaggerated,109 went handin-hand with the campaigns to civilise and enlighten110 the village in conformity with Western norms. The lachrymose invocation of Dacian ancestors was an expression, in the thick of modernity, of pride in immemorial origins, basing an ideology of autochthony on the less controllable and therefore more unique-seeming past, on a kind of temporal exoticism.111 Exoticisation delineates and fixes an identity, and at the same time sets us slightly apart from it. It is in fact, an attempt to escape from the everyday aspects of Balkanism, which was either ironised or used in an aesthetic context, as ‘curiosity’.112 To exoticise your own country is both to assume an individual identity and at the same time to criticise it and express disagreement with it. Educated in 105 Wunenburger, Filosofia imaginilor, 80. 106 Nicolae Iorga, Istoria literaturii româneşti. Arta şi literatura românilor (Bucharest: 1999), 244. 107 Constantinescu, Exotismul, 161. 108 Henri Zalis, Aspecte şi structuri neoromantice (Bucharest: 1971), 11, 31. 109 Ibid., 26. 110 Constantin Ciopraga, Literatura română între 1900 şi 1918 (Iaşi: 1970), 36. 111 Constantinescu, Exotismul, 180. 112 Constantin Ciopraga, Personalitatea literaturii române, 117.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 263

4/14/08 2:52:51 PM

264

Under Eastern Eyes

the West, intellectuals of Iorga’s type made it a point of honour to express surprise at the exotic aspects of the Eastern part of the continent. They use this both to underline the particularities of their own identity to distance themselves a little from it, and align themselves with the standards of Western culture. It is a slightly artificial, didactic, demonstrative attitude, an unpleasant but necessary civic duty.

CONCLUSIONS What are we left with after reading this travel prose? To what extent do Romanians allow themselves to be seen with the eyes of others? Iorga demonstrates that the desire to approach another reality, more inhabitable and hospitable than the one we are accustomed to, does not involve inventing a new language but merely reusing what we already dispose of.113 In this way, we do not limit ourselves simply to reinterpreting the surrounding world, the world of others, but we make things appear which, until recently, did not or could not exist for us.114 Western travel was always a key moment for any Easterner, particularly in relation to time and his own identity. It is not surprising that this genre of literature is a good source for the investigation of the historical culture of the Balkans and of symbolic geographies generally. In this context, the traveller Iorga proposes a series of motifs to his readers: travel as pilgrimage, imagination as passe-partout to the truth, the West as museum. His vision of the history of the two regions, monumental and apparently metonymic, attenuates the differences, and sustains, at a higher trans-historical level, an aesthetics of similitude, an all-encompassing metaphor, of common origins. The architectural element has always signified durability, and its transformation into a literary motif definitively established it in this posture.115 As Virgil Nemoianu observed, any historical situation secretes conflicts that survive it and become difficult to disentangle.116

113 Jean Burgos, Imaginar şi creaţie, trans. M. Constantinescu et al. (Bucharest: 2003), 26. 114 Ibid. 115 Wunenburger, Filosofia imaginilor, 252. 116 Virgil Nemoianu, O teorie a secundarului, trans. L. Szasz Câmpeanu (Bucharest: 1997), 16.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 264

4/14/08 2:52:51 PM

Metaphor and Monumentality

265

Art, then, presents itself as an attempt at a solution, a myth of conciliation. Literature, for instance, attempts to restitute and reintegrate what history has sent along different paths, creating antinomies, polarisations, oppositions; it combines what others vehemently deny,117 sorts out our anguishes and conflict, offering us an acceptable past and confirming our own values to us. In this context, travel literature serves the function of treating one of the great complexes of Romanian culture: the lack of monumentality or lasting character in its public life and art.118 Is the image of the West, then, a real state of affairs or just an invention, placed on the stage? To what extent does imagination participate in making a space concrete? We could reply that it momentarily falsifies reality, but also conserves its existence, or more precisely its memory. Transposed into literature, the monumental image of the West preserves hard-to-pin-down meanings and interpretations, thus enabling their reactivation at a later date.

117 Ibid., 17. 118 Martin, G. Călinescu, 43.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 265

4/14/08 2:52:51 PM

iBracewell_A_book.indb 266

4/14/08 2:52:52 PM

Oh, to Be a European! What Rastko PetroviΔ Learnt in Africa Zoran Milutinović

Africa has no end and is bereft of people, thought Rastko PetroviΔ while travelling through Libya in 1928. One can travel through it for days on end and never meet a single living soul. Nevertheless, at every moment, somewhere in the endlessness of people-less Africa, someone invisible and determined is trying to squeeze a drop of water from the parched ground. ‘And one only has to realise’, writes PetroviΔ, ‘how feverish and almost absurd the centuries-long struggle of that someone with nature is, all for a measly morsel, to be proud or even conceited about belonging to a more rational race. Everything I thought could be reduced to: not being a European, what conceit! Not to be a European, what conceit! And still I know that only a European can fecundate such ground and whole continents! These hills will be covered with olive trees and palm trees, and their golden bunches of dates will sway towards the sky. Songs and dances will be heard from villages that will spring up here, and joy brought about by palm-wine will flow, as it did the other day in the oasis. Through the beauty of the wine I might have thought that by any means, to be the Earth among all heavenly bodies, and to be a European among all the races!’1 Rastko PetroviΔ (1898–1949) was as European as one could be. He went to school in Nice, studied in Paris, served in Rome, Chicago, and Washington as a diplomat, and he travelled extensively not only throughout Europe, but in Africa, Turkey, Mexico, Cuba and Canada. Although he left a travelogue after almost every journey, there is nothing about his understanding of Europe to be found in his letters from Spain and Italy. There is a letter from Rome, for instance, in which he writes about a dinner party during which Marcel Proust had 1 Rastko PetroviΔ, ‘Libija’, in idem, Putopisi (Belgrade: 1977), 137.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 267

4/14/08 2:52:52 PM

268

Under Eastern Eyes

been discussed. What else could one write home about from Rome? Those who might have read his travelogue from Rome, published in a Belgrade literary magazine, would have already seen Rome. PetroviΔ wrote for a cosmopolitan generation which had its own memories of Toledo or Cordoba, whose members studied at European universities, served as diplomats in European capitals, reported from Europe as journalists, or simply travelled in Europe for the sake of their own pleasure. But not everybody would have heard of Proust who, in the 1920s, was not widely read even in Paris; this was something worth writing about from Rome. As with many other members of his literary generation, PetroviΔ was at home in Europe. And he was undoubtedly conceited about it.

JUST LOOKING In the same year in which he travelled to Libya, PetroviΔ undertook a more ambitious and difficult journey: 4,000 kilometres across Guinea, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Upper Volta, Nigeria, Sudan and Senegal. ‘Afrika’ is the record of this journey. Much like every travel writer, PetroviΔ legitimises his text in a traditional way: ‘I am writing only what a traveller can conclude as a traveller: by observing.’2 As a travel writer, one is a witness, observer, registrar, archivist of the visible. One records only what can be seen, one does not add or subtract. How else could one demand the attention of a reader? A reader will grant his trust to a travel writer only under the condition that can be—paraphrasing Lejeune’s autobiographical pact3—called the ‘travelogical pact’: you’ve been where I haven’t, and probably never will, so tell me what you’ve seen, don’t confabulate, don’t skip anything, just register the visible. Nevertheless, already at the beginning of ‘Afrika’, in the description of PetroviΔ’s first day on African soil, it can be seen that this pact has been amended by a first annex. PetroviΔ sees his ‘first naked black woman’ (202). This very formulation is indicative of his expectations to see naked African women, of his hope to see them, and here they 2 Rastko PetroviΔ, ‘Afrika’, Putopisi, 333. All subsequent page references to ‘Afrika’ are to this edition and are given in brackets in the main text. 3 Phillippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: 1975).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 268

4/14/08 2:52:52 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

269

are—this is the first one, and she really is naked, the first sign of visual pleasure that awaits him on the long journey, the first confirmation that this promised enjoyment as a compensation for thirst, danger and lack of comfort will not be denied him. And then comes the second naked woman, then the third. ‘I am all the more excited by these women’, writes the registrar, ‘as they perfectly resemble the old engravings which I found as a boy reading old travelogues and novels’ (203). The archivist has come straight out of the archive; he will observe with his eyes wide open, but these eyes already know what there is to be seen in Africa. They have learnt it reading old travelogues and novels, in which everything Africa offers to be viewed has already been archived. His excitement is all the stronger as it makes the recognition of what has not been seen before possible. PetroviΔ has not arrived in Africa alone, his imaginary has accompanied him: partly personal, individual and psychological; partly collective and cultural, as a personal selection from a vast archive of existing representations whose origins are lost in the past. His imaginary travels with him or ahead of him, and covers African hills, rivers, plains and villages like a huge shadow even before PetroviΔ’s arrival. And Africa does indeed fulfil the promises of his imaginary. This traveller who traverses savannah and jungle with a white evening suit in his suitcase (in case he comes across a house of European colonists and receives an invitation to dinner) during long, hot days has the opportunity to enjoy observing bodies: naked bodies ‘harmonic and muscular’ (211), bodies of ‘athletic young men, completely naked […] with long backs, narrow hips, straight and strong legs’ (212), ‘with no fat at all, no overdeveloped muscles’ (227), bodies ‘almost filigree-like in their musculature’ (241), girls’ ‘breasts cold and firm, straight and pear-like and heavy’(294). It would be impossible to list all the monotonous descriptions of the most beautiful bodies PetroviΔ had ever seen (335), for it would amount to repeating almost the whole of ‘Afrika’, a text which to a large extent is composed of descriptions of big strong youths, their childish faces and slim gigantic bodies which are completely naked (335), and girls who in a single movement remove the cloths wrapped around their waists and stand still and shameless, as perfect as a single muscle covered with dark splendid skin (208). The bodies are so different from anything this traveller has seen in Europe: ‘from an early age’, writes PetroviΔ, ‘the European face is weary and

iBracewell_A_book.indb 269

4/14/08 2:52:52 PM

270

Under Eastern Eyes

tormented by the unending, often unhealthy task of thinking. As if after a storm, a white face is destroyed by longings, worries, and abstractions. I am not saying that it makes a white face inferior to a black one; on the contrary, it is obvious that the whites pay for their superiority with their beauty’ (211). Careless and thought-free Africa appears as a huge naked body, young and firm, muscular and slim, offering itself calmly and shamelessly to the eye of a traveller. Not only to the eye though: Africa’s body offers itself freely and shamelessly to a traveller’s hand as well. The European gentleman with the white evening suit in his suitcase welcomes non-European sexual moeurs: as there is no sense of ownership (332), the relationship between men and women is also ‘strange’ (314). Any man can be with any other woman (314). A husband can offer his wife to someone, and ‘refusing would be impolite’ (313). ‘It is notorious’, writes PetroviΔ, ‘how much a black man, who does not know jealousy the way we do, is honoured when a white man turns his attention to his wife or daughter’ (207). During an overnight stay in a village, while the men are already in their sleeping bags on the ground, the village women come to clean up what was left after dinner. ‘They passed by so close, jumping over the sleepers, that we touched their bodies without getting up. Those bodies were smooth and firm, and tartly smelled of dried tropical fruit. For a moment they would stop and stand above us, obediently, without making a sound […] There was no danger that someone would see what was happening, for no one would be either puzzled or enraged by it.’(305). On another occasion PetroviΔ observes how a young man, as handsome as Michelangelo’s David, during a mock boxing match with one of PetroviΔ’s fellow-travellers tries to protect a yellow-greyish spot on his chest whenever he believes that it might be hit. The curious traveller asks for an explanation, and learns that the youth is, just like many other Africans, sick with leprosy. If this spot is hurt, it will turn into an open wound which will never heal, and his end will not be far off. ‘Never have I been so scared in my life’, writes PetroviΔ, ‘for my hands have, forced by circumstances, touched these spots who knows how many times’ (284). What circumstances force one to touch naked bodies numberless times in Africa, and why these circumstances are not present in Paris or Belgrade, the author does not explain. This is just a small part of the hospitality with which Africa receives a traveller. If he and his retinue were to arrive in a village in the

iBracewell_A_book.indb 270

4/14/08 2:52:52 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

271

dead of night, uninvited and unannounced, the villagers would wake up a whole family and hurry them out of their hut so that the unexpected guests could be comfortable. May, a young and successful African businessman, notices that PetroviΔ sleeps without a pillow, much like everybody else, and offers him his own pillow, even though he needs it himself. The tribes PetroviΔ visits speak languages which lack the possessive genitive, and even when they master French they keep expressing possession in a descriptive way: not ‘my glass’, but ‘a glass for me’. If they happen to make any money, they either spend it on drink or leave it in the first village they pass through. African hosts give their European guests everything they own: their houses, their food, their beds, their only pillows, their women, even their own bodies, and do not ask for anything in return. They do not even ask for the name of the unexpected guest. This is the absolute, unconditional hospitality which Derrida writes about in Of Hospitality: ‘absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.) but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names.’4 Not to be a European, what conceit! If they could read, and if we gave them the Bible, they would recognise that they live in what our holy book describes as our idea of Heaven: in a place where one, although foreign, is always at home, where other beings, with everything they have ‘for themselves’, open themselves up for us in a festive reception and with absolute, unconditional hospitality. This is why PetroviΔ claims that May, who brought him his pillow, is ‘above species and sublime’ (283). Above species: naked and handsome; free from possession; from white evening suits; from money; free from every prohibition; free for sex with anyone they want, anybody with everybody else, without puzzlement and anger; free and happy as before the Fall. Above species, for the species has fallen into slavery; into the necessity to earn and save; to multiply what has been saved; to protect what has been earned, especially from foreigners; to give carefully and conditionally; to exchange 4 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of hospitality, trans. R. Bowlby (Stanford: 2000), 25.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 271

4/14/08 2:52:53 PM

272

Under Eastern Eyes

for something else; into selective invitations into our houses, instead of receiving anyone who might turn up; into giving hospitality only to those who enter the pact of hospitality; into wearing suits, particularly white evening suits which get dirty so easily; into the possessive genitive and ‘my wife’ and ‘my pillow’. Above species: the species has fallen into what we call civilisation, and one cannot have sex with just anybody. The species has a sexual protocol which regulates who, how and when one can touch and be touched; the first rule of this protocol forbids incest. Although it might be ‘the most drastic mutilation which man’s erotic life has in all time experienced’5, it is still one of the two pillars we have built our civilisation on. The fall into civilisation has been progressing for centuries; several years before PetroviΔ’s journey to African pre-civilisational Heaven, Freud proclaimed that this fall—he named it die kulturelle Sexualmoral—had reached its nadir and blamed it for the neurotic misery of his contemporary Europeans.6 Nevertheless, this archivist of the visible, who records only what can be grasped by observing, has not actually witnessed this pre-cultural, liberating sexual morality among the Africans. When PetroviΔ claimed that Africans are honoured when Europeans sleep with their women, he used the impersonal formula: ‘it is notorious’. He neither said that during his journey in Africa anyone had ever demanded to be honoured in that way, nor that he had met a European who had had first-hand experience in this matter. That any man can be with any woman, PetroviΔ concluded while observing a wedding ceremony in a village. Soon the lights would go out, he foretold, and when plunged into darkness anyone would be with anyone else (314). But he did not wait for the lights to go out, let alone inspect what happened in the village afterwards. Even without that, he knew that one can, better yet must achieve more in Africa than in Europe. He never saw anyone enjoying the pre-civilisational sexual liberties he finds so attractive. What he saw and can bear witness to is only his own visit to a brothel in Morocco, his own stay in a hut with girls whose skin smelled of dried

5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilisation and its discontents’, in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: 1953–1974), 21:104. 6 Idem, ‘Civilised sexual morality and modern nervous illness’, in The standard edition 9:181–204.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 272

4/14/08 2:52:53 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

273

fruit, where he had to wash his hands for a long time, for the smell was not to his taste, and his own countless touchings of handsome bodies—although forced by circumstances. If one pillar of civilisation is in such a condition, then the other must be in bad shape too. The assumption that those who have not heard of the incest taboo, allowing instead unregulated sex, may not have heard of the prohibition against anthropophagia comes true when PetroviΔ brings on stage a cannibal. It is an African ‘ill in his chest and incurable’, ‘with his head tired and collapsed’ (255). That much can be seen: a travel writer who only records what can be seen should stop here. Nevertheless, PetroviΔ knows that the man is an endo-cannibal who could cure himself only if he were allowed to tear apart ‘his second sister-in-law, or his small brother-in-law, or any other member of his family’ (255). The deductions that brought him to this conclusion would amuse William Arens, who holds that anthropologists’ claims regarding the ubiquity of cannibalism were ‘based on something less than a rational evidential process’.7 How did the archivist of the visible come to the conclusion that the sick man is a violator of the second great taboo of our civilisation? The interpreter told him that ‘for a man like this one, who like many others has previously been accused of having been a panther, the cure would certainly be human flesh, for a man-panther cannot live if he is deprived of it’ (255). The man ill in his chest had only been previously accused of being a panther,8 such accusations were frequent here, and for a sick panther the only medicine is human flesh, for the ‘blood and body of a family member give the greatest strength’ (255)—that much the interpreter said, but from there to PetroviΔ’s conclusion, that he sees a cannibal prevented from curing himself in the traditional manner by civilised French laws, should only have been made through several cautious and rational steps. To be a rational European, what conceit! To be different from Africans, ‘who are incapable of any analytic and deductive effort’ (205), and to make an analytic and deductive leap that would bridge the lack of proof! 7 William Arens, ‘Rethinking antropology’, in Cannibalism and the colonial world, ed. F. Barker, P. Hulme and M. Iversen (Cambridge: 1998), 42. 8 Panthers are cannibals who wear animal skin and claws during anthropophagic rites.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 273

4/14/08 2:52:53 PM

274

Under Eastern Eyes

Even more impressive is PetroviΔ’s second testimony about African cannibalism. This time PetroviΔ retells the tale of a man disappearing from a village, and the villagers finding ‘traces of nails and some hair from a panther’s fur’ on the ground (262). They suspected that panthers might be involved and notified the French administrator, who came to the village, called the village shaman and threatened to sentence him to death if he did not betray the guilty ones. The shaman ‘brought out a cage with a small tiger, danced around it, sang songs, washed his face with water from a special well, and then walked in a circle around the villagers, observed them for a long time, and pointed at three of them’ (262). They were immediately arrested. Two of them were poisoned that very night, and the third one was tortured the next day and eventually confessed to the crime, though ‘in spite of the torture he did not want to reveal what sort of rite compelled them to kill and eat the victim’ (263). So the rational French administrator who relied on songs sung around a cage, on water from a special well, and a confession obtained through torture was disappointed by the perpetrator’s inability to explain the rite he admittedly took part in. But for PetroviΔ, even that was more than enough. After that story, the author of ‘Afrika’ concludes that even without proof ‘it was enough to see the frightened convulsion of a black man when seeing a white; his almost wild, insane look’ (263) in order to be sure that he spends his days lying in wait for his second sister-in-law and his small brother-in-law. That the frightened convulsion might be a result of his insight into European rational and deductive procedures obviously never occurred to PetroviΔ. This is PetroviΔ’s Africa. The people are ‘children’ (124, 134, 220), ‘splendid mountain animals’ (116), with beautiful naked bodies, long elegant muscles, no fat at all, with high firm breasts; incapable of analytic and deductive effort; free from possession; absolutely and unconditionally hospitable; and, last but not least, free for sex with just about anybody, and only through French administrators’ prohibitions prevented from eating each other.

HOW DO THEY DIFFER FROM US? First of all, we are different, and the difference between us and them cannot be erased: a flower would start to resemble an insect, or an insect a flower, sooner than an African could resemble a European.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 274

4/14/08 2:52:54 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

275

PetroviΔ has no second thoughts about that. His sympathies for the Africans, his hymns to the purity, innocence and youth of the human race turn into contempt, anger and sneering the moment he notices in them even a fleeting wish to emulate particular traits of European identity. Judging by the unrestrained anger which accompanies his descriptions of those rare attempts on the part of the Africans to substitute a new identity for their own, or at least to open themselves up to another one, it seems PetroviΔ regards this as something unbecoming, offensive and even dangerous. PetroviΔ arrives in Africa accompanied by Vouillet, an explorer and a brother of one of PetroviΔ’s Parisian friends. He ‘led one of the most important exploratory missions in Sudan thirty years ago, he founded whole towns in Upper Volta, and named many insects and plants after himself, he also collected pre-historical armoury, jewellery and precious stones from all ages’ (197–8). Vouillet undoubtedly knew Africa well: he spent many years living there, and knew everything about its languages, flora, fauna, customs and geography. After many years he returned to Europe, and managed an African coffee farm from Marseille. Vouillet was only to introduce PetroviΔ to Africa and to spend the first couple of weeks with him, leaving him on his own thereafter. While they were still aboard the ship, Vouillet told PetroviΔ how, during many long years among the Africans, he had ‘unconsciously forgotten that he wasn’t one of them’. Vouillet says: ‘I didn’t imagine myself being black, but I felt as if I were, and I didn’t mind seeing my white hand for days on end, until suddenly it occurred to me: Look, my hand is white! When after fourteen years of that life I suddenly married, out of love, I treated my wife very badly according to European standards, because I imported into my white marriage the mentality of a black one. I still admire my wife for understanding that instantly and for not interpreting my behaviour in a bad manner. Only after twenty years with the blacks, I subconsciously began—not separating myself from them—to return to European civilization. When I am with them today, I am a member of a different race as much as you are. Let’s say that there was no genuine reason for me to return to Europeaness. I never perceived my wife and my children as different from the black: you might become so accustomed to the difference in skin colour that you won’t notice it

iBracewell_A_book.indb 275

4/14/08 2:52:54 PM

276

Under Eastern Eyes any more. Our way of life, under the circumstances, wasn’t much different from the way of life of the black. When I say that I was black, I want to say that I felt no difference between myself and the natives. And then, all of a sudden, I began to feel it more and more. Was it fatigue, or ageing, which erased everything new that my spirit had formed, or, on the contrary, an atavistic awakening of the primitive forces of my race, which had annihilated everything in me that was purely mimetic?’ (214–5)

Vouillet is not a traveller who will, after only several weeks in Africa, return to Europe to write a travelogue in the peace and comfort of his study, a travelogue in which he would—following the law of the genre—describe the difference between us and them. This difference does constitute the true content of every interesting travelogue, and the only reason for writing it: travelogues are not written about the same, but about the different. Here, the travel writer who spends only several weeks in Africa is PetroviΔ, it is his mission to notice the difference between Africans and Europeans, which might explain his nervousness and even embitterment upon noticing that some Africans try to blur the picture by imitating Europeans. Vouillet, on the contrary, did not write a travelogue: he instead spent long years living in Africa, and during that time slowly overcame the difference between us and them, annihilating it until it eventually disappeared. He became an African and lived an African way of life. Why did it not, then, stay that way? Why did the difference, once successfully overcome, begin to manifest its presence again? There is not a simple answer to this question. Even Vouillet himself cannot explain it. Nevertheless, whatever the reason may be—fatigue, old age, an ‘awakening of the primitive forces of his race’—there is no doubt that both Vouillet and PetroviΔ consider that this lessening, if not an annihilation of the difference between the African and the European identity, is a process that can occur only temporarily and on the surface, or on the margins of an identity, while its core always remains unchanged and solid, always capable of reversing all the superficial changes and restoring the whole to its original state. This margin where the changes may occur, if only temporarily, can be isolated from that part of our identity which is solid and unchangeable, permanent and defining, that is to say, what actually is our identity. Thus isolated, the margin capable of changing can be named mime-

iBracewell_A_book.indb 276

4/14/08 2:52:54 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

277

tism: the change occurred in what is ‘mimetic in me’, says Vouillet, which is not to be confused with myself. The mimetic margin in me and myself can be temporarily joined, the former can, for a while, cover the latter, as a new text written on a palimpsest. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that sooner or later the proper hierarchy between them will be restored: myself will overcome what was imposed on it as foreign and different—the palimpsest will re-emerge. This theory might be new to the travel writer PetroviΔ, even though he does not seem to object to it, but the scientist Vouillet had, in all probability, enough time not only to think about it, but to test it experimentally as well. ‘He discovered a new insect’, continues PetroviΔ, ‘which mimics the flower of a tree on which it lives. Since the insect failed to mimic the flower perfectly, the flower on its part began to mimic the insect by acquiring some kind of small legs, in order to repel the butterflies which destroyed it. This mutual mimetism led to an absolutely common outer identity’ (215). The margin of mimetism of every identity is limited: the insect failed to perfectly mimic the flower, the self of the insect prevailed and prevented its full metamorphosis. What was lacking in the identification of the insect with the flower, was supplemented by the flower’s margin of mimetism, so eventually the two different entities looked identical. Thus the flower became protected from the butterflies which destroyed it, and the insect became safe from the birds that fed on it. PetroviΔ is impressed by the stories and does not imply that Vouillet should be reproached for his transformation into an African during his long stay on the continent. On the contrary, PetroviΔ narrated the story of Vouillet’s becoming an African and the story about the mutual mimetism of the insect and the flower in the same breath, so that both processes seem to be the result of the same natural law. But later, during his travels in Africa, when he encountered similar attempts which did not involve insects and flowers, but human beings, PetroviΔ reacted in a different manner. Only four pages after the story about the strange insect-flower mimetism, PetroviΔ writes that in Africa one can see ‘young men in white European trousers and pink shirts: the ones with tailcoats and bowler hats are rare. They dart here and there on their bicycles and look like chimpanzees paraded in a circus’ (219). The key word in this description is chimpanzee: of all the animals, chimpanzees are the most similar to humans, and

iBracewell_A_book.indb 277

4/14/08 2:52:54 PM

278

Under Eastern Eyes

the only ones with the ability to imitate them. Their imitating, aping, provokes laughter in us, but a laughter imbued with uneasiness: the similarity we see should not be there. There should not be any similarity between what we know is different; what must be different. And if it appears in such an imposing manner that it cannot be ignored, our confidence in difference is called into question. Thus the source of this uneasiness: what if the similarity has not been achieved on the surface only, in the margin of mimetism? What if it is the outcome of a certain likeness in that solid and unchangeable part of our identity, the part that Vouillet so confidently names myself? Would admitting to such an essential, and not only mimetic similarity undermine our confidence in difference, and thus our self-confidence which is its product? Moreover, this obtrusive mimetism, which achieves similarity but not a perfect sameness, reflects back on our image, it deforms our features, separating them from the solid core of ourselves, and shows us that what we held to be solid and integrated can be remodelled in a very unusual manner. That which is available to mimetism, that which can be aped, ought to be only on the surface, or in the margin of mimetism, but never in what we consider the core of our identity. But how are we to tell the difference between a part of the solid core and the margin? Aping is dangerous because it threatens to disrupt the border between the core and the margin, between Vouillet’s ‘margin in me’ and ‘myself’: if we let it happen, we shall not be able to tell what is ‘myself’ any more, and the difference between us and them will disappear as well. Respectful of Vouillet’s story about almost becoming an African after many years in Africa, and impressed by the scientific discovery of the mutual mimetism of the insect and the flower, Rastko PetroviΔ is appalled by Africans who attempt to look and behave like Europeans. On another occasion, while crossing a river in a small boat, he observes two women and a man who are trying to turn the little they know about European customs and manners into a performance: Almost by my side the natives, a man and two women, address each other in French as Monsieur and Madame in order to impress me. They screech and babble at the top of their voices. They imitate the gestures of white women who gossip, and look as if performing one of

iBracewell_A_book.indb 278

4/14/08 2:52:55 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

279

Sterija’s9 comedies: they slap themselves and shriek ‘Tut, tut, don’t say that!’ One of the women excitedly squeaks: ‘Madame, Madame, my husband is majuscule, and I am paroxysm; oh, no, Madame, you are not paroxysm, you are verbal!’ They belong to the elite of converted Negroes who read propaganda brochures, and then joyfully and luxuriously decorate themselves with shiny meaningless words, as if with pearl necklaces made of sea foam. […] After half an hour the Christians were completely exhausted by this aping of refinement. The women first ate dry fish and damp and hard bread, which resembled dirty bacon, and then scooped up some water in a chamber pot in order to refresh themselves by washing between their legs. The man, still struggling with his Europeaness, like someone who is just about to fall asleep, gallantly handed them his handkerchief to dry themselves between their legs. (224–5)

For PetroviΔ this is the point of no return, and one wonders which part annoyed him most—the image of gossiping women, the use of meaningless European words, or the attending to the needs of intimate hygiene in public? Had this small group of Africans known that the needs of intimate hygiene should be attended to only in private, and that a handkerchief is lent only in exceptional circumstances, what would have made them any different from a group of Europeans who gossip and use shiny meaningless words? In order to preserve the border between the margin of mimetism and the solid, integrated identity of myself, and thus to reinforce the border between us and them, PetroviΔ must not agree with their aping and circus performances. They are beautiful when they dive naked, but if they try to approach you as equals, you had better keep them at a distance. The next time he met an African who had used his own margin of mimetism, PetroviΔ behaved very cautiously: As I immediately realised that his kindness, smiles and winks had a purpose of convincing me how European he was, the kind called ‘civilisé’ and ‘Creole’ by the Negroes, which is to my taste the most 9 Jovan Sterija PopoviΔ (1806–1856), the writer who introduced Molière’s type of comedy into Serbian literature.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 279

4/14/08 2:52:55 PM

280

Under Eastern Eyes repulsive possible representative of the black race, I totally restricted any cordiality I might have shown him.(328–9)

How did this man deserve PetroviΔ’s punishment in the form of coldness and distance? Were his kindness and smiles such an unforgivable offence? Or is there a danger in them? ‘As the word “Creole” implies,’ writes Robert Young, ‘translation involves displacement, the carrying over and transformation of the dominant culture into new identities that take on material elements from the culture of their new location. Both sides of the exchange get creolized, transformed, as a result.’10 Vouillet was not afraid of being creolised. Another European in ‘Afrika’, whom we are to meet presently, was not nervous about his own identity either. Only PetroviΔ is eager to see everybody in his proper place, and to make sure that they know the difference between them and us.

BUT WHO ARE WE? In the middle of ‘Afrika’, there begins a description of ‘the strangest and most fantastic part’ (266) of his journey. ‘Something happened and I was involved […] with the very core of African life’, writes PetroviΔ, something which prevented him from being ‘a simple traveller’ and transformed the character of his journey. PetroviΔ met a Swiss who in the text is not referred to with a proper name, but with the initial N. ‘This is one of the strangest men I have ever met. If I had not seen anything else in Africa, the journey would have been worth the trouble’ (315). This fascination with a European in Africa structures the second part of PetroviΔ’s travelogue. ‘A hero of great novels of adventure’ entered PetroviΔ’s text, and with it the shadow of Joseph Conrad (267): ‘Afrika’ has got its Kurtz. It ceases being a record of the visible and becomes something more complex. From that moment on, PetroviΔ travels in his company, and it changes his perspective significantly. No matter how unlikeable N. might be, sometimes at the very edge of disgusting, PetroviΔ has to give him the place he has been occupying himself so far. Up until that moment the author was a Eu10 Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism. A very short introduction (Oxford: 2003), 142.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 280

4/14/08 2:52:55 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

281

ropean in Africa and wrote from that perspective. Now entering the stage is someone who has a higher right to Europe, a real European, and PetroviΔ, an Europeanised Balkanite, a European from the margin, a European by virtue of his culture, language and education, only an aspiring European, has to take a step back before the very embodiment of Europe. Why is this so? N. is a young Swiss nobleman, a Count, the direct descendent of the Duke of Berry and the French Marshal ‘D’. PetroviΔ’s grandfather was born a subject of the Sultan in the Ottoman Empire. His father, Mita PetroviΔ, fought the Turks in the war for the liberation of southern Serbia. Rastko himself was born in a country ‘so small, without a sea, weak; final death threatened it at any moment’.11 N. speaks the language of Montaigne and Descartes as his mother tongue, PetroviΔ had to learn it. In Montaigne’s and Descartes’ times, no one wrote in PetroviΔ’s mother tongue. This small and weak country of his barely survived the First World War: ‘thus they grow up together: he and his country’, writes PetroviΔ about himself, ‘one could not be separated from the other. He represented his country by himself’.12 So here they are now, in the middle of Africa, the grandson of the Duke of Berry and the grandson of a subject of the Sultan; France and Serbia. The latter believes that he should make an effort to be a European; the former does not, for he believes that he received his Europeaness by birth. PetroviΔ has Picasso, Gide and Max Ernest for friends, he has read Bergson and Proust; N. has probably never heard of them. PetroviΔ enters Europe by assimilating its culture; N. can afford to ignore it, precisely because he believes that it belongs to him. On the other hand, PetroviΔ knows Europe in what he believes to be the essence of Europe, and that he knows a lot better than N. who is European by virtue of his family inheritance. For PetroviΔ, Europe is European culture, in which, and only in which, he can be an insider. The Europe of empires, colonies and conquests to him, who ‘represents his country by himself’, ‘small and weak’, is not his Europe, and in it he will always be an outsider. In this Europe he will never have a place. Since he has two languages—French, the central language of European culture, and Ser11 Rastko PetroviΔ, ‘Opšti podaci i život pesnika’, Eseji i ∑lanci (Belgrade: 1974), 462. 12 Ibid., p. 464.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 281

4/14/08 2:52:55 PM

282

Under Eastern Eyes

bian, the language of a European margin—this insider/outsider has a double perspective as well. Because he had to make an additional effort to buy his ticket to Europe, because belonging to Europe was not part of his family silver, but deserved and earned by intimate knowledge of what is the most European about Europe, and by devotion to it, he can see better than hereditary Europeans what is non-European, or even anti-European in Europe. Even if he wanted, he could not do otherwise: because he entered Europe via its culture, he believes that Europe is only that which he knows and cherishes. Thus a half of reality always escapes him, and he does not see that Europe is still Europe even when it is at its least ‘European’. Then he wonders: he wonders as Rastko PetroviΔ wondered when a German bomb hit his Belgrade home in April 1941 and destroyed his family library in which generations stored the greatest works of European literature and philosophy. He wonders because he cannot believe that this is Europe destroying itself—while actually this is only the real Europe leading its complex and ambivalent existence. It is not in historical reality that the idea of Europe attains its purest embodiment, it is in the dreams of those like Rastko PetroviΔ. Young Count N. must once have been extraordinarily handsome, assumes PetroviΔ, but now he is no more than ‘a ruin of a youth’ (267), all covered with scars, and keeps himself going only by his extraordinary toughness. Due to some foolishness committed in an affair with a Russian lady in Paris, his parents demanded that he leave and disappear to the colonies. There he is, bitter, angry, compelled to struggle for every single bite he eats and every moment of sleep he gets. He does not travel with numerous servants, chefs and porters like other Europeans. N. eats what Africans eat, drinks the same water: ‘I have removed all barriers between them and myself’, he says, ‘I speak their language, eat their food, sleep with their women and cheat on them their way: hence they both like me and fear me more’ (270)— and they really fear him. ‘Twenty black, almost athletic men’, wonders PetroviΔ, ‘in their own country, in the middle of nowhere, where wiping out a human life is so easy, fear him, terribly fear a man all broken, who has to bind his stomach in order not to fall apart, who cannot move his head and does not even carry any arms’(301). ‘Oh, I have no illusions’, says N., ‘I know how miserable and dirty-minded a creature a black is, and I despise him as much as other whites do, but I too know that the whites are equally disgusting and dirty-minded’.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 282

4/14/08 2:52:56 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

283

He does not try to hide his contempt for Africans, and admits that he wishes them evil (274). N. pursues his arduous trading business, he tries to cure his dysentery and many wounds earned in three traffic accidents on bad African roads, and dreams of building a house in the middle of the wilderness: ‘a big, magnificent house, with a real piano in it, with real portraits, real, robust furniture, books, dishes. […] To build one’s own home, in the wildest part, by oneself, on one’s own steam, in the wilderness’. A real European house, ‘for after all, Europeans have best known how to build’ (273). This was, says PetroviΔ, the only human feature to be seen in him: the desire to build his own home (281). In this country—of absolute and unconditional hospitality, where other beings open themselves up in festive reception, and without a demand for reciprocity give place to an unknown, anonymous other—the foreigner and guest N. wants to build a big, strong European house. He wants to be at home among the hosts which he treats with hostility, to turn himself from a guest into a host. He wants the hosts in their own country to be guests who will not enter the big and strong European house the same way N. and PetroviΔ enter their huts—freely and welcomed—but the way all European houses are entered: upon an invitation. This need of invitation would be a barrier, as much as the strong walls of the real European house, against an unwelcome presence at the dinner table. In this country of absolute and unconditional hospitality Mrs. J., ‘otherwise a very educated, nice and quiet lady, a doctor of medicine’ says that ‘she would never admit a black, no matter how cultured, to her dinner table, and that she never misses an opportunity to let him know that he belongs to a lower race. […] Everyone who takes part in the conversation considers eating at the same table with the blacks as impossible’ (210). Thus the absolutely hospitable hosts in their own country will become guests who are never let in and led to the table. They should learn that they are no longer at home wherever a strong European house emerges. This mad builder, N., a foreigner and guest in the country of absolute hospitality, yells at his hosts: ‘Who is giving orders here, who is giving orders here! This is the land for the whiteman, this is the land for the whiteman, don’t you understand that!—This is a land for the white, confirms the frightened black, scared of his fist and his bites’ (306). Africans fear him, and he knows well how to frighten them. When he gets angry at his only boy servant, he beats and scares him—but if

iBracewell_A_book.indb 283

4/14/08 2:52:56 PM

284

Under Eastern Eyes

the boy starts crying, N. comforts him through soothing and caressing. This is his boy, ‘the boy for him’ (281), but the others receive much harsher treatment. If one of PetroviΔ’s servants ‘does not obey immediately, or not enthusiastically enough, N. does not slap him as any other white would do, he bites him madly and abruptly on his arms or back’ (285). ‘The bitten one would always shriek so much and look at N. with such hate, and so fearfully run away from him ever after that, without a doubt, the bite was quite serious’, comments PetroviΔ. N. has a fairly rational explanation: ‘It hurts them and reminds them of beasts and cannibals’ (285–6). N.’s bites leave ‘bloody scars of teeth’ (286) on the skin of one of PetroviΔ’s servants as proof of his seriousness. While cleaning and binding the wound, PetroviΔ thinks: ‘He didn’t have the right to became a cannibal, or at least something akin to a cannibal, even though his life is difficult and bitter’ (286). He didn’t have the right, says PetroviΔ: it is the Africans who are cannibals, they live in the pre-civilisational state of incest and cannibalism, but we have built our strong European house of civilisation on those two taboos. This is how we define ourselves, this is how we draw a borderline between what we are, and what they are. We do not have sex with just anybody and do not eat other people, and if we want to preserve this border we have to respect these two prohibitions. We do not have the right to cannibalism: the most we can allow ourselves is to be tempted. We can freely watch naked ‘harmonic and muscular’ bodies (211), the bodies of ‘athletic young men, completely naked […] with long backs, narrow hips, straight and strong legs’ (212), ‘almost filigree-like in their musculature’ (241), girls’ ‘breasts cold and firm, straight and pear-like and heavy’(294), ‘with no fat at all, no overdeveloped muscles’ (227), one would almost say lean meat, bodies whose smell reminds us of ‘wild fruit’ (294), ‘rounded shoulders […] like firm apples’ (228), eyes ‘the colour of dark plums’ (294). We have the right to be ‘most excited […] by the wonderfully moist pinkness of their tongues’ (294), although we know that ‘there is something blasphemous in the pinkness of this tongue’ and in ‘the moist redness of the interior of her mouth’ (228). We do not have the right to succumb to this temptation, we must resist this blasphemy of the moist redness of the human interior, of the wild fruit smell and lean meat—for we know that one does not eat it, or at least that we do not eat it. This is what we touch, kiss, lick, suck, we penetrate this moist redness with our

iBracewell_A_book.indb 284

4/14/08 2:52:56 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

285

tongues, or whatever else, but we do not bite it off. We know, though, how porous and unstable the border between those two actions is. The most influential interpreter of the European soul has explained to us that both actions derive from the same root, but he also stressed that their division is a sign of a successful sexual development. We leave behind the cannibalistic, oral phase, no matter how much we might have enjoyed the feeling of being at one with the world, represented by mothers’ breasts, that can be taken inside ourselves and thus become part of ourselves.13 No matter how much we might feel this lack for the rest of our lives and try to find comfort in other, sometimes hopelessly fruitless attempts to find a substitute for it, we are not allowed to regress to the stage we have successfully overcome. This success is the foundation both of our becoming a subject and of our European civilisation. This is why we react to cannibalism with loathing and fascination, for a cannibal can and may satisfy the desire for symbiotic unity with the world, and not only symbolic unity, but the original one from which we are forever expelled by our individual and civilisational development, as if from the heavens, and sentenced to putting up with the lack. Nevertheless, N., although a hereditary European and the grandson of the Duke of Berry and Marshal D., who should be the very embodiment of European civilisation, and who should be the barrier against the uncivilised, against psychological and historical regression, can and may. He has been living in a cannibal tribe for more than a year, and instead of being afraid of them he ‘has been abusing them as only he can’ (282). This evil, sick and unkempt man with disgusting habits, this ruin of a youth who keeps living only by virtue of his enormous toughness, covered all over with wounds and scars, still pursues his trading business in Africa, bosses around twenty athletic men unarmed, beats and bites them, looks for a place for his big and strong European house, and ‘simply devours; his appetite is something unimaginable’ (297). PetroviΔ’s reaction to him is loathing and fascination: although he feels ‘a certain loathing’ (269) he cannot but ‘admit 13 See Freud, ‘Three essays on the theory of sexuality’, in vol. 7 of The standard edition; on association of the satisfaction of the erotogenic zones and the need for nourishment, 7:181–2; on the connection between pregenital sexual organisation and cannibalism, 7:198.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 285

4/14/08 2:52:57 PM

286

Under Eastern Eyes

that the bitterness, peculiarity and madness of this man, whom everybody is so afraid of, is something extraordinary’ (292). Oh, to be a European, what conceit! Might it be that exactly because he is the grandson of the Duke of Berry and Marshal D. he can and may satisfy his desire, saturate his unimaginable appetite, devour, and do everything that PetroviΔ cannot and must not do, this Europeanised Balkanite, a European from the margin, self-appointed guardian of European culture, of the idea of Europe stored in that family library turned into ashes by a German bomb in April 1941, a European insider only as long as he sticks to this culture and respects its prohibitions? Count N. can overstep the border and still remain a hereditary European: his Europe is not only that from PetroviΔ’s Belgrade library, his Europe is also this big, strong European house in the middle of wild Africa, with real portraits and massive furniture, in which not everybody who happens to come is admitted to the table, with a roof from which one can yell ‘this is a land for the whiteman! This is a land for the whiteman!’. Even if he oversteps the border between the civilised and uncivilised, he will still have this other Europe, the one in which PetroviΔ will always be an outsider, and sitting at his massive dinner table he will be able to announce that the new law of civilisation is—biting. PetroviΔ must not overstep the border, he must not succumb to the temptation, he must not let go of the idea of Europe from his Belgrade books, for if he did, he would be no more than a grandson of a Sultan’s subject, the son of Mita PetroviΔ who fought the Turks to liberate southern Serbia, small and weak. He has to stick to these books and prohibitions, and when he sees that the books have been turned into ashes and that the prohibitions are being ignored, he must protest, he must ask, demand, beg for new books to be printed and prohibitions reinforced, for their existence is his only chance of being a European insider, having nowhere else to go, for only in such a Europe can he be at the dinner table, for the grandson of a Sultan’s subject is certainly never going to build a big, strong house in the middle of wild Africa. No matter how loathsome N. might be for breaking the law and ignoring the prohibitions, PetroviΔ never parted from him during his journey in Africa: he stayed with him until the very end, as agreed at the beginning of the journey, because N., who can and may break the law and ignore the prohibition, is also fascinating.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 286

4/14/08 2:52:57 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

287

THE TOWN CRIER Even if PetroviΔ had not mentioned ‘Jósef Konrad’ (267), a reader would probably recognize Heart of Darkness in ‘Afrika’, and especially in N., as a hypotext. Petrovic’s travelogue, as a hypertext, invites the reader to a relational reading, the one described in Palimpsest by Genette: ‘on the same parchment, one text can become superimposed upon another, which it does not quite conceal but allows to show through. […] The hypertext invites us to engage in a relational reading […]’.14 In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Kurtz is also a paradigmatic European in Africa. In addition to his German surname, he is introduced by the narrator Marlow as someone who studied in England, born to a half-English mother and a half-French father, and thus ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.’15 Europe expects much of its creation: ‘Oh, he will go far, very far’, says of him someone who knows him well. ‘He will be somebody in the Administration before long. They, above—the Council in Europe, you know—mean him to be’ (22). Kurtz is also instrumental in Europe’s plan for Africa (28), so much so that the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, an organisation that has civilising Africa as its aim, has entrusted him with writing a report (50). Kurtz is the embodiment of Christian mercy, European science and progress (28), European ideas of justice (‘I want no more than justice’ [72]), and rights (‘live rightly’ [68]), and of the modern ideal of business efficiency (‘a firstclass agent […] Sends in as much ivory as all the others put together’ [22]). He also represents the best of great European artistic achievements: Kurtz is ‘essentially a great musician’, ‘a painter’ (71) and a poet (104); briefly, ‘a universal genius’ (71). Nevertheless, of all his gifts ‘the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating’ (48). Kurtz’s report to the In-

14 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests. Literature in the second degree, trans. C. Newman and C. Doubinsky (Lincoln, Nebraska & London: 1997), 398–9. 15 Joseph Conrad, Heart of darkness (New York & London: 1988), 50. All subsequent page references, shown in brackets in the main text, refer to this edition.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 287

4/14/08 2:52:57 PM

288

Under Eastern Eyes

ternational Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs ‘was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence’ (50), and his monologues were not only ‘splendid’, but also expressive of the highest European ideals of love and justice (59). It is, therefore, not a surprise that before coming to Africa, Kurtz worked as a journalist. Writing for newspapers, taking part in the public sphere of democratic societies, really is the genuine domain of the just and the right, and what’s more, the enlighteningly eloquent. Here, where our most cherished ideals are shaped, where our most precious ideas are represented and defended, where our plans are exposed to public debate before becoming our policies, just and eloquent universal geniuses are most needed. And from it there is only a small step to politics, in which the advocates of justice and progress get a chance to make true their ideas. ‘Kurtz’s proper sphere’, says one of those who had the honour of knowing him, ‘ought to have been politics on the popular side. […] He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party’ (71). Nevertheless, the sublimely expressed ideals of love, justice and progress, cannot conceal the truth of Kurtz’s African engagement. Upon hearing what Kurtz’s admirers have to say about him, Marlow is left with a simple conclusion: ‘To speak plainly, he raided the country’ (56). And upon seeing spiked heads surrounding Kurtz’s hut, Marlow ought to have noticed that there is something in it that cannot be explained solely by business efficiency and Kurtz’s need to accumulate as much ivory as possible. ‘There was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts’ (57). Even if it would be understandable, Marlow thinks, for someone to surround his hut with spiked heads instead of flowers if profit is at stake, why would one do it if it were not profitable? From the point of view of business rationality, this is a pure surplus, irrational in the meaning of satisfying one’s lusts. The immediate benefit or profit might demand the death of the bearers of the heads, but certainly does not demand that the latter be exposed to be viewed. That demand can be only a result of lust which derives great pleasure from death, and extends the pleasure by watching the spectacle of death, but is not the necessary result of a desire for profit or robbery. Taking pleasure from the spectacle of death is legitimised by robbery, but their relationship is different: it only takes advantage of the situation in which profit legitimises everything. Arriving at Kurtz’s

iBracewell_A_book.indb 288

4/14/08 2:52:57 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

289

habitat at the heart of the ‘Dark Continent’, Conrad’s Marlow discovers that the lust for death and pleasure in its spectacle is not a mere extra-profit of the colonial economy, but a motive equally as strong as profit: taking ivory and giving death go hand in hand, but the latter has its rights independently of the former. This is the secret discovered by Marlow in Africa, and it is cryptically expressed in the murmurs of the dying universal genius: ‘Live rightly, die, die…’ (68). Live rightly: widen the boundaries of civilisation and suppress barbarity; represent progress, justice, science and business efficiency; create poetry and music, paint; and employ your splendid eloquence to articulate Christian ideals of love and pity. Die, die: the fascination with death which creates the ‘lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief’ (58). In the heart of this lightless region there is Kurtz’s fascination with death, lust for death and pleasure taken from it. This is a European secret that confuses the savages. Marlow, the Englishman, passes over this secret in silence and tells Kurtz’s Intended that his last words were: her name. This false romanticism of love and devotion has to conceal the truth of Kurtz’s final revelation, which cannot be expressed any other way than with the word ‘horror!’ The secret which is ‘too dark’ (76) is being repressed deep down, away from the sight of the ethically more sensitive gender. Too dark secrets are not revealed in bright rooms, ‘in a lofty drawing-room with three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and be-draped columns’ (72). Dark secrets belong to the ‘Dark Continent’, and should stay there. To put it differently, they should be sent there: although they are our secrets, they should be expelled to the ‘Dark Continent’. Enormous power is needed for the operation by which a whole continent is transformed into a spoil area for our dark secrets, into a region for our repression, and thus into our unconsciousness, into our projection of what we do not want to be—into our ‘lightless region of subtle horrors’ in which we are allowed everything, even regression into a state that we have successfully left behind in both our individual and civilisational development. What conceit: discreetly keeping too dark a secret that one has the right to regression and the power to blame others for it. The secret so well kept in London by the Englishman Marlow, is revealed in Heart of Darkness by the town crier Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. He cries so loudly that it echoes even in PetroviΔ’s

iBracewell_A_book.indb 289

4/14/08 2:52:58 PM

290

Under Eastern Eyes

‘Afrika’: from the moment N. enters the travelogue ‘there was an invisible Jósef Konrad too’(267), 16 writes PetroviΔ. Invisibly present, as a palimpsest beneath ‘Afrika’, Conrad’s short novel surfaces through PetroviΔ’s text and intensifies all the author’s impressions, all people he had met, and most of all the main character of his travelogue, N. The reader who knows how to read relationally will recognise in PetroviΔ’s travelogue a transformation of a European literary genre and of a text written in English by an east European which has became a classic of English literature. The Ukrainian Pole, Conrad, revealed the secret about power, about keeping the dark European secret, in a par excellence European literary genre and in one of the west European languages. In order to recall this echo in a new text, PetroviΔ had had to acquire both generic and linguistic competence, which made it possible for him to transform and rewrite Conrad’s writing gesture. ‘In order to imitate a text’, claims Genette, ‘it is inevitably necessary to acquire at least a partial mastery of it, a mastery of that specific quality which one has chosen to imitate.’17 By transforming Conrad’s hypotext, PetroviΔ too reveals the European secret about power and about keeping the secret by employing European means of cultural expression. What else could he have done this with? Even when he wants to confront Europe with what she would prefer to pass over in silence, PetroviΔ, as much as Conrad, has no choice but to do it in a European way. For he has nothing else.

PETROVIĆ LEARNS FAST The mastery of a European means of cultural expression, if it is the only mastery he had achieved, was not enough to relieve him from his nervousness about identity. Something else is needed there, and PetroviΔ seems ready to learn. Could it be that PetroviΔ stayed with N. because he wanted to learn something? Surely there is something to learn from N., the mad builder who, though unarmed, strikes fear in twenty athletic men. PetroviΔ learns fast: he is being carried in a palanquin, whose ends rely on the heads of two African men, in the ter16 All subsequent page references given in brackets in the main text are to Rastko PetroviΔ, ‘Afrika’, Putopisi. 17 Genette, Palimpsests, 6.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 290

4/14/08 2:52:58 PM

Oh, to Be a European!

291

rible African heat, uphill. ‘They lose their breath; the wood slips down from their heads, and their effort at first sight seems enormous’, writes PetroviΔ. ‘I have a slightly guilty conscience, for weighing down on the heads of these poor devils, although they tell me that I shouldn’t tire myself if I don’t want to catch a tropical fever, that they are here through their own will, and that for them all that is not too much of an

Figure 1. Rastko PetroviΔ in Africa, National Museum of Serbia.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 291

4/14/08 2:52:58 PM

iBracewell_A_book.indb 292

4/14/08 2:52:59 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity: Mihail Sebastian’s Interwar Travel Reportage Diana Georgescu

This chapter approaches travel writing as a site of self-exploration and self-presentation, starting from a series of articles sent by Mihail Sebastian from Paris, Geneva and Vienna for publication in the Romanian press in 1930 and 1931. A promising member of the generation of young intellectuals emerging in the late 1920s in Romania, Mihail Sebastian was a prolific journalist as well as a literary critic, a novelist and playwright.1 His first stay abroad as a journalist and doctoral 1 Mihail Sebastian (1907–1945), born in Brăila as Iosif Hechter, studied Law at the University of Bucharest and undertook doctoral studies in Paris (1930–1931). He began his journalistic career in 1927, contributing essays on contemporary Romanian and European prose to the interwar daily, Cuvântul, and other publications. Immediately following his return from Paris, Sebastian published three novels—Fragmente dintr-un carnet găsit (1932), Femei (1933) and De două mii de ani (1934)—and joined a group of likeminded young intellectuals, the ‘Criterion’ group. Following a press scandal around the autobiographical novel he published in 1934, Sebastian resumed his career as a journalist and writer with increased intensity, adding play-writing to his repertoire. He published the novel Oraşul cu salcâmi (1935) and the play Jocul de-a vacanţa (1936) and wrote numerous literary and dramatic reviews, political and social commentaries and interviews for interwar publications such as Rampa, Revista fundaţiilor regale and Viaţa românească. After the passing of anti-Semitic legislation, Sebastian was fired from Revista fundaţiilor regale in 1940. In the last few years of his life, he wrote another novel, Accidentul (1940) and several plays: Steaua fără nume (published in 1944 under the pseudonym Victor Mincu), Insula and Ultima oră (premiered after the author’s death). Mihail Sebastian died in 1945 in a car accident. Studies on him in English include Irina Livezeanu, ‘A Jew from the Danube: Cuvântul, the Rise of the Right, and Mihail Sebastian’, Shvut 16 (1993); Norman Manea, ‘The Incompatibilities: Romania, the Holocaust and a Rediscovered Writer’, New Republic (20 April 1998); Matei Calinescu, ‘The 1927 generation in Romania’, East European Politics and

iBracewell_A_book.indb 293

4/14/08 2:52:59 PM

294

Under Eastern Eyes

student gave Sebastian ample opportunity to reflect on his ambivalent status as a Romanian-acculturated Jewish intellectual, on the virtues of cosmopolitan cities such as Paris, as well as on national diversity and European identity in a variety of travel texts ranging from published articles to personal correspondence and autobiographical writing. Travel functioned as a device that shuffled the various dimensions of his identity, eliciting identifications as both Romanian and Jewish in travel accounts that are imbued with the awareness of coming to an emblematic European metropolis from the provincial margins of Europe. In making selfhood the structuring principle of his private and public travel writings, Sebastian continues in a long tradition of postRomantic travel narratives, whose concern with the self and the subjective mediation of travel experiences, rather than with objective depictions of places visited, betray a uniquely modern sensibility.2 Mihail Sebastian’s excursions into national specificity constitute the object of two sections that explore the deeply ingrained interwar language of national character, its limits in accounting for an ambivalent identity that failed to fit neatly into national borders, and its uneasy coexistence with the sense of a broader European identity. Far from receding to the background, the idea of Europe was still invoked in interwar travel accounts as an ideal image against which Romanian intellectuals measured both their peripheral society and the West itself. The last section of this chapter, ‘Paris, the Hub of the Universe’, examines the contrast that Sebastian made between provincial Bucharest and cosmopolitan Paris, arguing that the sense of lag and lack with respect to the West took subtler forms in the interwar period when the language of national sovereignty and specificity intensified. The chapter is framed by an opening section, ‘Agents of Authenticity’, devoted to remarks on the narrative and rhetorical strategies employed by the young generation of postwar Romanian intellectuals with the express purpose of achieving discursive authority and authenSocieties 15 (2001), 649–77; and general surveys: Leon Volovici, Nationalist ideology and anti-semitism: The case of Romanian intellectuals in the 1930s (Oxford: 1991); Zigu Ornea, The Romanian extreme Right: the 1930s, trans. E.M. Popescu (Boulder, Colorado: 1999). 2 Mircea Anghelescu, ‘Romantic travel narratives’, in Nonfictional Romantic prose, ed. S.P. Sondrup and V. Nemoianu (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: 2004), 167.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 294

4/14/08 2:52:59 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

295

ticity in their travel writings. Zooming in on Sebastian’s accounts, I will read the articles he sent to the interwar daily Cuvântul [The Word] alongside his private correspondence, the journal recording his work in progress on the novel Oraşul cu salcâmi [The Acacia Town], and the autobiographical fiction that emerged out of his Parisian experience and was published two years after his return to Bucharest—the novel De două mii de ani [For Two Thousand Years].3 The analysis considers travel writing genres as various as articles, letters, a diary, and an autobiographical novel, all of which Sebastian employed as vehicles of self-presentation for diverse audiences. This comparative perspective across genres and time provides insights into the relevance of Sebastian’s travels in the early 1930s for his later career as a journalist, literary critic, and novelist, tracing some of his main concerns with personal, national and European identity back to this period.

AGENTS OF AUTHENTICITY Having graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1929, Mihail Sebastian set out to Paris for doctoral study. The late 1920s were a time when other fellow students of the postwar generation were leaving for graduate study in France, Italy, Germany, as well as less familiar destinations such as India or America. Some of them had written for the interwar press throughout their student years and continued their contributions from abroad by sending travel impressions for publication. Sebastian, who was an editor at Cuvântul, sent articles for his newspaper from Paris as well as from Geneva and Vienna, until his return to Bucharest in July 1931. Similarly, the future historian of re-

3 While I worked directly from Mihail Sebastian’s articles as printed in Cuvântul, the page references here are to Mihail Sebastian, Eseuri, cronici, memorial (Bucharest: 1972), where most of the pieces were republished in full. Exceptions are: ‘Rue de Lappe’ and ‘Balul internatului’ [Boarding-house ball]. Excerpts from Sebastian’s Parisian journal are taken from ms. 091/27, Central University Library, Bucharest. An edited excerpt of the journal was published by Sebastian in the review Azi in November 1932 and reprinted in Eseuri, cronici, memorial. Covering a period of one year during Sebastian’s stay in Paris, from 17 January 1930 to 14 January 1931, the approximately 40-page notebook of this journal functioned as a writing log rather than as an intimate diary.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 295

4/14/08 2:52:59 PM

296

Under Eastern Eyes

ligions, Mircea Eliade, wrote for Cuvântul in the early stages of his career as a journalist, essayist, and writer. During his travels to Venice, Vienna and Geneva in 1927 and 1928, as well as during his stay in India from 1929 to 1931, Eliade sent articles for publication in Cuvântul, and after his return continued to write on his Indian experience both in Cuvântul and Vremea, an interwar weekly. After two years of graduate study in Philosophy and Aesthetics in California, the art critic and essayist Petre Comarnescu contributed to Vremea in 1932 with a series of articles on American typology, published the same year in a volume with the title Homo Americanus. To a great extent, travel impressions published in a variety of interwar dailies and weeklies responded to a genuine interest in national specificity in a changed world, contributing significantly to the interwar debates on the Romanian character. At a time when the very idea of ‘nation’ was normalised in a newly institutional way through the League of Nations, the growing concern with national character was intimately tied to the necessity of legitimating national sovereignty in the recently reconfigured political map of postwar eastern Europe.4 Consequently, the concern with national specificity in travel writings of the interwar period can be best understood by reference to the broader context of competing national ideologies. Given their historical emergence as national leaders during the nineteenth century, east European intellectuals were the main actors in the debates over national identity. They also constituted a significant number of those who traveled for study to Paris, Berlin or Vienna and who wrote travel texts. The interwar press, for example, abounded in accounts of travel abroad by students or professors who were either professional journalists or occasional contributors to some of these magazines. This pattern of travel and travel writing was enhanced by the existence of Romanian students’ associations or Romanian schools in many major west European cities such as Paris, Rome, Padua, or Geneva and cultural centres across eastern Europe. The mission of

4 For a comparative study of national ideologies in the interwar period, see Katherine Verdery, ‘Introduction: National character and national ideology in interwar Eastern Europe’, in National character and national ideology in interwar Eastern Europe, ed. K. Verdery and I. Banac (New Haven, Connecticut: 1995)

iBracewell_A_book.indb 296

4/14/08 2:53:00 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

297

educating their readership about the more or less distant countries and regions of the world was consistent with the traditional role of east European intellectuals as teachers of the people. In the tradition of ‘pastoral power’,5 intellectuals who travelled abroad took upon themselves the task of enlightening the people about a great variety of topics: Romania’s political and cultural status in the region; the literature of neighboring countries; the international peace proceedings at the League of Nations in Geneva; artistic trends in Paris; the struggle for national independence in India; or the mentality of the American club woman. Needless to say, the mission of teaching the people and the implication that it was an essentially selfless cause conferred a significant amount of authority on intellectuals. To this recipe of discursive authority, the young generation of postwar intellectuals to which Mihail Sebastian belonged added another ingredient: personal experience. The authenticity of a travel account was to be measured according to its experiential quality or the extent to which it emerged out of lived experience. This resulted in a profusion of first-person writings ranging from intimate diaries to autobiographical novels that eventually blurred the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. Very often, these writings were published on return from study abroad and fed on the same raw material that had informed travel impressions sent for publication as articles. Much in the same style, travel impressions aimed at being engaging and self-expressive in order to achieve their informative and educational objectives. In some cases, they also proved an efficient advertising strategy for the autobiographical novels or collections of essays published on return. Sebastian’s first-person travel accounts reveal the concern with delivering authentic impressions fresh to his readership. They were published under the generic title ‘Letters from Paris’, ‘Letter from Geneva’ and ‘Letter from Vienna’, and followed the conventions of letter writing. Sebastian employs a number of rhetorical strategies to keep his readers engaged: he plays with time and space markers to evoke a

5 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and change’, East European Politics and Societies 1 (1987), 174, makes use of this Foucauldian concept in his account of the status of east central European intellectuals and their allegedly disinterested exercise of power for the benefit of the people.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 297

4/14/08 2:53:00 PM

298

Under Eastern Eyes

sense of present and presence that creates a virtual space for his readers; acts as a guide; or invokes his inability to render the peculiar Parisian atmosphere. Almost all of his articles addressed an imagined Bucharest audience, relating to its horizon of expectations even while challenging it. Sebastian’s fellow journalists writing on India or America could count on a Romanian readership that was relatively unacquainted with these places, in order to claim the authority to guide them into virtually unexplored territories. By comparison, Sebastian addressed an audience expected to be familiar with French literature, Parisian fashion and the broader issues of European diplomacy covered by numerous reports in the Romanian press after the First World War: I would like to speak here about a kind of self-sufficiency characteristic of the French but I don’t know where to begin. It is somehow dangerous to make such an assertion. Haven’t we all lived with the legend of a Paris, the hub of the universe? Haven’t we been told in schools, haven’t we read in books, haven’t we been reminded by magazines that it is France that does and undoes the destiny of Europe? Isn’t it true that for us to be French is to a great extent to be European?6

Provocatively entitled ‘The Frenchman, A Non-European Type’, the opening paragraph of the article defines the horizon of expectations of a Bucharest readership in terms of its perception of France as the epitome of Europeanness. Identifying with that readership, Sebastian confessed that his ‘imaginary Paris used to be partly intimated through photographs and illustrated journals’ before his two-year stay in the city. The young journalist invoked his previous perceptions and his readers’ expectations only to dismiss them as ‘received certainties’ and to foreground the relevance of his ‘personal experience’ in debunking common misconceptions about the French.7 Sebastian’s first-hand experience of the city was contrasted not only with his readers’ received wisdom about Paris and France, but 6 Sebastian, ‘Francezul, un tip ne-european’, Cuvântul (7 May 1931), in Eseuri, 611. 7 Sebastian, ‘Scrisoare dintr-un alt Paris’, Cuvântul (10 April 1930), in Eseuri, 583.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 298

4/14/08 2:53:00 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

299

also with the passive consumption of historical and cultural sites by Parisian tourists. In one of the first articles sent to Cuvântul, ‘Letter from another Paris’, Sebastian presents himself as an agent of authenticity in contrast to the prototypical foreign tourist, a category he discredits as incapable of discovering and exploring the ‘true’ Paris. It is because tourists’ access to Parisian reality is mediated and patterned by travel guides that they stand out as ‘foreign’ to the landscape, being easily recognisable to Sebastian’s trained eye by their anxious admiration: They have a kind of professionalized state of wonder in front of a building: they measure it, they look at it from the right, then from the left, as if it were a curious animal, they ask for historical information from the guide, they take off their hats in front of Napoleon’s tomb, then sign collectively a postcard, which, sent from afar to their country, will attest to their presence in Paris.8

Although from a slightly different perspective, Sebastian’s private correspondence at roughly the same time reveals a similar concern with the category of tourists and the shallowness of their experience of Paris. Writing his first Parisian letter to a fellow writer in Bucharest five weeks after his arrival, Sebastian referred to himself as ‘a stranger’ and ‘a tourist’. The terms are indicative of the overwhelming effect of Parisian life and of Sebastian’s initial frustrations in the big city, intensified by his lack of fluent French: I still feel like a stranger and I will most likely remain one for a long time. […] To start with, I have difficulties in speaking French and I make only very slow progress. […] At the moment, I can only float uneasily on the surface of things and watch them like a tourist; I can only get a provisional understanding of things and let myself be deceived by appearances. What will the future bring? We’ll have to wait and see!9

8 Ibid., 582. 9 Sebastian, Letter of 31 January 1930, in Scrisori către Camil Petrescu, 2 vols. (Bucharest: 1965–1981), 2:231–2.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 299

4/14/08 2:53:00 PM

300

Under Eastern Eyes

During the first six months of his stay in Paris, from January through July 1930, Sebastian wrote three letters to Camil Petrescu and Camil Baltazar,10 two well-known writers and journalists. Invoking his inadequate command of French as the main reason for his seclusion ‘in the Latin quarter, 52 Rue de Clef, with a few notebooks (that I intend to turn into a couple of short stories, articles, and a novel), a few books of fiction and philosophy, and a load of manuals in law’,11 Sebastian mentioned his uneasiness at making contacts with Parisian literary circles, journals, and publishing houses or at socialising with the Romanians living in Paris such as Princess Bibescu.12 Exhilarated by the endless opportunities of the city, he made plans for a gradual initiation into its social life, trying to improve his command of French and his knowledge of Paris.13 By the end of July, both the letters and the articles show Sebastian immersed in city life, shedding his tourist skin and claiming deeper insights into Parisian life. Dating from this later period of his stay, ‘Letter from another Paris’ is opened by a series of ironic remarks about the foreign tourists’ unimaginative reliance on travel guides. By contrast, as he steps out of the library, the young student follows his instinct in order to lead his readers into ‘another’ Paris: ‘And yet, I come to explore and understand another Paris […] out of the reach of American tourists and married cousins.’ As his impression of Notre-Dame is immediately checked against Utrillo’s visions of the cathedral in ‘Notre-Dame pavoisée’, it becomes obvious that Sebastian’s ‘imaginary Paris,’ shaped as much by illustrated magazines as by paintings and literary works, informs his experience. Acknowledging that ‘the view is old’, Sebastian draws on his sharpened sensibility, sensitised to subtle details and shades of colour, and on its immediate transcription on paper in order to produce a fresh depiction of legendary Parisian sites for the reader: ‘Look, in front of the open window where I’m writing, there stretches a narrow and winding lane, Rue Gracieuse. […] The view is old,

10 Like Sebastian, Camil Baltazar was a Romanian Jewish intellectual and their correspondence dealt openly with questions of Jewish identity. 11 Sebastian, Letter of 31 January 1930, in Scrisori către Camil Petrescu, 2:232. 12 Sebastian, Letter of 27 July 1930, in Scrisori către Camil Petrescu, 2:238. 13 Sebastian, Letter of 31 July 1930, in Scrisori către Camil Baltazar, 118.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 300

4/14/08 2:53:01 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

301

I know. I’m only transcribing an overwhelming impression; I’m not looking for literary motifs.’14 The immediacy of personal impressions and experiences was most likely what Sebastian’s readers were looking for in his accounts. It was noted that ‘already by the end of the eighteenth century, […] the reader no longer understands his reading in terms of an objective mediation of information, but rather primarily as the revelation of a sensibility that communicates and interprets unfamiliar experiences’.15 An aspiring young novelist, Sebastian was experimenting with literary means for conveying personal experience in an authentic and sincere manner, like many other Romanian writers in the interwar period. Before his trip to Paris, in 1928, Sebastian had already published numerous essays on Marcel Proust’s innovative narrative techniques, on André Gide’s autobiographically informed writing, and on European and Romanian modernist prose in Cuvântul, Universul literar and Tiparniţa literară.16 Inspired by these authors, Sebastian engaged in Gidean exercises in his fictional works as well as in his articles.17 Writing in the modernist spirit of the time, Sebastian’s first-person accounts were elaborate and self-conscious literary experiments, despite his emphasis on the unmediated transcription of sheer emotion and authentic experience. The immediate effect of this literary convention was to privilege the authorial self as the organising principle of the journalist’s travel writings.

14 Sebastian, ‘Scrisoare dintr-un alt Paris’, Eseuri, 583–4. 15 Anghelescu, ‘Romantic travel’, 168. 16 See, for example, the series of seven articles entitled ‘Consideraţii asupra romanului modern’ [Reflections on the modern novel] on Marcel Proust, André Gide, Miguel de Unamuno, Pirandello and André Maurois, and the series of articles on Romanian modernism ‘Intre experienţă şi temperament. Reflecţii asupra modernismului românesc’ [Between Experience and Character. Reflections on Romanian Modernism] published in Cuvântul in 1927. Sebastian continues with another series of articles published on Marcel Proust in Cuvântul in 1928. All these are reprinted in Sebastian, Eseuri, and idem, Opere. Publicistica (1926–1928), ed. C. Ştefănescu (Bucharest: 1998). 17 For example, he sent for publication in Cuvântul a series of three subsequent articles, ‘Fragmente dintr-un carnet găsit’ (Fragments from a lostand-found diary), prefaced by precise remarks about the lost diary notes he happened to find on the Mirabeau bridge in Paris.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 301

4/14/08 2:53:01 PM

302

Under Eastern Eyes

Travel accounts were perceived by the young generation of intellectuals as appropriate vehicles for self-exploration. Travel had the advantage of uprooting the individual from his familiar environment and social network, reshuffling the main coordinates of one’s existence. Sebastian seized the opportunity of being removed from the familiar world of editorial staff members, literary circles, and coffee houses in Bucharest, confessing in a letter to Camil Petrescu from April 1930 that he had interrupted his correspondence with friends and acquaintances in Romania: I indulged in a kind of childish delight at making my absence absolute. I wanted nothing more than to be in Paris. I wanted to be totally absent from Romania. […] If you knew how people fade away from such a distance, how ‘personal issues’ disappear, how Pamfil Şeicaru disappears, how the whole of Bucharest vanishes in a cloud of awful smelling cigarette smoke, and how the only thing you can still remember are two or three books and two or three people!18

In a letter sent to Camil Baltazar in August 1930, Sebastian reiterated his feeling of estrangement from journalistic and literary life in Bucharest, noting that his only remaining connections were the sporadic correspondence with Camil Petrescu and Baltazar and the newspaper issues received daily from Cuvântul. Sebastian’s emphasis on complete estrangement and absolute absence did reflect to some extent his early period in Paris given that his correspondence during the first six months was limited to only three letters. At the same time, it can be seen as a self-presentation strategy, allowing the aspiring journalist and novelist to pose as the ‘great absent’ from the literary scene in the capital city and to tell Baltazar: ‘I hope I’m no longer a topic of discussion in Bucharest.’ As he confessed in the same letter, he kept his literary and journalistic presence in the Romanian press to a minimum so that he could take full advantage of these ‘untapped possibilities’ on return.19 His correspondence with Baltazar during the next couple of 18 Sebastian, Letter of 30 April 1930, Scrisori către Camil Petrescu, 2:235. Pamfil Şeicaru: an influential journalist and politician in interwar Romania. 19 Sebastian, Letter of 14 August 1930, Scrisori către Camil Baltazar, 120–1.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 302

4/14/08 2:53:01 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

303

months was primarily concerned with the successful publication of his first novel, Oraşul cu salcâmi,20 betraying similar efforts of self-presentation orchestrated around his literary debut. Although actively engaged in Romanian literary life by sending daily articles for Cuvântul, arranging the publication of his first novel in Bucharest, and planning a dozen future literary projects and critical essays on contemporary Romanian and European literature to be completed on return, Sebastian often exaggerated his absence and distance from home in an attempt to make the most of his stay in Paris and travels to other European cities such as Vienna and Geneva.

ON AMBIVALENCE Like most of the young intellectuals studying abroad, Sebastian perceived the period spent in Paris as a source of intense reflection and experience that informed his travel impressions as well as his later autobiographical novels or edited personal diaries. To a great extent, his writings shared in the enthusiastic self-assertion of the young generation of Romanian intellectuals welcomed into the expanding system of higher education by a rhetoric of national rejuvenation. In response, this generation of intellectuals identified with the young Romanian nation, charging themselves with a mission of cultural creation in an intensified language of national specificity. The intellectual debates around the nature of the Romanian character in the period contributed to the articulation of a full-fledged national ideology that functioned, according to some scholars, as a form of subjectivity or identity ‘in which the person feels him- or herself to belong to something called ‘a nation,’ and behaves in ways that show this feeling’.21 The existence of a strong link between personal identity and collective or national belonging can account for the fact that writing in the first person came to be seen as one of the most authentic expressions of national consciousness by interwar Romanian intellectuals. By comparison, for acculturated Jewish intellectuals who failed to fit neatly into national borders, the sense of belonging to the Ro20 The publication of the novel was in fact delayed until 1935, his ‘Fragments from a Lost Diary’ [Fragmente dintr-un carnet găsit], reissued in the form of a volume in 1932, being considered his literary début. 21 Verdery, ‘National character’, xiv–v.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 303

4/14/08 2:53:02 PM

304

Under Eastern Eyes

manian nation was fraught with ambiguity. Young graduates like Sebastian were likely to experience the contradictory effects of political assimilation and social exclusion both during their studies, when the influx of Jewish students following the mass naturalisation of the Jewish population generated a strong nationalist backlash in Romanian universities,22 and on graduation, as the Jewish presence in the spheres of culture or state administration was viewed with suspicion.23 Reflecting on the status of European Jewry in a world of growing or existing nations, Zygmunt Bauman underscores the challenge that their territorial dispersion and ubiquity posed to a world preoccupied with drawing national borders.24 His analysis of the self-defeating process of assimilation of European Jews and their resulting ambivalent status within and across national communities will be the theoretical background against which I will read the reflections on national specificity and instances of self-recognition in Mihail Sebastian’s travel writings. The Parisian episode seemed to give Sebastian the necessary distance in space and time to reflect on the realities of his existence as a Romanian Jew. He saw Paris as a space of freedom consistent with his perception of France as ‘A free country where there is no censorship, either legal or moral’25 as well as a space for experimentation and adventure: ‘Paris, where adventures are always possible and a trip from one district to another is synonymous with a change of continents.’26 Most importantly, with respect to his ambivalence, Paris seemed ‘neutral’ so that Sebastian could use this ‘break’ to make sense of his situation and set his past records straight. A record of his work-in-progress on the first novel, Sebastian’s writing log reveals the intimate connection between the young writ22 Enjoying the tacit support of some government and university officials, increasingly influential nationalist student organisations exerted pressure to reduce the number of Jewish students in universities to their percentage in the population, aiming at curbing their access to the limited positions available in the professions and administration. 23 Irina Livezeanu, Cultural politics in Greater Romania (Ithaca, New Jersey: 1995), 203–8. 24 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and ambivalence (Cambridge: 1993), 75–101. 25 Sebastian, ‘Francezul, un tip ne-european’, Eseuri, 612. 26 Sebastian, ‘Pascin’, Cuvântul (3 April 1931), Eseuri, 606.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 304

4/14/08 2:53:02 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

305

er’s literary projects and his sense that Paris could function as a stage for self-exploration. Reflecting on the impact that the stay in Paris had had on his self-perception in an entry recorded on 14 June 1930, Sebastian mentioned the necessity of coming to terms with his situation as a Romanian Jew and the problems inherent in his status by writing a personal book. He insisted on the confessional and autobiographical quality of his future project, looking for alternatives to the term ‘novel’ in order to describe it. At a time when most young intellectuals were experimenting with first-person writing inspired by lived experience, Sebastian was similarly concerned with finding an authorial voice true to his experience of ambivalence: Of all the different things I have realized during this break of two months […], I make a note for the most important. I have to write a book that can be truly mine. Not a novel. A book in which to pour myself, to review and settle a few ideas and problems that I can only overcome when I have put them down in writing once and for all. Like a letter enclosed in an envelope that you can seal and send off. The book will be probably called The Diary of Azdril Grünberg. In this book I will come to terms with the realities of my existence as a Romanian Jew. I will accept the situation with sincerity and I will face its inner mechanisms.27

In November 1932, after his return to Bucharest, Sebastian published an edited version of the manuscript in the literary journal Azi with a preface that invoked the Gidean model as an inspiration for the decision to keep a writing journal, suggesting that this self-reflexive exercise was more authentic and valuable than the actual novel. Despite the author’s reassurance that the journal was published without any modification, the last three sentences of the paragraph translated above, clarifying the topic and potential title of the book, were not included in the published version. While it is not clear why this passage was omitted, it is likely that Sebastian had reservations about making

27 Bucharest Central University Library ms. 091/27, 21.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 305

4/14/08 2:53:02 PM

306

Under Eastern Eyes

public prematurely a literary project of great personal significance and thus weakening its impact on publication.28 The roots of Sebastian’s concerns with his ambivalent status as a Romanian Jew can be traced back to 1927, when he decided to sign the articles for Cuvântul with the pen name Mihail Sebastian. The decision to change his name was not an exception in the period, being a common choice among Romanian Jewish intellectuals. Nor was Mihail Sebastian the young journalist’s only pseudonym. Cornelia Ştefănescu notes that he had already used the pseudonym Eraclie Pralea29 in 1926 to publish his poem ‘Static’ in Lumea, Bazar săptămânal, a magazine issued in Iaşi, while Maria Dinescu completes the list with Sebastian’s less well known pseudonyms as a journalist: Amyntas, Flaminius, and Victor Mincu.30 Nevertheless, Mihail Sebastian was the name that the young writer and journalist would use most consistently to publish his best known literary and journalistic work. The transition from Iosy Hechter to Mihail Sebastian can be noticed in private correspondence with his friend in Bucharest, Camil Baltazar. In a letter dated October 1927, Sebastian wondered if his Jewish identity, unknown to those at Cuvântul, would prevent him from working for the newspaper.31 He depended on Cuvântul for the funds necessary to leave his provincial native town of Brăila for the capital city so that it is very likely that his decision to write under a pseudonym was a response to this concern. By October 1927, he had

28 Sebastian mentions this new and exciting literary plan in two letters sent from Paris (in July 1930 and April 1931) to his good friend, Camil Baltazar, without giving the any further details (Scrisori către Camil Baltazar, 118, 146). This attitude is consistent with Sebastian’s similar concerns regarding the presentation and publication of other literary projects. To give an example dating from the same period, the author orchestrated the publication of his first novel from Paris to the last detail: he refused to publish excerpts from his work in literary magazines before the publication of the complete novel, he insisted that the novel should be published before his return to Bucharest, and chose a publishing house that he considered appropriate for his literary début. 29 Sebastian’s brother published articles on Marcel Proust’s work in Cuvântul in 1929 under the name P.H. Pralea. 30 Cornelia Ştefănescu, preface to Sebastian, Opere, 1:xxxi; Maria Dinescu, Mihail Sebastian. Publicist şi romancier (Bucharest: 1998), 18. 31 Sebastian, Letter of 19 October 1927, in Scrisori către Camil Baltazar, 108.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 306

4/14/08 2:53:02 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

307

already published a few articles in Cuvântul under the pen name Mihail Sebastian, but his letters to Baltazar were still signed Iosy Hechter. It was only three years later, in April 1930, that he started using the pen name in his private correspondence with Baltazar. This also happened to be the first letter he sent to his friend from Paris. The writing log that Sebastian kept during his first year in Paris provides further insights into his concerns with the inner tensions of his ambivalent identity as reflected in his work as a novelist. Like the previously quoted passage, the following paragraph was not included in the published version of the journal in 1932.32 In his first diary entry from January 1930, Sebastian dwelt on the possible impact that his life in an exclusively Jewish environment might have had on the way he developed the inner life of fictional characters: So far, I’ve been confused by their [the fictional characters of his future novel] names and civil status. I cannot imagine the intimate life of a character unless he is a Jew. I have lived among Jews for too long. I have lived for too long in a closed and sharply demarcated circle to be able to imagine freely and authentically life beyond its borders. It is however possible that my intuitions have a general character. Thus, I will just let the novel unfold, I will make my heroes into a group that chooses to be isolated by free will, and I will change their names at the end. Adriana could be Protestant. Angela Jewish. Izi Jewish. [three illegible names] Christian.33

The novelist meditated on the narrative act of moulding the psychology of fictional characters on the experience of an ethnic group whose specificity was intensified by its isolation, wondering if this psychology could have a broader significance. The author’s final decision to change the characters’ Jewish names is motivated by his sense that specifically Jewish experiences can be invested with broader human sig-

32 Besides the passage translated on page 13, this paragraph, the entire diary entry for 23 March 1930, and character names such as Ania Brandt or Paul Sternberg (reduced to Ania B. and Paul) are the only other omissions that I could trace by comparing the manuscript of the journal with its first 1932 version and an identical one published in Eseuri, 501–20. 33 Bucharest Central University Library, ms. 091/27, 3–4.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 307

4/14/08 2:53:03 PM

308

Under Eastern Eyes

nificance without any loss of authenticity. A similar logic might have informed Sebastian’s own change of names, accounting for his decision to sign both his private correspondence and his published work as Mihail Sebastian. A few years after his return to Romania, in 1934, Sebastian wrote the confessional book he had promised to himself in Paris in the form of an autobiographical novel, De două mii de ani. Tracing back the origin of this literary project to Sebastian’s stay in Paris is significant because a whole series of episodes, characters, and reflections were first developed by Sebastian in the articles published in Cuvântul in the early 1930s. Much like the novel, which is an attempt to articulate a synthesis of Romanian and Jewish identity in the intellectual and life trajectory of its main protagonist, Sebastian’s early travel writings explore the dilemmas of assimilation. One of the articles in which the young journalist dealt with the tensions of assimilated identity, ‘Pascin’, takes the form of a narrative of the author’s participation in a funeral in a Parisian cemetery. Following a burial procession under rather bizarre circumstances, Sebastian found himself attending the funeral of a Parisian Jew. On hearing the Jewish writer Shalom Asch34 addressing his listeners in Yiddish at the funeral, he experienced a moment of self-recognition that invited extensive comments on Jewish fate. Yiddish triggered memories of shtetls and Jewish ghettos, of spaces symbolic both for the isolation of European Jews within national communities and for the common trans-national fate of European Jewry. Compared to the much lighter tone of similar passages describing his encounter with Romanians, the story of his participation in a Jewish funeral bears tragic overtones. Both the choice of setting and the circumstances of the author’s revelatory participation in the funeral give highly symbolic value to this incident as Sebastian ended his story with the revelation that individuals are destined to share the fate of their community and that Jewish fate is inescapably tragic: At the cemetery, an incident made the funeral take an unexpectedly tragic turn. A friend of the dead made an attempt to utter a few words 34 American Jewish writer, one of the most widely known writers in modern Yiddish literature.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 308

4/14/08 2:53:04 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

309

of good-bye but he burst into tears and had to be taken away. Then, an old man emerged out of the crowd. He spoke slowly, with controlled serenity, and without affectation. I later found out it was the Jewish writer Schalom Asch. He was speaking Yiddish. How many of those French, Russian, Bulgarian, Italian listeners could understand what he was saying? Even so, the desperation in his words sounded like a curse or like a call, a lullaby for death itself. Although I didn’t know anything about the life of the man whom they were burying, I felt he was less a stranger to me. I imagined his childhood in a shtetl, I thought of his vagabond fate, of how he had never come out of the ghetto because the ghetto found him once again in Schalom Asch’s words, there, in his last minute, in a Parisian cemetery.35

The imagery and overall message of this article are echoed by Sebastian’s later work. His autobiographical novel, for example, features the main protagonist in a similar encounter with an old Jewish bookseller traveling the country to popularise books in Yiddish. Reiterating the author’s own concerns with having lived ‘for too long in a closed and sharply demarcated circle’, the young protagonist argues that Yiddish and shtetl life are anachronistic in a world increasingly open to assimilation.36 Despite his advocacy of assimilation, the character overcomes the embarrassment of being associated with a Yiddish-speaking old Jew, undergoing a significant shift from rejection to identification. In its emphasis on the revelatory encounter with a stranger, portrayed as a symbolic repository of forgotten linguistic and cultural traditions, the Parisian incident anticipates the later fictional episode. Both episodes are indicative of a broader shift in the perception of Eastern Jews—from agents of backwardness to preservers of an authentic Jewish life and tradition—as the process of assimilation started to prove self-defeating. Beginning with the turn of the century, European Jews who had responded to the invitation to assimilate were rediscovering the Eastern Jew ‘as the symbol of cultural wholesomeness and health’ with a mixture of envy and admiration. Zygmunt Bauman 35 Sebastian, ‘Pascin’, Eseuri, 605–6. 36 Sebastian, De două mii de ani/Cum am devenit huligan (Bucharest: 1990), 66–9, 98–101.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 309

4/14/08 2:53:04 PM

310

Under Eastern Eyes

argues that, as a result of this shift, assimilated Jews were caught between ‘a lost and an unfound reality’, between the lost reality of traditional Jewish communities and the arrested process of integration into various national communities throughout Europe.37 In the literary episodes discussed above, language can be an indicator of the sense of ambivalence experienced by Sebastian’s protagonists, both of whom feel estranged from Yiddish in the very process of contemplating it as a resource of ‘cultural wholesomeness’. While Sebastian dwells on the powerful emotional impact of his recognition of Yiddish in ‘Pascin’, his rhetorical question is an indirect reference to his Romanian identity: ‘How many of those French, Russian, Bulgarian, Italian listeners could understand what he was saying?’38 Much like the diverse listeners whom he identifies by the language they adopted, it is very likely that Sebastian could neither speak nor understand Yiddish.39 At a time when the frustrations of not being able to speak French properly made him feel like a stranger in Paris, Sebastian wrote about his encounters with fellow Romanians and the reassuring effect of hearing ‘snappy, lively, self-confident phrases in Romanian’.40 It was Romanians’ display of noisy enthusiasm at the Louvre and in the streets of Geneva that invariably triggered memories of ‘home,’ offering him ‘comforting’ moments of self-recognition: I often happen to meet Romanians. They are probably the most comforting visitors. I can hear them speak from the other end of the long gallery. They start talking to each other with ease and good will. 37 Bauman, Modernity, 87–8. 38 Sebastian, ‘Pascin’, Eseuri, 606. 39 In a letter to Petre Comarnescu, Mihail Sebastian gives insights into his family background, noting that ‘Both my parents were born in our country (my father in 1868) and spoke only Romanian and they raised us in a Romanian spirit [ne-au crescut româneşte]’ (Letter of 12 August 1936, in ‘Mircea Eliade şi Mihail Sebastian în corespondenţă cu Petru Comarnescu’, Manuscriptum 9:4 (1978), 168. It is not clear whether being ‘raised in a Romanian spirit’ meant speaking only Romanian, but Sebastian seems to suggest this interpretation. He continues his letter to Comarnescu by comparing the case of his parents with that of the parents of a mutual friend: ‘Mihail Polihroniade’s parents still spoke Greek when I met them. I don’t know when they came to our country.’ 40 Sebastian, ‘Scrisoare din Viena’, Cuvântul (18 July 1931), in Eseuri, 577.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 310

4/14/08 2:53:05 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

311

When they are students, they come and go in groups. I can’t tell how comforting this is to other visitors, but all this noise amuses me. It gives me a familiar sense of ‘home’, a sense of the liveliness of a Romanian street.41

It seems to me that, at this early stage in his career as a writer and journalist, Sebastian did not conceive of his Jewish and Romanian identifications as incompatible although he was concerned with the tensions and problems likely to emerge from an identity straddling the border between the two. Most importantly, Sebastian saw the problem as a primarily personal one, affecting the ‘inner mechanisms’ of his subjectivity rather than his public persona. As a consequence, he conceived of the solution to the problem in terms of an essentially solitary act, contemplating the redeeming intellectual and creative effort of writing an autobiographical novel. While still in France however, the insights into the realities of his existence as a Romanian Jew did not seem to take a conclusive form like that of ‘a letter enclosed in an envelope that you can seal and send off’. They can be read alongside other similar, even if less personally significant, exercises in ‘national specificity’.

‘EXERCISES IN NATIONAL SPECIFICITY’ AND VISIONS OF EUROPEAN IDENTITY An early discovery of Sebastian’s stay in Paris, the Louvre, was one of the sites most often explored by his expert eye as ‘a theatre of human possibilities’. During his repeated visits to the museum, Sebastian was obviously more excited by the possibility of observing people than of contemplating paintings. Thus, he opened ‘At the Louvre’ by invoking the elusive nature of national character, only later to engage in a series of observations about nationally specific ways of contemplating paintings: I can’t tell exactly how peoples differ in their ways of contemplating paintings at the Louvre, but I do know they differ. Bulgarians, Hungarians, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, blacks, Scandinavians, all these people who run around the hallways talking to each other, wondering, and enjoying themselves seem to have a specific way of 41 Sebastian, ‘Plimbări la Luvru’, Cuvântul (7 May 1930), in Eseuri, 588.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 311

4/14/08 2:53:05 PM

312

Under Eastern Eyes running, talking, and watching. Let us make some exercises in ‘national specificity’.42

Visitors at the Louvre betrayed their national character by their manners, by the language they spoke, by their appearance, or by their more general behavior. Sebastian made remarks about Romanians’ bustling presence in the galleries, about the annoyingly touristy attitude of the Americans’ routine tour of the museum, and about the sophisticated manners of the French. Despite the diversity of tourists at the Louvre, it becomes increasingly obvious that the prototypical foreign tourist is also a national type: the American. In this particular piece, Sebastian did not spare Americans/tourists a series of ironic accusations of mercantilism and lack of refinement in contemplating art: They are led by a guide, who whispers three words in monotonous English. They stop in front of a famous painting from time to time, look at each other, write something down in a pocket notebook (probably the price of the painting in dollars) and move on until they stop again in front of a painting, the guide whispers three words, they look at each other and then again write something down in their notebooks. They are all blond, look concerned, and carry a notebook. 43

In fact, the Americans were his most handy foil for the French. The latter were touched by Sebastian’s irony regarding their exquisite manners only to be rescued in the following sentence as his privileged object of admiration. The unobtrusive manners of the French, allowing them to blend effortlessly with the museum landscape, seem to have impressed him most: I recognize the French by their silence, their almost stealthy walk, and by the way they apologize if you happen to run into them. Sometimes they bring their children along. And the patience with which they explain a painting tells me a lot about this nation who, as far as I am concerned, can be just as interesting in the street as in books.44 42 Sebastian, ‘Plimbări la Luvru’, Eseuri, 589. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 312

4/14/08 2:53:06 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

313

Eating or dressing habits could also become pretexts for remarks on national specificity as observed on the streets of Vienna. Having retreated to the Velasquez collection at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Sebastian made a series of comments about lack of refinement and manners: I had forgotten there, in the halls of the ‘Kunsthistorisches Museum’, that, beyond its walls, there are people who eat sausages standing in the street, grown-up people wearing shorts, and blond girls whistling Ein spanischer Tango…45

The direction of his trip from Paris to Vienna might have inspired Sebastian to start his travel account with a comparative remark on ‘taste’ that reinforced his bias for the French: ‘I wonder how Jean Cassou, a Frenchman, could like a city of such charming bad taste.’ His remark came with an interesting shift of perspective since Sebastian identified with the French and looked at Vienna through French eyes. In order to make his depiction of Vienna more vivid, he added Germans to the picture in a comparative exercise in nationally specific ‘bad taste’: ‘I think the bad taste of the Viennese has a certain poetic quality absent from the aggressive bad taste of the true German.’46 There is a marked tendency in Sebastian’s ‘Letters’ from Paris, Geneva, and Vienna to articulate his experiences in the idiom of national character. This is not only obvious in descriptions of manners, appearance, behaviour, the character of national languages, and comments on taste, but also in the recurrent use of the comparative language of nationalism as the Austrians (or the Viennese), are read against the French and the Germans.47 While this tendency is indicative of the pervasiveness of national ideology in the interwar period, neither the critique of tourists, nor the organising theme of a variety of 45 Sebastian, ‘Scrisoare din Viena’, Eseuri, 625–6. 46 Ibid. 47 In his account of the transition from the modes of thought characterising dynastic realms to those making possible the idea of ‘nation,’ Benedict Anderson notes that the language of religious relativism paved the way to the language of nationalism. Making claims for pre-eminence (‘“our” nation is “the best”’), the latter unfolds ‘in a competitive, comparative field’ (Anderson, Imagined communities, revised edition [London: 1991], 41).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 313

4/14/08 2:53:06 PM

314

Under Eastern Eyes

nations on display is novel in Romanian literature. Both can be found, for example, in historian Nicolae Iorga’s much earlier account of Venice in Amintiri din Italia [Recollections from Italy] in the 1890s.48 It is also important to note that Sebastian’s remarks on national specificity are often written in an ironic and playful mode that does not claim final authority in portrayals of national character. It is only his reflections on a common Jewish fate that suggest the existence of an unchangeable collective psychology (‘a racial instinct for restlessness’) and bear tragic overtones (‘the destiny of “strangerhood”’). By comparison with the heavy reliance on the idiom of national specificity, Sebastian’s travel articles give only a vague sense of the nature of European identity that could transgress nationally bound values. His most substantial comments on the ideal of Europe appear in the young journalist’s articles on his trip to Geneva and his several visits to the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris. At first sight, Geneva seemed unimpressive and artificial to Sebastian, striking him as ‘a badly organized museum’. He had approached the town with expectations of a dynamic and turbulent atmosphere derived from Paul Morand’s novels and American cinematography, but found it wanting both in historical resonance and authentic city life. Setting the unimpressive ‘Geneva of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ in contrast to the ‘genuine charm of Briand’s Geneva’, Sebastian associated his experience of the town with the name of Aristide Briand, an outspoken advocate of the League of Nations in the early 1920s, and the bold advocate of a federal union of Europe at the time when Sebastian took his trip to Geneva, in 1930. Thus, it is fair to say that Sebastian’s interest in the town was exclusively limited to its function as the headquarters of the League of Nations, an international organisation committed to maintaining the status quo as expressed by the post-First World War peace treaties. It was in Geneva that Sebastian made a bold attempt at locating, experiencing, and recording the European spirit: Geneva becomes an international center of political and social life for a month and then returns to its usual state. Let me then not miss this opportunity as I suddenly find myself in some kind of synthesizing headquarters of Europe. 48 Nicolae Iorga, Amintiri din Italia (Bucharest: 1895), 73–8.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 314

4/14/08 2:53:07 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

315

Much like the Louvre, the streets around the headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva allowed Sebastian to contemplate the diversity of European nations and enjoy the lively mix of various peoples recognizable by language as English, Hungarian, Balkan, Nordic or Romanian. It was only in Geneva, however, that Sebastian had the express feeling that this mix of diverse nations exhaled a common Europeanness, concluding his descriptive exercise with the realisation that: ‘Never and nowhere before have I been so conscious of the reality of our continent.’ The young journalist’s description of the ‘festive and friendly European spirit’ emanating from the diverse crowds in Geneva echoed the founding principles of the League of Nations: collective security, open diplomacy, and arbitration of international conflicts. Mapped according to the essentially national coordinates of an international organisation legitimating the principle of national sovereignty in a newly institutional way in the interwar period, Sebastian’s own picture of European identity resembles a collage or ‘synthesis’ of national specificities, a vague unity of much more vividly coloured national diversities.49 If Geneva brought forth only a blurred picture of Europeanness, the International Colonial Exhibition, held in Paris from March to October 1931, did not fail to mobilise a European identity against nonEuropeans. Celebrating the centennial of the conquest of Algeria, the Exhibition was a huge enterprise: after 25 years of planning and preparation, it was held at Vincennes, the eastern suburb of Paris, and attracted thousands of visitors over several months. Although the United States and other European powers such as Italy, Holland, Belgium or Portugal were also represented, it was the wealth and loyalty of the French colonies that held the stage. The Exhibition involved the recreation of African, Arab, Polynesian and Asian buildings filled with people from the colonies featuring as craftsmen, dancers and actual examples of natives. Despite the communists’ and Surrealists’ boycott of the exhibition, a popular wave of primitivism developed in the wake of this state-endorsed representation of the colonies. Interestingly, the organisers of the Exhibition were enthused by the same spirit of cultural difference and diversity that Sebastian him49 Sebastian, ‘Scrisoare din Geneva’, Cuvântul (28 September 1930), in Eseuri, 577.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 315

4/14/08 2:53:07 PM

316

Under Eastern Eyes

self testified to having experienced in the streets of Geneva, seeking to display and perform colonial diversity for an audience comprised not only of regular tourists and visitors, but also of famous anthropologists, linguists, and ethnologists. In his recent examination of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition as a site of struggle among contending colonial visions, Benoît de L’Estoile emphasises the central role of this event in the reassessment of imperial policy. In the context of the ‘rise of nationalist movements in South-East Asia’ and the subsequent ‘“crisis of authority” of colonization’, the reassessment involved a shift from the ‘policy of assimilation’ that dominated the early period of colonisation to a ‘policy of association’ that was to recognise the distinctiveness of each ‘native race’ and colony.50 According to L’Estoile, the Exhibition was meant to illustrate ‘the individuality of indigenous societies’, being instrumental in the gradual redefinition of cultural ‘inferiority’ as cultural ‘difference’.51 Sebastian’s visits to the Colonial Exhibition prompted him to define Europe in terms of its claims for ‘economic, political, and industrial progress’ and its pretensions to a ‘civilizing mission’ for the benefit of the colonised.52 His indictment of a hypocritical ‘humanitarian rhetoric’ is a reference to the language employed by the organisers of the Exhibition in their attempts to legitimate the colonial enterprise and the exhibition itself. L’Estoile argues that the Exhibition was intended by its official organisers to be a ‘leçon d’humanité’, a phrase that allowed them to pun on ‘the double meaning of humanité in French (“humanity” and “humankind”)’. While it described the Exhibition as an attempt ‘to present “colonial humankind” (l’humanité coloniale) in all its diversity,’ the phrase ‘leçon d’humanité’ also referred back ‘to

50 Benoît de L’Estoile, ‘“Races not inferior, but different”: Anthropological sciences and imperial policy at the Paris Colonial Exhibition (1931)’, in Science across the European empires, 1800–1950, ed. B. Stuchtey (Oxford & New York: 2005), 215–41. 51 L’Estoile, ‘“Races”’, 226, mentions ‘Bronislaw Malinowksi, the government anthropologists, Charles K. Meek and Ronald S. Rattray, the ‘father of Indirect Rule,’ Lord Lugard, the renowned missionary-anthropologist E.W. Smith, the German linguist Dietrich Westermann, and the Kulturkreis ethnologist Schebesta’. 52 Sebastian, ‘Spectacole, oameni şi dobitoace’, Cuvântul (15 July 1931), in Eseuri, 622.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 316

4/14/08 2:53:08 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

317

the self-proclaimed “humane character” of French colonisation’, suggesting that ‘the humanity of the French imperial power consisted precisely in his caring for “colonial mankind”’.53 Possibly influenced by the counter-manifestations organised by the communists and the Surrealists, Sebastian took an overtly critical position towards attempts to present the colonial mission as civilising and ‘humane’: When it comes to the colonial problem, you can invoke whatever arguments you want: economic, political, or industrial progress, production… But do not, in God’s name, do not talk about ‘the civilizing mission of Europe.’ It is a sinister joke. Come to see the blacks, Annamese, Indians, and Arabs brought to the colonial exhibition for demonstration, come to see how lonely and frightened they are, how strange to this place. They do not understand anything. Of all this huge colonial show, they do not understand anything. They are absent. Visitors’ gazes take them by surprise, spotlights scare them, and noises leave them dumbfounded. They have the same confused stare of caged beasts at the zoo. Let us abstain from talking about civilization. It is immoral. A bit of cynicism will not harm our European dignity.54

While the young writer and journalist was excited by the spectacle of human diversity in settings such as the Louvre or the streets of Geneva, the elaborate effort to collect and display the diversity of ‘colonial mankind’ at the Colonial Exhibition appalled him. To Sebastian, the colonial staging of non-European realities was a failure of European civilisation, dignity, and morality. His extensive description of the spectacle gives insights into the two-fold process of construction of ‘local colour’ by both stage directors and audience, emphasising the fact that the process of construction is one of domination and manipulation. In a reactive attempt to rescue the authentic reality of the colonised from the artificial colonial construction, the young journalist reinforced the perception of two incompatible worlds: a world of nature and one of culture. In its failures as well as in its achievements, Europe is depicted by Sebastian as a world of culture, while non-Europeans are relegated to the world of ‘nature’. Sebastian’s descriptions rely 53 L’Estoile, ‘“Races”’, 219. 54 Sebastian, ‘Spectacole, oameni şi dobitoace’, Eseuri, 622.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 317

4/14/08 2:53:09 PM

318

Under Eastern Eyes

heavily on metaphors that rehearse colonial images of the colonised in terms of passivity, childlike ignorance and primitiveness. In the broader context of contending interpretations emerging around the Colonial Exhibition, Sebastian’s stance shows close affinities to the intellectual and artistic currents subsumed under the term ‘primitivist’. Represented by the counter-exhibition of the Surrealist group, the ‘primitivist narrative’ shared assumptions about racial and cultural alterity with the dominant ‘evolutionist’ narratives: ‘This narrative [the ‘primitivist’] might appear to invert the stereotypes of evolutionist discourse (the very features which had been denounced as “savagery” became valuable as the embodiment of “primitive art” and “primitive soul”), all the while cultivating alterity.’55 Valuing the ‘authenticity’ of primitive life over its colonial representation, Sebastian’s position regarding the ‘exhibition’ was a critical one. However, when faced with the ‘authentically’ non-European, Sebastian could not but assimilate himself to Europeanness. Calling on his Romanian audience in order to further intensify his criticism, the journalist made an appeal to solidarity that allowed him to invoke a common European sensibility and to identify as European (‘our European dignity’). The very bitterness of Sebastian’s criticism must have derived from his disappointment with the failure of European values he identified with. In this sense, his was a criticism from within.

‘PARIS, THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE’ The busy halls of the Louvre, the crowded alleys of the Colonial Exhibition, the lively streets and coffee shops, or the fast-moving crowds in the metro were only some of Sebastian’s preferred Parisian sites. Much like the avant-garde cinemas, theatre and concert halls, modern art exhibitions, libraries, university halls and campuses that the young journalist explored during his stay in Paris, these were places likely to exhibit agglomerations of people. Writing back home seven months after his arrival in Paris, Sebastian testified to the intoxicating impact of human diversity in the city: ‘It is intoxicating. To know that the world is so vast and that people are so diverse is an invitation to self-forgetting.’ The cosmopolitan character of Paris made the city into ‘the hub of the 55 L’Estoile, ‘“Races”’, 235–6.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 318

4/14/08 2:53:09 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

319

universe’ entertaining Sebastian with a colourful diversity of people of all nations, sexual orientations, social classes or marital statuses: I have met so many people here: midinettes, students, married women, Englishmen, pederasts, lesbians, a huge and diverse world, with new faces, curious habits, speaking all the different languages of the world, making friends for two days or two weeks, then going with the flow before I got a chance to classify them.56

The lengthy description of these colourful crowds shows Sebastian excited as much by national diversity as by the ‘curious habits’ of marginal social categories and social outcasts. In fact, almost each of these categories becomes the topic of an individual article. The journalist explored student life in ‘La Cité Universitaire’, ‘Le Quartier Latin’ and ‘Balul internatului’ [‘Boarding-house ball’], an account of the carnivalesque procession of medical students celebrating the end of their exam period in the streets of Paris. Melodramatic episodes involving midinettes spice up his description of the Parisian underground in ‘Metro’ and a couple of other articles. ‘Rue de Lappe’ was devoted to the depiction of the meeting places of gays and lesbians in Paris, inviting Sebastian’s Romanian audience to indulge in contemplation of unlikely gender combinations and sexual affairs: From our perspective, the perspective of those who call themselves normal, their [homosexuals’] freedom is absolute. Mating follows different rules there from those we are familiar with. Two women, two men, a man and a woman seem to love each other in a similar manner. To an outsider, pederasty and sodomy seem to repeat the same old love game. Rue de Lappe brings all possible combinations together effortlessly, casually, and carelessly. It is only there that this diversity can be an object of contemplation.57

The journalist’s preoccupation with the marginal and anecdotal comes in a long tradition of Romantic travel narratives that Mircea Angheles56 Sebastian, Letter of 31 July 1930, in Scrisori către Camil Baltazar, 118. 57 Sebastian, ‘Rue de Lappe’, Cuvântul, No. 1, 980 (25 October 1930), never republished.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 319

4/14/08 2:53:10 PM

320

Under Eastern Eyes

cu traces back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Anghelescu argues that travel writers such as Nerval, Stendhal or Dumas started being captivated at the beginning of the nineteenth century by ‘cities inhabited by a busy, diverse, and self-absorbed crowd’, by ‘the colorful nuances of the sociality of streets and markets’, and by ‘local lowlife happenings’ translated into reportages ‘of more or less interesting case histories’.58 At the time when he was writing his articles in Paris, Sebastian might have played on the spectacular quality of Parisian streets populated by ‘specimens of a third sex’ (‘Rue de Lappe’) and by drunken students wearing Roman robes (‘Balul internatului’) in order to give the place an exotic character and to appeal to his readership back home. However, it is very likely that he intended the reportages of spectacular Parisian experiences and exotic characters as early literary experiments. While Sebastian’s articles seek to grasp the specific Parisian atmosphere through ‘case histories’ of its lower classes and social outcasts, they are also concerned with capturing a big-city sensibility that privileges experience and sensations over morals. Posing as a voyeur, the most valuable experience from the Rue de Lappe that the journalist shared with his readers was that of a shift of perspective that liberated him from the narrow constraints of social classifications rooted in conceptions of ‘normality’. Employing a confessional register, Sebastian speaks of a move beyond his initial perception of same-sex affairs as ‘disgusting’ and ‘grotesque’ to a gradual awareness of their ‘normality’. The boundaries of ‘normality’ and respectability are similarly violated in ‘Balul internatului’, an article in which Sebastian no longer poses as a voyeur or uninvolved observer, but as an active participant. The journalist joins the hundreds of half-naked students swarming into the streets of Paris in their Roman robes after an intense exam period. The student procession does not omit any of the traditional ingredients of a carnivalesque reversal of order: wine is drunk in excess; traffic is halted on the streets of Paris; wives disappear mysteriously in agglomerations of students; the party hall is decorated by a 58 Anghelescu, ‘Romantic travel narratives’, 171. In February 1930, during his stay in Paris, Sebastian published a series of four articles on Stendhal’s novels: ‘Literatura lui Stendhal’, ‘Note Stendhaliene: Armance’, ‘Lamiel’ and ‘Lucien Leuwen’.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 320

4/14/08 2:53:10 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

321

huge phallus; and a sixteen-year-old loses her virginity in a ritual of sexual initiation. His later autobiographical novel built on the episodes in ‘Rue de Lappe’ to give similar accounts of the public displays of affection between gays and lesbians in Parisian cafés.59 In this case, the spectacle is presented through the eyes of Maurice Buret, a Frenchman with ‘no moral scruples’.60 The Frenchman’s attitude echoes Sebastian’s journalistic reflections on the narrowness and irrelevance of conceptions of morality and immorality and the virtues of spontaneous experience and unchecked sensation. In his attempts to account for Maurice Buret’s specifically French sensibility in the novel, the main protagonist invokes the Gidean model and the libertine atmosphere of Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses,61 indicating Sebastian’s possible sources of inspiration for his earlier journalistic writings. The aspiring literary critic had already written a couple of essays on Gide’s Les faux-monnayeurs and had discussed Laclos at length both in his articles62 and in a letter to another novelist and literary critic, Camil Petrescu.63 Accounts of spectacular Parisian experiences, verging on the exotic, were also an implicit criticism of home, given the fact that Bucharest was found wanting in diversity, eventfulness, and the sophistications of a big-city sensibility. If Paris was ‘the hub of the universe’, provincial Bucharest was sadly located on its margins. Throughout Sebastian’s correspondence as well as in some of his articles, Bucharest appeared to be the mirror image of Paris: its familiarity and predictability foregrounded the unexpected character of Parisian events, places and people, while its stillness was set in contrast with Paris’s eventful life, overwhelming Sebastian with endless opportunities. Throughout his stay in Paris, Sebastian never tired of congratulating himself on escaping the ‘depressing atmosphere’ of Bucharest, the mediocrity of its intellectual circles, and the uninspiring staleness of its social life.64 He made similar references to the suffocating stillness of the

59 Sebastian, De două mii de ani/Cum am devenit huligan, 159–62. 60 Ibid., 166. 61 Ibid., 167. 62 See note 6 on Sebastian’s articles on European modernist prose. 63 Sebastian, Letter of 5 May 1929, Scrisori către Camil Petrescu, 2:226. 64 Sebastian, Letter of 31 July 1930, Scrisori către Camil Baltazar, 117.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 321

4/14/08 2:53:11 PM

322

Under Eastern Eyes

capital city in his letters: ‘I cannot see myself nailed down in Bucharest year after year. I would explode.’65 In later stages, he often expressed his anxiety over leaving Paris in terms of despair: ‘I’m contemplating the prospect of my return […] I realize I have only nine months left to spend here and this realization throws me into despair.’66 On his return to Bucharest, Sebastian published an article with the title ‘Nimic nou’ [Nothing New], making allusions to the Westernising changes that the capital city had undergone while he was abroad. Unimpressed by the signs of technological progress (new telephones, welllit cinemas showing sound films), innovation (the new houses and shop signs), and a growing consumerist attitude, he concluded that nothing had changed in essence. Interestingly, it was not the unsatisfactory nature of technological or economic progress that invited his ungenerous conclusion, but the stale social ambiance of the capital city: I’m looking at all these new things with only one thought in mind: that nothing has changed in this city that I know so well. People tell you the same stories, talk about the same projects, and wait for the same events. […] You wait for an unexpected detail that would convince you that time did not pass in vain and that there was something happening here to correspond to the changes you’ve been through abroad.67 Despite Sebastian’s claim to familiarity with the capital city, he had not lived in Bucharest for an extended period of time before January 1930, when he started his trip abroad. He had registered as a law student at the University of Bucharest in the autumn of 1926, but his correspondence with Camil Baltazar and Camil Petrescu during his studies indicates that he commuted regularly between his provincial native town of Brăila and the capital city.68 From 1927 through 1929, Sebastian wrote regularly for Cuvântul, published sporadically in Uni65 Sebastian, Letter of 3 October 1930, in Scrisori către Camil Petrescu, 2:242. 66 Sebastian, Letter of 12 November 1930, in Scrisori către Camil Baltazar, 131. 67 Sebastian, ‘Nimic nou’, Cuvântul (14 July 1931), in Eseuri, 623–4. 68 All his letters to Camil Baltazar and Camil Petrescu from 1927 through 1929 were sent from Brăila and mentioned his plans to travel to Bucharest for exam sessions.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 322

4/14/08 2:53:11 PM

Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity

323

versul literar, Tiparniţa literară and Vremea,69 and socialised with intellectual circles in the capital city, attending their regular meeting places at the Capşa café and the Hotel Modern. However, Sebastian was far from being an established journalist, literary critic or writer at the time. Furthermore, the financial problems mentioned frequently in his correspondence allowed only for a sporadic social life and for temporary stays in Bucharest. Sebastian’s correspondence from Brăila contains similar complaints about the stillness and uneventfulness of provincial life and the young student’s desperate efforts to make the necessary connections with intellectual circles in Bucharest that would usher him into the literary and journalistic life of the capital city. It is very likely that the depressing provincial atmosphere he attributed to Bucharest in his Parisian letters was in fact a more fitting description of his experience of Brăila. Projecting it onto Bucharest allowed Sebastian to assume a much more advantageous position. Rather than coming to the capital city with the heavy burden of provinciality, his travels abroad gave Sebastian the chance to return to Bucharest from the cultural capital of Europe that loomed largely in Romanian imagination as the ‘hub of the universe’. Sebastian’s Parisian experience was more than an entry pass into the literary and journalistic life of the capital city. Besides its function in his self-presentation strategy, it was an extremely inspiring and resourceful period as well as an important experimental stage in his career as a journalist and writer. In a letter sent home during his first month abroad, Sebastian noted that ‘Paris is the guarantee of an indispensable richness for a thirsty mind. Everything is of interest to me here: the people in the street, the monuments, the theatres, the Seine, the newspapers, and breakfast’.70 The nationally and socially diverse humankind that the journalist contemplated during his travels, the situations and reflections provoked by these encounters, and the early literary experiments with autobiographical writing shaped significantly Sebastian’s later work.

69 Ştefănescu, ‘Preface’, xxxiv. 70 Sebastian, Letter of 31 January 1930, in Scrisori către Camil Petrescu, 2:232.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 323

4/14/08 2:53:11 PM

324

Under Eastern Eyes

In the immediate years after his return, Mihail Sebastian turned the richness of this Parisian episode to good account, publishing both his first literary piece, Fragmente dintr-un carnet găsit, and the Parisian writing log in 1932. Soon after, two of the novels conceived and written in Paris were also published: Femei [Women] in 1933 and Oraşul cu salcâmi in 1935. At the same time, Sebastian continued to work on De două mii de ani, and engaged actively in journalistic and cultural life in Bucharest. He wrote almost daily for Cuvântul, became the editor of a literary journal, România literară, and joined one of the most ambitious and energetic intellectual groups of the interwar period, the criterionişti. Together with fellow writers, journalists and artists such as Petre Comarnescu, Mircea Eliade, Mircea Vulcănescu, Mihail Polihroniade and Mac Constantinescu, Sebastian organised conferences on a diversity of topics, ranging from debates on famous personalities (Lenin, Gandhi, Mussolini, Freud, Proust, Gide, etc.) to discussions on contemporary Romanian poetry, prose, theatre, arts, dance or architecture. Seen retrospectively, Mihail Sebastian’s travels abroad in the early 1930s constituted a formative experience mediated by the author’s efforts to record the rich world around him and explore its impact on the experiencing and observing self. The aspiring writer anticipated the formative quality of his travels abroad in ‘Breviar de călătorie’ [Travelogue], the first article sent for publication in Cuvântul: ‘You can see yourself mirrored back by the wide world and by foreign lands, you can see yourself in the lives of others and then identify with them, you can feel that the world is an extension of your own existence.’71 It is precisely the anticipated tension between self-forgetting and self-discovery which Sebastian shared with his readers at the outset of the journey that is at the heart of his travel writings.

71 Sebastian, ‘Breviar de călătorie’, Eseuri, 553.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 324

4/14/08 2:53:12 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze: Jan Lenica’s 1954 Sketchbook of London Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius

At the beginning, there were three Europes: the prescribed Europe, the permitted Europe, and the forbidden Europe. The prescribed Europe – it was a trip to a Sport Tournament in one of the brotherly countries; the permitted Europe – Picasso; and the forbidden Europe – say … Kafka. In 1955, for instance, Kafka was still far away. But the permitted Europe was flooding in through a variety of gaps and holes, ever faster and in ever bigger doses. We were absorbing it, half-conscious from craving and totally confused by contradicting reports. Agnieszka Osiecka, Szpetni Czterdziestoletni [Ugly people in their forties] (1985)

In the autumn of 1954, near the end of the heyday of the Cold War, the young Polish graphic artist and cartoonist Jan Lenica went on a three-week visit to London. The relatively modest output of his trip was a series of nine satirical drawings of London streets and monuments, of public and private spaces, of London bodies and fashions. Accompanied by scathing captions, they were published as a two-page spread in a November issue of the major Polish satirical magazine * For help in the preparation of this article I would like to thank Grażyna Godziejewska, Curator at the Museum of Caricature in Warsaw, without whom I would have not been able to collect my primary and secondary sources as well as vital information about Szpilki communicated to her by former employees of this magazine. But for the idea of the article, stimulation and encouragement at various stages of its conception, for patience and friendly comments, I am very grateful to Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis, as well as to Wojciech Tomasik.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 325

4/14/08 2:53:12 PM

326

Under Eastern Eyes

Figure 1. Jan Lenica, ‘My London Sketchbook’, Szpilki (14 November 1954).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 326

4/14/08 2:53:12 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

327

Figure 2. Jan Lenica, ‘My London Sketchbook’, Szpilki (14 November 1954).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 327

4/14/08 2:53:13 PM

328

Under Eastern Eyes

Szpilki (Pins), under the title ‘My London sketchbook’ (Figs. 1–2).1 Barely 26 years old at the time, Lenica was already an artistic director of Szpilki which, widely read by the urban intelligentsia, was actively engaged in the task of the formation of a new Polish Communist Self.2 He must have belonged to a tiny group of the most trusted personalities whose travel beyond the Iron Curtain, sponsored by the authorities, was expected to generate a new correct identity.3 This forgotten graphic account of London and Londoners, which comes from Lenica’s militant communist period, precedes by just a few years his stunning career as an avant-garde animation artist, and his subsequent move to Paris in 1963.4 I want to argue that despite its invisibility in Lenica’s celebrated œuvre, the London sketchbook 1 Jan Lenica, ‘Mój londy≈ski szkicownik’, Szpilki, 20:46 (14 November 1954), 6–7. One more cartoon relating to his London visit was published on the last page of Szpilki 20:49 (5 December 1954). Entitled ‘Tele-vision’, it shows a British middle-class couple sitting comfortably in front of the television set and watching a programme with the participation of the former commander of Luftwaffe Albert Kesselring, who had been released from prison, for health reasons, in 1952. The image of the Tower Bridge under the Blitz in the background, under the huge darkened sky penetrated by Nazi bombers, reminds the viewer of Kesselring’s war crimes, which included the invasion of Poland, most of western Europe, and later, the Soviet Union. 2 On Szpilki, see Eryk Lipi≈ski, Drzewo Szpilkowe (Warsaw: 1976); Karol Alichnowicz, ‘Szpilki’, in Słownik realizmu socjalistycznego, ed. Z. Łapi≈ski and W. Tomasik (Krakow: 2004), 338–41. It is difficult today to establish the print run of Szpilki. According to Anatol Potemkowski, a former member of the magazine’s editorial board, it was published in around 80,000 copies during the 1960s. 3 Another was Zygmunt Kałuży≈ski, whose book Podróż na Zachód (Warsaw: 1954), was a series of sketches about French theatre, art and society of the 1950s. By Lenica’s own account, his travels to the West in this period were made possible by commissions to design Polish pavilions at international fairs which took him to Vienna, Paris, London, İzmir and Brussels in the years 1952–6: Jan Lenica, Labirynt/Labyrinth, ed. E. Czerwiakowska and T. Kujawski (exh. cat., Pozna≈: 2002), 49–50. This catalogue includes the reproduction of Lenica’s London sketchbook on 52–3. 4 During his international career, he lived and taught at Harvard University, Kassel and Berlin, where he died in 2002. See Jan Lenica, ed. J.-L. Passek (exh. cat., Paris: 1980), with essays by Robert Benayoun, R.-J. Moulin, Jean-Lóup Passek and Jan Lenica; Jan Lenica, ed. J. Döring and L. Finkler (exh. cat., Hamburg: 1991); Jan Lenica, ed. U. Śniegowska and E. Czerwiakowska (exh. cat., Warsaw: 2000); Lenica, Labirynt/Labyrinth.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 328

4/14/08 2:53:14 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

329

makes a particularly telling, if ambiguous, Cold War travel text. Not only does it lay bare the interdependence of the Cold War journey with the production of identities on the East–West axis, but it also reveals the prejudices, anxieties and cravings of the bearer of the gaze, and of the Polish society of the 1950s to which the visual reportage was addressed. Lenica’s travel diary can be approached as an example of the complex process of (self-)representation, travelling between, and collapsing, the subject positions of Self and Other. Ultimately, it hides the projections of Warsaw and Varsavians under the skin of London and Londoners. Particularly remarkable is the author’s total silence on the disturbing issue of the Polish emigration assembled around the delegalised Polish Government-in-exile, the issue which was central to all kinds of reports on Britain in post-1945 Poland, and was a ‘favourite’ topic of cartoons published at that time in Szpilki. Before looking at the sketchbook more closely, I want to pause at several wider issues which it raises. I will start from the specificity of Cold War travel and its texts as forming part of the wider strategies of Occidentalism, i.e., of imaging the Western Other in the process of constructing the Internationalist Communist Self. I will proceed then to the specificity of the illustrated travel reportage within the framework of Occidentalism, introducing the methods used in this article. Lenica did not go to London as a private tourist—this would have been utterly unimaginable at the time of the ‘Great Sealing Off’ from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, which coincided with the period of the Stalinist transformation. In those years, following an earlier Soviet experiment of ‘communism in one country’, Poland’s borders (as with other peoples’ democracies) became closed to almost all forms of personal mobility. Moreover, any contacts with the West, including private correspondence, were perceived then as verging upon a criminal offence.5 The ban on travelling was all the more acute because it fol5 The term ‘Great Sealing Off’ was coined by Dariusz Stoła in his article ‘Międzynarodowa moblino√Δ zarobkowa w PRL’, in Ludzie na hu√tawce: Migracje między peryferiami Polski i Zachodu, ed. E. Jaźwi≈ska and M. Okólski (Warsaw: 2001), 62–100, especially 65–9. For a closer analysis of the institutions surveying and limiting foreign travels in Poland in this period, see Dariusz Stoła, ‘Zamknięcie Polski: Zniesienie swobody wyjazdu i uszczelnienie granic w latach 40 i 50’, in PRL: Trwanie i zmiana, ed. D. Stoła and M. Zaremba (Warsaw: 2003), 159–86. The author stresses that the number

iBracewell_A_book.indb 329

4/14/08 2:53:15 PM

330

Under Eastern Eyes

lowed the period of a historical climax of migration and expatriation during the Second World War and just after, involving the displacement of over 14 million people over the territories of Poland. As a corollary to the ‘Great Sealing Off’, at the height of the Cold War contest between communism and capitalism the practice of travelling was virtually forbidden to ‘ordinary’ citizens. One of the reasons for this unprecedented policy of isolation was the fact that a reliable model of the New Communist identity, to be imposed evenly on this part of Europe, was in the process of a feverish construction. And one of its indispensable but long-missing components was a script for a new travel narrative which would instruct the New Traveller how to encounter the Other in order to strengthen rather than doubt the integrity of the New Communist Self.6 Indeed, from a certain point of view, a new travel narrative served as a blueprint for the New Communist identity. Like body armour, or a set of spectacles, it would form part of the necessary equipment of the yet unformed citizen/traveller, telling him or her how to look at the locals, what to see, where to go, and what to remember after the visit.7 The Stalinist travel narrative had to precede or even replace the journey (following the model of medieval and early modern spiritual journeys to the Terrestrial Paradise or to the in-

of people travelling abroad in the early 1950s was unprecedentedly low. For instance, in the year of Lenica’s visit to London, barely 2,000 people went on business trips to capitalist countries (12,500 to the countries of the Soviet Bloc), while private passports were issued to just 52 citizens from amongst 1,352 who applied to the Passport Office for a migration permit (Stoła, ‘Zamknięcie Polski’, 164–5). It is worth noticing here that the topic of travel has not yet entered the revisionist accounts of Stalinism, and studies of individual mobility are preoccupied with the issue of migration rather than travel. 6 Older travelogues, both to the West and to the Soviet Union, dating from the interwar period, were now considered totally unsuitable for the emergent New Internationalist Self, i.e., for the New Traveller. On the analogous process of selecting correct travelogues to the West, and on burying the incorrect ones in special collections, making them inaccessible, see the article by Rossitza Guentcheva in this volume. 7 For a short reflection on various ways of pitching travel narratives, either through dark glasses or pink glasses, implying however that one can also see through ‘ordinary glasses’, see Marian Podkowi≈ski, USA przez zwykłe okulary (Warsaw: 1957). I owe this note to Wojciech Tomasik.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 330

4/14/08 2:53:15 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

331

ner circles of the Terrestrial Hell).8 A glance through post-1945 Polish magazines confirms that the Paradise/Hell dichotomy reappeared in the rigid opposition between travel accounts from the Soviet Union, always kept in the ascending poetics of utopia, and those from the ‘West’, made to resemble a descent to the dark realm of class abuse, uncontrolled violence and of American kitsch high culture.9 Stalinist travel narratives thus formed part of a wider strategy of cultural representation which can be approached under the rubric of Occidentalism, i.e., the essentialising construction of the Western Other in the process of the formation of the non-Western Self. The strategies of the ‘occidentalisation’ of the Occident are global—often pointing to the materialist bias and decadence of Western culture—and appear as an almost exact reversal of the Western discourse on Orientalism and the construction of the essentialised notion of the eternally backward Orient. The concept of Occidentalism has been the subject of a debate initiated by anthropologists, and in particular by James Carrier. In the mid-1990s, Carrier drew attention to the mutual dependency, as well as asymmetry, of Orientalist and Occidentalist discourses, stemming from the dialectical nature of defining-the-Other, in which Orientalist constructions are always underscored by the notion of the pre-eminence of the West, i.e., by a form of Occidentalism. While pointing to the political imbalance between the tropes of Ori-

8 Following the distinction made by Tzvetan Todorov, we might argue that the very understanding of travel was moved from the category of ‘exterior journey’ which involves a bodily transfer in space, to an abstract realm of ‘interior journey’, that is to the purely conceptual journey of self-recognition which does not require any physical movement or a material encounter with the Other, but is best accomplished on the meta-level of representation. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The journey and its narratives’, in Transports: Travel, pleasure and imaginative geography, 1600–1830, ed. C. Chard and H. Langdon (New Haven & London: 1996), 278–96. 9 A popular weekly Przekrój, published in Kraków after 1945, simultaneously serialised enthusiastic travel impressions from Moscow, written by the celebrated author Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and uniformly critical letters from London, sent by the correspondent of the Polish section of BBC, Janusz Meissner: Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, ‘Wrażenia z Moskwy’, Przekrój, No. 70 (11–17 August 1946), 5–6; Janusz Meissner, ‘Listy z Londynu (I): Home sweet home’, ibid., 8–9. Similar juxtapositions would occur in those years in Rzeczpospolita (1945; 1946), and in other newspapers and weeklies.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 331

4/14/08 2:53:15 PM

332

Under Eastern Eyes

entalism and Occidentalism, he also made an attempt to distinguish between several strands of their manifestations, in which ‘ethno-Orientalism’ and ‘ethno-Occidentalism’ stand for the essentialist rendering of either ‘Orient’ or ‘Occident’ by members of non-western societies, while the terms Orientalism and Occidentalism without prefixes connote the fabrication of identities in western culture.10 Following this distinction, the discursive production of ‘the West’ by travellers and writers, journalists, politicians and academics from Eastern Europe should be classified as a particular subcategory in the much wider paradigm of ethno-Occidentalism. Lenica’s London diary belongs to this subdivision as well, and I will return to this issue below. ‘My London sketchbook’ also constitutes a specific form of Occidentalist travel narrative belonging to the long-established genre of the illustrated travel reportage. It thrived following the invention of the illustrated press in the early nineteenth century, but its origins can be traced back at least to the early modern era of geographical discoveries.11 Although primacy in this genre is usually given either to text or to image, meaning is produced in a constant dialogue between the two. The specificity of Lenica’s sketchbook, where images play the dominant role, does not lie just in the hybrid construction of meaning in the interstices of the visual and the verbal, but in the discontinuity between words and images. While the sardonic captions of Lenica’s cartoons are informed by the tropes of the Marxist critique of capitalism and those Occidentalist discourses which made London its pri10 James G. Carrier, ‘Occidentalism: the world turned upside-down’, American Ethnologist 19 (1992), 195–212; also Occidentalism: Images of the West, ed. James G. Carrier (Oxford: 1995); for a recent application of the notion of Occidentalism in the realm of ‘Eastern Europe’, see Zala Vol∑i∑, ‘The notion of “the West” in the Serbian national imaginary’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (2005), 155–75. 11 The genre of graphic reportage has been surveyed by the British artist Paul Hogarth, himself a Cold War reporter, who argued for the superiority of drawings over photographs as involving more individual choice and creativity: Paul Hogarth, The artist as reporter (London: 1967). Despite the ascendancy of photography and film, and later, that of television and digital imagery, this old form of illustrated reportage has been recently revived by the graphic novels of Joe Sacco, documenting his travels to war-torn Palestine and Bosnia: Joe Sacco, Safe area Goražde: The war in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (Seattle: 2000); idem, Palestine (Seattle: 2002).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 332

4/14/08 2:53:15 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

333

mary target,12 their visual messages slide away from those hegemonic truths, revealing instead a barely restrained desire for modernity and ‘Britishness’. While examining the shifting regimes of the representation of London in Polish visual culture of this period, I will argue that a close investigation of the visual helps to ‘uncover’ those silenced aspects of the travel discourse which, unanchored by the captions, add another dimension to Cold War narratives. Lenica’s sketchbook, furthermore, represents a particular strand of the visual travel record which uses the language of caricature to exaggerate the differences encountered in a foreign land. Satirical drawings, caricature and cartoons, operating by distortion and simplification, constitute a specific category of persuasive visual representations. They appeal to their viewers not by offering an ‘objective view’ of reality, but, on the contrary, by proclaiming subjectivity as the ultimate guarantee of reaching the hidden truth, and moreover, by presenting aggressive distortion as an act of rebellion against authority. Freud saw caricature as one of those forms of expression which is empowered to degrade authority by making it comic: Caricature, parody and travesty […] are directed against people and objects which lay claim to authority and respect […]. Caricature, as is well known, brings about degradation by emphasising in the general impression given by the exalted object a single trait which is comic in itself but was bound to be overlooked so long as it was only perceivable in the general picture. By isolating this, a comic effect can be attained which extends in our memory over the whole object. This is subject to the condition that the actual presence of the exalted object himself does not keep us in a reverential attitude. If a comic trait of this kind that has been overlooked is lacking in reality, a caricature will unhesitatingly create it by exaggerating one that is not comic in itself […]13

12 See Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, ‘The Occidental city’, in their Occidentalism: A short history of anti-Westernism (London: 2004), 13–47, especially 23–5. 13 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their relation to the unconscious [1905], trans. J. Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Freud Library 6, 1991), 261–2.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 333

4/14/08 2:53:16 PM

334

Under Eastern Eyes

This justification of distortion and aggression as the way of unmasking invisible, albeit defining, features which have been concealed under the surface, makes caricature and cartoons better suited than any other forms of visual expression to act as embodiments of the ‘evil eye’, the ‘eye’ which sticks to the object of its gaze so closely that it becomes impossible to discern the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’. By exposing the locals as comical and deviant—as too thin, or too old—Lenica’s drawings were to deprive them of authority, while implying at the same time the superiority of the traveller’s/draftsman’s ‘I’. Moreover, this sense of superiority could be extended to the viewer, but only on condition that he or she abandoned ‘a reverential attitude’, adopting the same perspective, the same ‘Eye’ and, as a corollary, the same ‘I’, and saw the object of representation in the same distorted manner. Those highly charged images, blurring the boundaries between the ‘Eye’ of the draftsman and the ‘I’ of the viewer, invite employment of the notion of ‘scopic regimes’ as particularly helpful in their analysis. The term, introduced by visual culture studies, calls into question the presumed naturalness and the transparency of the process of seeing, and attracts attention precisely to the opacity of the viewing grid, the transference between the seeing ‘Eye’ and the seeing ‘I’, as well as between the draftsman and the audience. The term ‘scopic’ comes from Greek skopein, meaning to ‘look at’, and the expression ‘scopic regimes’ reveals also its proximity to the Foucauldian notion of ‘regimes of truth’, pointing to the interdependence between modes of seeing and modes of knowing. It alerts us to the constructed nature of seeing and to the changeable sets of cultural and social constraints that delimit, mould, and institutionalise the mechanisms of looking. Seeing is not innocent and individualistic, but socially produced and shaped by pre-existing codes of representation which, in turn, can be affected by normative ways of seeing. Thus, regimes of seeing and regimes of representation are mutually dependent.14 The same fundamental belief that processes of seeing are not natural, and are governed by sets of social practices, is shared by the notion of the ‘tourist gaze’, which has been elaborated by travel stud14 Martin Jay, ‘Scopic regimes of modernity’, in Visions and visuality, ed. H. Foster (Seattle: 1988), 3–28.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 334

4/14/08 2:53:16 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

335

ies, and which appears even more suitable for the analysis of the visual content of a travel sketchbook. The ‘tourist gaze’ can in fact be approached as a particular kind of ‘scopic regime’ which is manufactured by the rituals and institutions of mass tourism, and which, specifically, points to the condition of departure as a prerequisite for the articulation of difference. Significantly, research on the ‘tourist gaze’ is largely directed at the ‘seeing self’ rather than the seen other. As argued by John Urry in 1990: ‘[T]o consider how social groups construct their tourist gaze is a good way of getting at just what is happening in the “normal society”. We can use the fact of difference to interrogate the normal through investigating the typical forms of tourism.’15 This line of reasoning uses the same strategy which underlies the process of deducing the self-image of the representing subject from the image of the represented object, the ‘I’ from the ‘Eye’, so to speak. However, limited to those social practices which can be qualified as ‘tourism’, the notion of the tourist gaze presupposes, among other things, a leisure activity divorced from paid work, and conducted by a detached consumer of the pleasures offered by otherness. Hence it does not appear to be fully applicable to Cold War relations, where the gaze belongs to a visitor who arrives in the ‘West’ from behind the Iron Curtain, and who, like Lenica, is there on a paid mission rather than on holiday. More appropriate in this context is the term ‘reporter’s gaze’, which connotes a critical and penetrating observation, bent on piercing the shallowness of the tourist’s vision. Instead of indulging in pleasures, the reporter’s gaze is sharply focused and highly motivated to search for faults,16 for the Freudian comic traits which can be ex15 John Urry, The tourist gaze: Leisure and travel in contemporary societies (London: 1990); Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, ‘Tourism and the photographic eye’, in Touring cultures: Transformations of travel and theory, ed. C. Rojek and J. Urry (London & New York: 1997), 176–95; Visual culture and tourism, ed. D. Crouch and V. Lübbren (Oxford & New York: 2003). 16 An extreme variant of this would be the ‘spy’s gaze’, elaborated to Gargantuan proportions by the Western media, especially by the new type of film known as the espionage thriller or the Cold War thriller; the enormous interest in the communist spy’s gaze cast on the ‘West’ might be seen as an earlier manifestation of what Žižek described as the Western desire for the admiring gaze of the Other, in the context of post-1989 transformation, when he wrote: ‘Eastern Europe functions for the West as its Ego-Ideal: the point from which the West sees itself in a likeable, idealised form,

iBracewell_A_book.indb 335

4/14/08 2:53:16 PM

336

Under Eastern Eyes

tended ‘in our memory over the whole object’. The reporter’s gaze, and even more so, the Cold War reporter’s gaze, may indeed share its propensity for aggressive distortion with caricature, parody and travesty. The Cold War reporter’s gaze, underpinned by the ideological contest between communism and capitalism, is filtered through a dense grid of scopic regimes of Cold War visuality and the ensuing imperative to ‘other-ise’ the ‘West’. It is therefore likely to create the necessary comic traits if they happen to be missing in ‘reality’. But does Lenica’s sketchbook operate as a prime example of the Cold War reporter’s gaze? How unforgiving is his ‘Eye’ in scrutinising the traits of otherness? What kind of ‘I’ does it construct, and what kind of ‘I’ does it imply? An Eastern European one? A communist one? Or does it perhaps show what it illustrates, parting the curtain and allowing for a glimpse of the ‘permitted Europe’, and even more boldly, hiding behind his London the ‘forbidden Europe’ and the ‘forbidden I’, the inaccessible ‘Kafka’ in Osiecka’s categorisation quoted at the beginning of this article? One more excursion through the complex mechanisms of Occidentalism, before the analysis of Lenica’s icontext, is needed here. Lenica’s sketchbook, as mentioned earlier, belongs to a much larger paradigm of (ethno-)Occidentalist discourses, which manufactured the Communist Peace-Loving Self through imaging the Western Warmongering Other. Countless scenarios for those purely ideological encounters with the West were supplied by staged public events and the media, and especially by the illustrated press in Poland of the 1950s. Its favourite graphic form was a small two-fold drawing in which, as in emblematic juxtapositions of virtue and vice, the progressive and well designed world of happy workers and citizens celebrated its endless victories over the chaotic old world overcrowded by capitalists, an army of the unemployed and bloodthirsty warmongers. The reader of Szpilki, Przekrój or Świat would easily get an impression similar to that of Czesław Miłosz, who complained in his Captive Mind of 1951 that:

as worthy of love. The real object of fascination for the West is thus the gaze, namely the supposedly naïve gaze by which Eastern Europe stares back at the West […]’ (Slavoj Žižek, ‘Eastern Europe’s Republic of Gilead’, in Dimensions of radical democracy: Pluralism, citizenship, community, ed. C. Mouffe (London & New York: 1992), 193).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 336

4/14/08 2:53:17 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

337

If an alien from Mars, knowing nothing of earthly affairs, were to judge the various countries of the world on the basis of descriptions published in periodicals and books, he would conclude that the East is inhabited by thinking, clearly reasoning beings, while the West is peopled by pygmies and degenerates.17

Lenica, in this period, belonged to a circle of ardent contributors to the Occidentalist discourses. In a number of militant articles published at the time, the young critic Lenica advocated an uncompromising political involvement of graphic artists in the task of building the New World. Addressing his fellow cartoonists, he did not shy away from using official phraseology: In the moment of the mobilisation of all forces for struggle against imperialist aggression, political caricature must address every man with added strength, and with enhanced passion it must uncover the criminal machinations of the capitalist world, arousing alertness against the class enemy; it must speak in a simple, realist language.18

His cartoons published at that time strike us today, however, with their skill in marrying his straightforward response to the political 17 Czesław Miłosz, The captive mind [1951], trans. J. Zielonko, (Harmondsworth: 1985), 218. My translation of this passage differs slightly from that by Zielonko. On stereotypes of enemies propagated by Polish cartoons in the period of Stalinism, see Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, ‘How to look at a warmonger, How to see the self? Imaging the West in Stalinist cartoons, 1946–1954’, in Studies in language, literature, and cultural mythology in Poland, ed. E.M. Grossman (Lewiston, Queenston & Lampeter: 2002), 227–57. 18 Jan Lenica, Nowa Kultura 31 (1950), quoted after Jacek Kopci≈ski, ‘Satyra’, in Słownik realizmu socjalistycznego, 307–11; see also Jan Lenica, ‘O karykaturze współczesnej’, Odrodzenie 20 (1948), 5; Jan Lenica, ‘Groźny u√miech’, Nowa Kultura 13 (1951); Jan Lenica, ‘Wystawa karykatury polskiej’, Przegląd Kulturalny 2:24 (1953), 3. Lenica’s early cartoons were praised by the most unwavering critics of Polish caricature of the time, including Tadeusz Borowski, ‘O postępowych i wstecznych tradycjach karykatury politycznej’, Przegląd Artystyczny 10–12 (1950), 57, who saw Lenica as the only young artist who devoted himself to caricature and whose work demonstrates some efforts to liberate itself from the influences of the cosmopolitan art of the West.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 337

4/14/08 2:53:17 PM

338

Under Eastern Eyes

Figure 3. Jan Lenica, ‘Increasing Production Curve Thwarts the Warmongers’ Plans’, in Jan Lenica, Antoni Marianowicz, Jan Szeląg, Polska Karykatura Polityczna (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1951).

tasks set for artists by the Communist authorities with a stunning command of form.19 Lenica proved capable of fulfilling even the most tedious task awaiting the Cold War cartoonist, namely of creating a memorable image of the ‘positive Self’. In those years, the stencilled imagery of the paper-like Self, usually anodyne and de-gendered, would contrast unfavourably with the much more exciting gallery of monstrous Others. But Lenica could draw thoroughly convincing figures of the victorious proletariat, such as the massive body of a worker raising his hugely oversized arm to mark yet another victory on the diagram of the Production Curve, towering over the ‘criminal policy of warmongers’, the ‘aggression of imperialism’, and the ‘Atlantic Pact’ (Fig. 3). The cartoon uses a whole arsenal of modernist formal devices, including distortion, the magnifying scale, the expressiveness of 19 His earliest drawings and cartoons, published in Odrodzenie and Szpilki, were exhibited at a one-man show held at the trendy venue of the Club of Young Artists and Scientists in Warsaw, in 1948, see Marian Bogusz’s esssay in Rysunki Jana Lenicy (exh. cat., Warsaw: 1948).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 338

4/14/08 2:53:17 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

339

the line as well as a penchant for the modernist grid and avant-garde lettering, building up a dramatic, Mayakovsky-like vision of the New Man.20 Of course, it is possible to sense the towering presence of Lenica’s New Man as a kind of pre-existing ‘riposte’, or protective bodyarmour, behind his account of London’s elderly bodies and its fashion. One could stretch the imagination even further, trying to imagine marching crowds in the streets of Warsaw as an ideological grid behind Lenica’s Piccadilly Circus. But in terms of the immediate visual and verbal context, what tropes in the hegemonic discourses about London are tackled, or silenced, in Lenica’s sketchbook? In the heading to his reportage Lenica claims that his impressions are no more than a supplement to what has been already said about the English by Voltaire, Dickens, Chesterton, G.B. Shaw, as well as by the artist’s fellow cartoonist Jerzy Zaruba. With the exception of the first, all those authors had contributed to the proliferation of images of London as a city of darkness and oppression. Labelled the ‘modern Babylon’ since the nineteenth century, London had been a favourite target for Occidentalist loathing, figuring in endless accounts as the capital of social inequality, overpopulated and enveloped in smog, in which the extreme poverty and squalid living conditions of the working class contrasted with the luxury and greed of the privileged classes.21 In the first years after the Second World War in Poland, before the Stalinist ban on free travelling and reporting from the West, there was no shortage of texts and images of London, which further reproduced this master image of the city. The year 1946 witnessed a plethora of sketches about London in the time of austerity, sent by those representatives of the Polish war emigration in Britain who contemplated a return to Poland, such as the ‘Letters from London’, sent to Przekrój by the former pilot and the correspondent of the Polish Section

20 The cartoon was reproduced in Polska karykatura polityczna, ed. J. Lenica, A. Marianowicz and J. Szeląg, 2nd edition (Warsaw: 1951). On the problems of representation of the Communist Self in cartoons, see MurawskaMuthesius, ‘How to look at a warmonger, How to see the self?’, 235–8. 21 See Buruma and Margalit, ‘The Occidental City’, 13–47. See also The image of London: Views by travellers and émigrés 1550–1920, ed. M. Warner (exh. cat., London: 1987).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 339

4/14/08 2:53:18 PM

340

Under Eastern Eyes

Figure 4. Jerzy Zaruba, ‘The story of a dinnerjacket: Amongst the remnants of Polish émigrés in London, after the death of Władysław Raczkiewicz, a battle is fought for the position of the “President” between August Zaleski and Tadeusz Arciszewski’, Szpilki (17 June 1947).

of BBC Janusz Meissner.22 The same magazine also published travel sketches from Britain by Polish foreign correspondents and diplomats, including Czesław Miłosz’s essay of 1946 ‘The English on Poland and a Pole on England’.23 Bookshops also offered a good choice of cheaply produced publications, such as Great Britain in numbers, or propaganda pamphlets which, translated from the Russian and disseminated in a great number of copies, depicted London in Marxist perspective, as the capital of imperialism now verging on decline, tormented by the Blitz and anguished by post-war shortages of goods.24 22 Janusz Meissner, ‘Listy z Londynu’ [Letters from London], Przekrój, Nos. 70, 72, 74, 77, 84, 85 (1946); Nos. 94, 99, 101 (1947). It was subsequently published as a separate book under a new, somewhat enigmatic title, Wyspa ostatniej nadziei (Warsaw: 1947). 23 Czesław Miłosz, ‘Anglicy o Polsce i Polak on Anglii’ [The English on Poland and a Pole on England], Przekrój 44, (1946); Jan Kott, ‘Londyn’, Przekrój, Nos. 39–41 (1946); Mieczysław Wionczek (Polish Press Agency), Przekrój, Nos. 56, 58. 24 J. Lider, S. Bojko and W. Kalicki, Wielka Brytania w cyfrach [Great Britain in numbers], Informator Powszechny, Zeszyt 2, Wydawnictwo Prasa Wojskowa (Warsaw: 1948), (printed in 15,000 copies); I.A. Witwer, Wielka Brytania: Imperium Brytyskie, Irlandia, trans. L. Kubiatowicz [Komisja Centralna Związków Zawodowych w Polsce, Biblioteczka O√wiatowa, Cykl: Geografia Gospodarcza i Polityczna Świata] (Warsaw: 1949).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 340

4/14/08 2:53:18 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

341

But in the aftermath of the Second World War, London meant much more to many Poles. During the Nazi occupation, it had been the site of the Polish Government-in-exile and the headquarters of the Polish armed forces which fought on the side of western allies on many fronts of the Second World War. After the war, and the subsequent delegalisation of the Polish Government-in-exile as an effect of the Yalta treaty, London became the major centre of the Polish emigration, the symbolic focus of bitter resentment against the ‘betrayal of Poland’ by the former British ally and the heart of the ‘heroic resistance’ against the new ‘Bolshevik’ regime in Poland. Despite an energetic campaign by the authorities in Poland encouraging all Poles to return to their homeland, the official attitude of ‘Polish London’ proclaimed emigration as the only ethical choice, as the ‘sole accessible gesture of protest’, and as a proclamation of loyalty to the Western roots of Polish culture.25 What followed was a split of Polish subjectivity, divided between the two fighting Selves which, declaring allegiance to opposing classes, accused each other of treason. As a corollary, the hegemonic discourse about London in Poland was deeply coloured by an unrestrained hostility towards ‘Polish London’ and its claims to constitute the sole legitimate guardian of Polish nationhood and the bearer of its spiritual values, untouched by Bolshevism. And amongst journals in the forefront of this campaign were the aforementioned Przekrój as well as Szpilki. If the photographs of London slums and London children playing in ruins published in Przekrój supplied its readers with a mirror image of their own misery, their own slums and ruins, the iconic vision of ‘Polish London’ was created almost single-handedly by the cartoons of Jerzy Zaruba in Szpilki, exorcising the unwanted part of the Polish self. Reputedly Anglophile, Zaruba was the author of the most vitriolic images of ‘Polish London’, published from the late 1940s until the mid 1950s. In their vehemence they were matched only by the venomous pamphlets of authors such as Stefan Arski, orations against the reactionary Polish emigration, ‘the renegades, who drop out of the nation,

25 There is a huge literature on the political attitudes of the Polish emigration in England; see recent publications by Andrzej Friszke, Życie polityczne emigracji (Warsaw: 1999), and Rafał Habielski, Życie społeczne i kulturalne emigracji (Warsaw: 1999).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 341

4/14/08 2:53:18 PM

342

Under Eastern Eyes

breathing hatred to Poland and Polishness, like no other enemy’.26 Cartoons by Zaruba, equally unforgiving, set up the regimes of viewing London through the prism of the class arrogance, imputed decadence and reactionary political attitudes of ‘Polish London’, always presented as preoccupied with vain rituals, fighting for lost causes and engaged in pointless arguments amongst themselves (Fig. 4).27 In effect the image of London in Poland after the war became inseparable from the spiteful portrayal of the Polish émigré, an impostor in an old-fashioned dinner jacket, a loser and traitor, the unwanted and abject part of the Polish self. Significantly, Lenica’s London sketchbook would abandon this regime entirely, abandoning the Polish émigré as a necessary constituent in the process of identity formation, while exchanging—in a totally different way—the subject positions of the Communist Self and the castigated, but seductive, Western Other. During the years of full-blown Stalinist propaganda, perhaps the darkest image of London was presented to Poles by the British graphic artist Paul Hogarth. It is an interesting coincidence that Hogarth was one of the most ardent practitioners of the genre of illustrated reportage, and that he used it as a tool in the Cold War struggle for signification.28 Associated once with the radical British left, he started his career during the most confrontational period of the Cold War, spending the years between 1947 and 1956 in intensive travel behind the

26 Stefan Arski, Targowica leży nad Atlantykiem (Warsaw: 1952), 108; see also Włodzimierz Bolecki, ‘Emigracji obraz’, in Słownik realizmu socjalistycznego, 54–69. 27 Zaruba’s illustrated reports from London were published in Przekrój: J. Zaruba, ‘Moje wycieczki osobiste’, Przekrój 88 (1946), 6–7; Zaruba, ‘Jeszcze moja wycieczka osobista do Londynu’, Przekrój 94 (1947), 10–1; both of them were subsequently revised and reprinted, almost without illustrations, in J. Zaruba, ‘Londyn 1946’, in his Z pamiętników bywalca (Warsaw: 1960), 180–242. His cartoons on the topic of the Polish emigration in London published on the front covers of Szpilki include ‘Following England and the USA, many states recognise the Polish government’, No. 20 (17 July 1945); ‘In spite of all the efforts of the political bankrupts in London, heroic Polish soldiers return en masse to Poland’, No. 45 (5 November 1946), back cover; ‘The story of a dinner-jacket’, No. 34 (17 June 1947); ‘Romer’s Atlas’, No. 47 (25 November 1947); ‘In front of the Prime Minister’s residence’, No. 43 (30 October 1951). 28 Paul Hogarth, The Artist as Reporter [1967] (London: 1986).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 342

4/14/08 2:53:18 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

343

Figure 5. Paul Hogarth, ‘London District of Poverty’, Świat, 4:49 (1954).

Iron Curtain, visiting Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, as well as China and Russia. Hogarth’s drawings from this period might be said to constitute a particularly interesting example of the Cold War Occidentalist critique from within. While drawing Eastern Europe, he recorded all sorts of successes in the new People’s Republics; when reporting on the ‘West’, he would focus solely on the misery of the western working class, while stressing at the same time the readiness of the working class in the West to rise against the imperialism and join in ‘with the nations of the world to fight for freedom’.29 His illustrated reports from Britain, Italy, or Spain were often published in Eastern European journals, including Szpilki, Świat, as well as Przegląd Artystyczny.30 One of them, entitled ‘London District 29 On Paul Hogarth, see Paul Hogarth, Drawing on line: The autobiography of Paul Hogarth, introduction by Richard Ingrams (Newton Abbot: 1997); Paul Hogarth, Cold War Reports: 1947–1967 (exh. cat., Norwich: 1989) (with an essay by John Berger, published originally as the introduction to Das Antlitz Europas [Prague: 1955]). 30 Cf. ‘Meeting of the Conservative Party’, Szpilki 18:3 (27 January 1952), 9; Derek Kartun, ‘Ameryka≈ska okupacja Wielkiej Brytanii: Korespondencja z Londynu’, [American Occupation of Great Britain: Correspondence from London], drawings by Paul Hogarth, Świat 1:8 (1951); ‘Prawdziwe

iBracewell_A_book.indb 343

4/14/08 2:53:19 PM

344

Under Eastern Eyes

of Poverty’ and accompanied by Hogarth’s own text, focused on London’s East End, the ‘world’s largest working class district’, embracing ‘Stepney, Poplar, Hackney and Bethnal Green’, where the ‘urban poor has been squashed in overcrowded dwellings and small terraced houses, piled up around the gloomy warehouses and workshops’(Fig. 5).31 His drawings surrounding the text corresponded aptly to his verbal denunciations, bringing into the limelight the emaciated bodies of workers and street traders, the dark interiors of terraced houses in the East End, sweatshops and unappealing street markets in Clerkenwell, as well as an image of American soldiers introducing British girls to the indecency of rock’n’roll. The reportage was crowned with a portrait of a trade union activist, the fishmonger Lennie Baxter. Shown by Hogarth as standing boldly with his arms crossed and looking straight into the viewer’s Eye (‘I’), as if answering the call of the Communist Manifesto: ‘Proletarians of the whole world unite!’, his image appears to deliver a message of solidarity from the East End workers to their brothers in Eastern Europe. For Hogarth, at the beginning of his career, the multiplying exhibitions and publications in Poland (and in other Eastern European countries) provided a kind of public visibility which was hard to achieve in Britain. Importantly, his stark Occidentalist critique of the West enabled him to build up his own subjectivity, his own internationalist working-class-artist Self, which was to be detached from the western bourgeoisie and constructed instead in the gaze of the eEastern European Other. The portrait of the fishmonger LenWłochy’ [The Real Italy], Świat 1:17 (1951); ‘Byłem w Grecji’ [I was in Greece], Świat 2:44 (1952); M. Bąblewska, A. Kossakowski, ‘Grecja w rysunkach Hogartha’ [Greece in Hogarth’s Drawings], Przegląd Artystyczny 2 (1953), 46–8; ‘Drawings by Paul Hogarth from Poland and Czechoslovakia’, Świat 3:17 (1953); ‘Z teki Paula Hogartha: Prawdziwy Rzym’ [From Paul Hogarth’s Portfolio: The Real Rome], Świat 3:37 (1954); ‘Ameryka: Korespondencja wlasna Świata z Londynu’ [America: Świat’s own correspondent in London]’, Świat 4:20 (1954). 31 Paul Hogarth, ‘Londy≈ska Dzielnica Nędzy’ [Poor District of London], Świat 4:49 (1954). Hogarth’s drawing of an entrance hall of a Victorian terrace, in the darkest tone imaginable, and entitled (wrongly!) ‘Tenement House in the East End’, was re-reproduced as a particularly evocative image in Hogarth’s article on Socialist Realist painters in Great Britain, published in a professional art-historical journal: Paul Hogarth, ‘Realizm Socjalistyczny w Wielkiej Brytanii’, Przegląd Artystyczny 5–6 (1954), 138–45.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 344

4/14/08 2:53:19 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

345

nie Baxter staring unflinchingly into the ‘I’ of the Eastern European (br)other thus hides a self-image, or an Ideal Ego of the artist-reporter searching for his own subjectivity while travelling between the two worlds. Hogarth’s Occidentalism, clearly, was not free of Orientalist presumptions, and indeed it marked only a brief stage in his own journey of self-discovery. But what appears of prime significance for the argument of this article is precisely Hogarth’s denial of his ‘Western self’ and his attempt to construct his ‘real’ Self in the Eye of the Other. Even if motivated by a desire for success, it involved crossing and blurring the boundaries between the Self and Other. The very process of collapsing the borders between the emerging new Self and the old Other, as well as a certain confusion as to their respective identity, will recur in Lenica’s sketchbook. But to what extent were the modes of looking at London disseminated by Hogarth, and supplied to his Eastern European viewers within the framework of the Occidentalist critique of western cities, actually absorbed by his fellow illustrators behind the Iron Curtain, who, like Lenica, would soon travel to the West in person to see it with their own eyes? It seems that Hogarth’s ‘kitchen-sink’ gaze soon lost its power over its recipients. Lenica, clearly, refused to see London through Hogarth’s eyes, remaining totally unresponsive to the latter’s grimy social criticism, and proved stubbornly unwilling to adopt the social realist tropes of Cold War Occidentalism. His own London reportage does not show any desire to steer away from the usual ‘tourist track’. Instead of peeping into the ‘real London’ of East End terraces and working-class areas, Lenica seems to prefer to stroll the streets of London’s West End, to stare, like any other tourist, at royal residences guarded by soldiers, to visit Piccadilly Circus and the Tate, secretly indulging in recording the elegant silhouettes of smartly-dressed people, fashionable ladies and old-fashioned gentlemen, and, only occasionally, calling on less elegant pubs, or noticing the sad figure of a newspaper-seller feeding pigeons. Lenica’s gaze does not sit easily within the prescriptions of the Cold War reporter’s piercing gaze, informed by the Marxist critique of capitalism. His sheer delight in elegant clothes and slim bodies, the exuberant stained-glass decoration of Victorian pubs, the formal beauty of Piccadilly’s Eros, even the profusion of advertisements, or the graceful carpentry of the sash window—appears all too evident,

iBracewell_A_book.indb 345

4/14/08 2:53:19 PM

346

Under Eastern Eyes

and can hardly be weakened by the sardonic, politically correct tone of his captions. Lenica’s London is the product of a new hybrid visuality, merging the Cold War regimes of truth with the parameters of the tourist gaze, liberated from the burden of political scopic regimes. Not surprisingly, the messages emanating from his images and those imposed by the captions do not always match. Perhaps instead of just pigeonholing his vision, we should inquire into what Lenica’s ‘Eye’ reveals about the bearer of the gaze? Kept within the ascetic colour scale of black and red, and moving freely between a whole range of strokes, lines and splashes of ink – dreamy and fragile, bold and aggressive, comic and repulsive, Lenica’s cartoons reveal rather than conceal the bodily presence of their maker. However, in spite their artistic license, the image of the Other projected by the ‘London Sketchbook’, when examined today, does not strike one as particularly acute in uncovering the ‘hidden truth’ about the London and the Londoners of 1954. Lenica’s cartoons appear to be firmly embedded within a mainstream visual discourse about the city, and leafing through the contemporary pages of Picture Post, or Hulton Archives, one can find multiple examples of scenes very similar to those singled out by him: women in a pub, or gentlemen on their Vespas. However, if we compare those images more closely, and identify the minor visual keys which turn the picture’s tenor from endorsement to ridicule, and which encapsulate the different, the comical and the deviant, we may be able to trace back and to link those keys to repressed desires, as well as class and gender prejudices current in the society of the maker. There are several types of drawings in the ‘London sketchbook’: those which focus on people and their bodies; those which represent sites and public spaces; and those concerned with the very practices of looking. Considering the proportion of drawings which comment on the acts of seeing, it is this issue which preoccupies their author, who demonstratively distances himself from some of the standard practices of tourist visuality. The first large drawing of an American tourist with a camera taking a picture of a British soldier appears to assure the viewer that this reportage, i.e., the author’s ways of seeing, are governed by markedly different principles (Fig. 1). By adopting a kind of meta-position, that of one who sees the limitations of the other’s tech-

iBracewell_A_book.indb 346

4/14/08 2:53:20 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

347

niques of seeing, Lenica suggests that his will be a non-tourist, critical gaze. One can argue that the binary opposition between the fat American and the towering body of the soldier betrays the author’s soft spot for Britishness, but such an assumption is quickly neutralised by the caption (‘“Smile, please…” says an American to a Royal Guard. What a cynic! To be able to smile in the situation in which England finds itself at present!’), stressing the miserable economic condition of Britain which would have undoubtedly prevented the soldier from smiling, as expected by the ignorant tourist. The uppermost cartoon on the opposite side, entitled ‘The Hub of the Universe, or a Scottish Circus’ presents a similar effort to subvert Lenica’s embeddedness in tourist visuality by reflecting on the practices of observing while depicting clichéd sites (Fig. 2). A powerful sketch of Piccadilly Circus, juxtaposing crowds of the rushing pedestrians and tourists with the boldly outlined texture of buildings behind, covered by advertisements from top to bottom, is also subverted by its mildly sarcastic caption. Although it reflects on the conflation between the seeing subject and the seen object in the urban spectacle, it is also targeted against a sheer display of idleness in the middle of the rushing universe, which is now unmasked as nothing more than a circus: Every evening, Piccadilly Circus, called by the Londoners the ‘Hub of the Universe’, becomes a site of the so-called ‘Scottish circus’. A part of the audience sits around the Monument of Eros, standing in the middle of the Square, and watches the pedestrians passing by, who, in turn, watch those sitting in the middle. Apart from that you can stare at the numberless neon ads covering all the neighbouring buildings. The show is free (hence its name—the Scottish are, as is widely known, mean), providing total satisfaction to Londoners and tourists alike.

On both pages, the drawing underneath is posited as an example of the non-tourist, the deconstructive, or a quasi-Hogarthian gaze, which wanders off the beaten track, spotting the newspaper-seller, or venturing into a pub, and in particular, into its ‘Ladies Only’ rooms (Fig. 1). In the caption to the latter, having puzzled over the restrictive hours of pub openings, Lenica writes that:

iBracewell_A_book.indb 347

4/14/08 2:53:20 PM

348

Under Eastern Eyes Every British citizen devotes the hours spent in a pub (bar) to philosophical investigations, of course during the allocated hours: between midday and 3 pm, and from 6 pm to 10 pm. Every pub is divided into two parts by a glass panel. Its more elegant room, known as the ‘saloon’, serves the better-off citizens for their exchange of opinions over a glass of beer. There are also pubs whose inferior part is destined for women only—‘Ladies Only’.

Although one might question whether the gendering of the social space of London pubs was indeed the issue, the visual message of the image does not highlight Lenica’s awareness of the problem of gender inequality either. On the contrary, the cartoon strengthens the boundaries of permissiveness outlined for men and for women. In this way it betrays the rigid social rules governing the cultures of drinking and entertainment in Poland. What makes the image different from similar scenes reproduced in Picture Post or elsewhere is Lenica’s aggressively pejorative characterisation of women drinking beer. Shown with no sympathy, as formless bodies wrapped up in big coats, with ugly faces marked by signs of a drunken stupor, the women are effectively monsterised by Lenica, who drew them as two messy blotches incongruously pasted onto the quasi-calligraphic interior of the pub, as if contaminating its space. The image appears to be informed not only by beer-drinking habits in England, but much more so by patriarchal mechanisms of signification, as well as class bigotry in Polish society of the time, in which pub culture was unknown, and in which drinking beer was permissible for men only, as well as being associated with the working class. One of the visual keys to the Polishness underscoring this cartoon (the key which, like the Barthesian punctum, pierces the surface of the image opening the road to the unconscious and to repressed memories), is the prominent motif of the two big glasses of unmistakably Central European design. In Poland at that time, women who drank from those kinds of mugs in public places were likely to be labelled as deviant and underclass, and on a sure road to ruin. In fact, apart from the fetish-like image of a smart woman sipping a drink in the company of an equally smart man, any other image of the drinking female would be linked almost exclusively to the female alcohol vendor of the underworld, and it is the picture of the latter which can be read

iBracewell_A_book.indb 348

4/14/08 2:53:20 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

349

as the background to this particular cartoon.32 Patriarchal mechanisms of signification imaging woman as the other, either as a sexy prostitute or an old degenerate, operated both West and East of the Iron Curtain. I find this cartoon particularly significant for its uses of the pejorative image of the Eastern European Self as a template for projection onto the Western Other. It is also difficult not to notice that Lenica’s world was inhabited mainly by men. Women, if entering the picture at all, were masculinised, deformed and deprived of substance or agency. Another aspect of this image, which reappears in almost all the other cartoons in the London sketchbook, is the emphasis on the senility of British society. The next four pieces framed together on the same page, all of them concerned with fashion, design and modernity, represent in turn the elderly, albeit well-kept bodies of the representatives of the affluent British middle class (Fig. 1). Except for the ‘New Look’, the remaining three cartoons: those of a ‘Dandy’, of a ‘Motorised Gentleman’ and of a spindly woman viewer at the Tate, make together what looks today like a ‘purely’ touristy and stereotypical statement on British urban society. On the opposite page, the newspaper seller is also old. Lenica reproduces here, in visual terms, a well-established discourse on the aging society of post-war Britain. This stress on senility can be identified as one of the most pervasive tropes appropriated by Occidentalist strategies, and reappearing regularly in many standard travel narratives about Britain.33 I would argue that the stress on senility constitutes a response to the traditional Orientalist binary, which had earlier elevated an old, mature and civilised Europe against an infantile and backward Eastern Europe, as manifested endlessly in images of Eastern Europeans shown as unruly or ungrateful children, still valid today.34 And yet, the very stress on maturity and power appears to speak not only of the triumph of the New over the Old, but on the contrary, 32 See photographs accompanying an article by Dr Bolesław Ałapin, ‘Woda ogłupiająca’ [Fool-making water], in Świat 3:2 (1953). 33 Cf. Tadeusz Wittlin, ‘Stara Anglia’ [Old England], in Wyspa Zakochanych (London: 1951), 117–22. 34 Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, ‘On small nations and bullied children: Mr Punch draws Eastern Europe’, Slavonic and East European Review 84:2 (2006), 279–305.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 349

4/14/08 2:53:20 PM

350

Under Eastern Eyes

it hides a barely restrained desire to step into the skin of the elderly Western (br)other. The iconic figure of the British gentleman, in a black suit, bowler hat, black tie, with an umbrella and gloves, and a red carnation in his buttonhole, the type wrongly labelled here as a ‘dandy’, appears in the sketchbook as a male counterpart to the elegant British female, completing an iconic couple which signifies British society. In order to direct the viewer in the correct reading of the image, ‘to fix the floating chain of signifieds’ by a linguistic message,35 Lenica provided an explicit caption, which says: In the drawing above the author wanted to render the features of the real British gentleman, namely the dignity of posture and the conviction of an absolute superiority above the inhabitants of the rest of the world, depicted on his face.

What I find, however, much more significant here is precisely a perceptible ambiguity in Lenica’s design of this figure, as if underscored not by contempt, but on the contrary, by a hidden esteem, by a longing for this kind of phallic erectness, cool dignity, indifference and power. If the fishmonger Lennie Baxter might have served as an Alter-Ego for Hogarth, then the tailored silhouette of the British gentleman, drawn in one perfectly handled splash of black ink, tightly isolated from the world outside, perfectly restrained and composed, might constitute the repressed Ego-Ideal of Lenica. The gentleman’s face, covered by his bowler hat and his over-sized moustache, frustrates any possibility of meeting his gaze, any possibility of exchange. It is as if on encountering the archetypical Western Other, and in a failed attempt to reassert the towering New Self in his absent gaze, Lenica was tempted to cross the frontier of the prescribed Self, to shed the body-armour he had himself produced, moving now, even if for a moment, into the forbidden Europe, into ‘Kafka’, into the body and the suit of the Other. It might appear that I’m pushing the interpretation too hard, projecting invented scopic regimes onto Lenica’s gaze. And yet the same figure of the tall black-suited gentleman reappears in a whole array of Lenica’s post-communist male bodies, beginning with his untitled sa35 Roland Barthes, ‘The rhetoric of the image’, in idem, Image music text, trans. S. Heath (London: 1977), 39–40.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 350

4/14/08 2:53:21 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

351

Figure 6. Jan Lenica, Untitled (1957), reproduced on the back cover of Jan Lenica (exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980).

tirical drawing of 1957 (Fig. 6), and coming back as Monsieur Tête (1959), as the protagonist of The Labyrinth (1962), as Adam 2 (1968), and others. The 1957 drawing, often reproduced as an iconic figure of the decapitated prisoner of Communist society,36 offers a particularly striking resemblance to the image of the British gentleman. When posed side by side, they are almost twins. We can take it as a testimony of the adaptation of the image of the Western Other to the representation of the Polish post-Stalinist self; or even argue that a longing for lost Polish selfhood, identified with the privileged rather than the working classes, was already present in Lenica’s ‘London sketchbook’, and disguised in the nominally derided image of the aloof British male. But there is something more in the choice of the smart gentleman in a black suit as the locus of the New Post-Stalinist Self, which brings us back to the apparent absence of ‘Polish London’ in Lenica’s sketchbook. Lenica did not necessarily have to ignore the Polish Other usurping the status of the Polish Self. On the contrary, he might equally have conflated the distance between London and ‘Polish London’. The dinner-jacket, which in Zaruba’s cartoons used to signify no more 36 As on the back cover of the catalogue of Lenica’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (Jan Lenica, ed. Passek).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 351

4/14/08 2:53:21 PM

352

Under Eastern Eyes

than the helpless vanity of reactionary ‘Polish London’, has now been invested with a totally different meaning, standing for the lost privileges and forbidden pleasures of the affluent classes in pre-Second World War Poland. In late 1950s Poland, when the scopic regimes and representational practices of Stalinism were roundly dismissed as ineffective, the image of the old gentleman in a dinner-jacket, or at least in a well-made suit, was to proliferate with unheard-of vigour, far beyond Lenica’s work. No longer forced to hide within the boundaries of satirical magazines as the derided Other, it became one of the major protagonists of Leopold Tyrmand’s Zły, the bestselling novel about the hidden aspects of life and black market trading in Warsaw. Tyrmand’s own passion for well-made English jackets was well-known in the tight milieu of the Warsaw chattering classes of the 1950s. The black-suited gentleman entered avant-garde art and theatre with Kantor’s installations in the late 1950s, and received an almost official approval as the site of Ego Ideal with a phenomenally popular TV show launched in 1958, entitled The Elderly Gentlemen’s Cabaret [Kabaret Starszych Panów], and hosted by two well-composed characters in dinner jackets, bowler hats and carnations in their button holes. From one show to another they demonstrated an endless patience in dealing with the most disturbing gallery of New Others, electricians and plumbers, now invading their old-fashioned bourgeois interior, confirming in this way the ultimate exchange in the positions of Self and Other in post-Stalinist Poland.37 Remarkably, Lenica’s vision of London and Londoners must have received the official approval of the authorities because his drawings were reproduced, without captions, on the back cover of a glossy periodical Poland, published monthly in English, French, German and Russian by the Polonia Foreign Language Publishing House.38 Full of fabulous colour photographs of the rebuilt capital, folk art, or the 37 Amongst other examples of this fascination with the figure of an elderly gentleman in this period are Professor Filutek, the protagonist of a longrunning comic by Zbigniew Lengren, appearing every week on the last page of Przekrój from 1946 for over half a century; and Professor Tutka, created by Jan Szaniawski in 1954. I owe those examples to Wojciech Tomasik. 38 Poland 12:16, (1955), 24.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 352

4/14/08 2:53:21 PM

The Cold-War Traveller’s Gaze

353

pleasures of hunting in Poland’s primeval forests, the periodical was obviously addressed to non-Polish readers and was a highly accomplished exercise in self-representation. The use of Lenica’s images of London, detached from their captions, confirms that at this stage the visual messages they conveyed must have been assessed as suitable for the task of self-representation, and indeed as revealing an up-to-date picture of Poland to Western readers. The construction of the Polish post-Stalinist middle-class Self involved not only the process of fixing, but also of blurring the boundaries separating it from the Western Other. If, as argued by Carrier, Orientalist practices are informed by an Occidentalist self-understanding of the West,39 the Occidentalist attempts to ‘return the gaze’ and to reverse the binaries are haunted by the pre-existing tropes of Orientalist asymmetry. Lenica’s London testifies to the dependency of the Occidentalist clichés on pre-existing Orientalist stereotypes. By stressing the senility and decadence of London metropolitan culture, it responds directly to Orientalist clichés, notoriously marginalising nonWestern societies (including the fictitious collective of Eastern Europe) as backward, essentially non-urban, and grossly underdeveloped. More importantly, Lenica’s sketchbook constitutes a particularly transparent example of the permeability of the boundaries between Self and Other, demonstrating their mutual dependency in the process of identity formation, in which the negative image of the Other becomes a prerequisite for the construction of the superior Self. Thus, not only Lenica’s vision of London as the epitome of Western alterity is fabricated in response to the image of a non-urban Eastern (European) subaltern produced in the West, but, furthermore, it is also made out of the unwanted and repressed aspects of the Polish/Communist Self. While nominally it contributes to the process of the sublimation of the ideal Communist Self, it betrays at the same time the repressed anxieties and desires of the self-defining subject, split between the interpellating Self and the socio-politically unacceptable, and yet seductive Other. Lenica was both a traveller and a skilful designer. He embarked on many journeys during his life, and proved that he was particularly good 39 Carrier, ‘Occidentalism’.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 353

4/14/08 2:53:21 PM

354

Under Eastern Eyes

at fashioning identities that were in demand. When acting as a ‘fellow traveller’, he designed the Towering Self. When he went to London, he might have missed the city as many other travellers have done, but on his return he launched the Black-Suited Self, which became a hit for many years in his own country. He was a good traveller and had a very sharp ‘Eye’, which was capable of launching more than one ‘I’, depending on the point of his departure and the direction in which he travelled.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 354

4/14/08 2:53:22 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism (1945–1989) Rossitza Guentcheva

This chapter tries to grasp the multifaceted image of the West emerging from the travel writings of Bulgarians who made trips abroad during the socialist period. As might be expected, the travelogues show that the vision of the West was not a coherent and static construct throughout the socialist period, with a significant transformation becoming palpable in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I will analyse these shifts in the Bulgarian travellers’ perceptions of the West, and will attempt to demonstrate how the various images of the West were created through the intersecting efforts of writers, censors and Communist Party ideologues. Seeing writers, censors and party ideologues as three different sources of power producing competing images of the West will help explain both the dynamics and the social role of such perceptions. The article discusses published travelogues by Bulgarian citizens resulting from trips to west European capitalist states, as well as to the US and Japan, during the forty or so years of the socialist regime. Travel to the ideological enemy—the developed capitalist, ‘imperialist’ world—was severely controlled and regulated but not forbidden. It was pre-set, filtered and sanitised, as were the literary accounts of it written on the traveller’s return. Attention is paid to travel writing produced by people coming from different social strata such as professional writers, diplomats, journalists, sportsmen, etc. * Work on this article was begun at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where I was a fellow in the academic year 2003–4, and part of it was presented at the Tuesday colloquium on 2 March 2004. Another part was presented at the workshop Under Eastern Eyes in Sofia on 18–21 March 2005, co-organised by UCL-SSEES and Sofia University. I thank all participants in the two discussions for their comments.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 355

4/14/08 2:53:22 PM

356

Under Eastern Eyes

Before starting to sketch what travelling Bulgarians saw in the capitalist West, a few disclaimers are necessary. Since the travelogues were officially published—sometimes in quite large print runs—it is unrealistic to expect that views challenging the system could have found their way into them. Descriptions of travels to capitalist countries were very closely monitored, and were censored, self-censored, vigorously criticised, and sometimes banned altogether. One can, of course, explore such unfortunate texts, and analyse what exactly their authors should not have seen in the West, and thus grasp in its very essence what was unacceptable—both as vision and as transcript—during a visit abroad. But one can also look at published travelogues as ‘safe texts’, texts that had successfully passed the test of the censor, and consequently containing a correct, socialist-friendly vision of a Western society that could freely be offered to socialist readers. The great majority of the travelogues summarised impressions from official trips. Their authors were sometimes the first socialist Bulgarian visitors to a particular western country. They were quite conscious of that, and of the fact that they were writing for a large audience which might never travel, as well as for the censor. Their stated goal was to present Western reality correctly—according to the rules of socialist realism. These books thus also had an educative and informative function. They represented a sort of guidebook, listing what socialist travellers were allowed to see during their trips, a kind of manual disciplining vision. Through travelogues, a very strong attempt—and an efficient one—was made to pre-set visitors’ impressions of the developed West and to guide, direct and focus their perceptions.

TRAVEL IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA Socialist travelogues often functioned as a lens through which Western society could be seen in a prescribed, correct fashion; this had its roots in the specifics of the phenomenon of travel abroad by socialist citizens. The writers were themselves travellers, and their accounts were the product of a particular regime of travel that affected both the very movement of people and its literary description. Travel to the West was restricted and controlled for practical and ideological reasons, in order to limit emigration and protect socialist Bulgarians from the subversive influence of alien thoughts and corrupt capitalist practices. Through a

iBracewell_A_book.indb 356

4/14/08 2:53:22 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

357

complex system of control, combining legislative, economic and ideological measures, socialist citizens were held accountable both for their visits abroad and for the ways they were rendered in literature. Travel to the capitalist West was restricted immediately after 1944, while control was harshest in the late 1940s and 1950s. The late 1950s brought about a change in the way control over movement abroad was executed, with notable repercussions on the images of the West in socialist travel writing. The transformation was due to increased trade contacts with the West and the subsequent expansion of relations in fields like economy, culture, and sports. Diplomatic relations with the US were restored in 1959, and with West Germany in 1973. The boom in commerce and international exchanges with the West was a result of the urgent need for licenses, patents and machines to build a modern, industrial Bulgaria. Having embarked upon an ambitious and massive industrialisation campaign, the Bulgarian government needed know-how and technology for both its industry and agriculture. At the end of the 1950s, leaders across the Socialist Bloc came to realise that Western technology offered useful new products in an increasing number of economic sectors, among them consumer goods and light industry. At the moment this divergence started being manifested and felt, the Socialist Bloc countries set out to beat the West on its own territory, explicitly pledging to overtake it through peaceful competition. At a time when the Soviet Union’s economic growth surpassed that of the US, this promise seemed neither ridiculous nor impossible. It is of crucial importance for the control over travel and its literary description that the Bulgarian officials’ awareness of the West’s rising technological advantage did not imply a reconsideration of the basic principles underpinning the socialist economy, let alone socialist society at large. Bulgarian communist rulers continued to emulate Lenin’s memorable formula for the essence of socialism: ‘Soviet power + the Prussian railway system plus American technique and the organization of trusts + American education, etc., etc. + + = Σ = socialism.’1 They profoundly believed that Western technology, if transferred to a socialist economy, would work better and render many more benefits. Thus Western machines (and especially their licenses and patents) were the 1 Quoted in Erik Hoffmann and Robbin Laird, Technocratic socialism. The Soviet Union in the advanced industrial era (Durham, North Carolina: 1985), 17.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 357

4/14/08 2:53:22 PM

358

Under Eastern Eyes

first capitalist products to be dissociated from the fear of ideological pollution. They could be safely imported and successfully relocated into a socialist economy, thereby contributing to its progress. Thus in the early 1960s the Bulgarian regime of travel came to face a new challenge. The West continued to be the ideological enemy, yet visiting it had already become indispensable. While importing machines was ideologically safe, meeting their producers and negotiating the contracts were not. The distinction which communist ideology inserted between the relationship with people and the relationship with goods predetermined the character of the foreign trip. It could not be purely technical, since it involved something more than a relationship with goods. At the end of such a trip there stood the imminent contact with the Western capitalist. Such a visit was not a leisure trip, nor was it undertaken for the purposes of exploring new places and cultures. It was a duty, a command, to be carried out for the sake of socialism’s triumph over capitalism. It is not by chance that the Bulgarian word for a business or professional trip—komandirovka—derives from ‘command’ (as with its Russian equivalent). Its military connotation is not coincidental either. Travel to the West had become an involuntary expedition into enemy territory. Thus certain Bulgarian citizens were to be sent abroad by their superiors and invested with the duty—not the right—to travel to the closed-off West. Visiting the West became acceptable as an accomplishment of a higher order, an obligation, not a pleasurable pursuit for its own sake. And so was its literary description upon return. The Bulgarian regime took due account of the fact that some Bulgarians had to contact the ideological enemy. A series of measures was undertaken in order to govern the movement of bodies, goods, machines and documentation and to prevent the movement of ideas. The process of ideological inculcation began even before the start of the journey to a capitalist country, normally at the time of collecting a passport for travel abroad. It is no paradox that the ideological struggle to control the traveller intensified hand-in-hand with the relaxation of restrictions on travel abroad, and especially official travel. The communist officials’ interest in travelogues rose in parallel. In this way, the ruling Communist Party apparatus endeavoured to achieve the mobility of bodies, but to preclude the mobility of minds. Professional trips by socialist Bulgarians were sanctioned and approved by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian

iBracewell_A_book.indb 358

4/14/08 2:53:23 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

359

Communist Party in coordination with the Central Committee’s Secretariat which, acknowledging the hazards of travel abroad, had a duty to preserve Bulgarian citizens intact from their encounter with the foreign world. Only ministers and deputy-ministers, as well as presidents of regional people’s councils and public organisations, were allowed to send their staff to a capitalist country. These institutions had to ensure that the travellers’ minds were not affected by foreign ideology and by the contemplation of the products of capitalist culture. Counteracting threats of capitalist indoctrination started even before official trips began and continued after they ended. Before going abroad, members of Bulgarian delegations were instructed how to act in order to counter any attempt at subversion on the part of secret agents or ideological enemies. They were also taught how to behave in an exemplary socialist manner so as to not compromise their homeland and regime. As they were literally advised: ‘walk on any foreign street […] as if holding the Bulgarian flag in your hands.’2 A range of articles dedicated to ‘revolutionary vigilance’ appeared in the party journals and the newspapers. Their authors warned that imperialism employed all possible means in its struggle against communism, including international travel. Bulgarian visitors in the West were often shown: the outward glamour [of capitalism] and other appealing things that are attractive at a superficial glance. But behind the glittering façade of capitalism there stand hidden sharp and insurmountable social contradictions. […] Sometimes our citizens can face provocations and fraud so as to involve them in improper actions and deals, thereupon threatening them with exposure and recruiting them as spies.3

What the socialist traveller could do to prevent such cases was to ‘fight against excessive trust, needless talkativeness, careerism and moral instability and to guard state and professional secrets strictly’.4

2 Boian Bolgar, Sviat na dlan (Varna: 1972), 56. 3 Ivan Buchvarov, ‘Revoliutsionnata bditelnost—pǔrvostepenno zadulzhenie na vseki patriot’, Novo vreme 40:2 (1964), 32. 4 Ibid., 33. The article also warned that watchfulness had nothing to do with suspicion, adding that the people’s power was strong and stable, and that every honest worker deeply and rationally believed in it and supported it.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 359

4/14/08 2:53:23 PM

360

Under Eastern Eyes

Socialist travelogues and memoirs testify in detail to the fear of indoctrination in the West. Such episodes functioned as additional warnings to travelling Bulgarians. In 1950, during her trip to Sheffield for the World Peace Congress, the Stakhanovite shock worker Liliana Dimitrova was attacked in her hotel room by a hostile Bulgarian emigrant whose aim was to provoke a scandal and inculpate the innocent Bulgarian delegate.5 In 1967, before his year-long study placement at the European University Centre in Nancy, Bulgarian historian Ilcho Dimitrov remembered that he was summoned to the Ministry of Interior ‘for the traditional conversation with those travelling to the West for the first time’. He was instructed as to the kind of methods the enemy would use in order to recruit him as a spy; as a last resort, the enemy would send him a woman and would blackmail him by threatening to send pictures to his wife.6 Travellers were warned about thefts and killers everywhere in the West, and they treated with suspicion the most innocent questions addressed to them by border guards, customs officers, conductors, or taxi drivers. They learned to check their passports after leaving a hotel, to see whether the visa had not been torn out on purpose (thus making their stay illegal).7 Fear of potential enemy provocation and the imperative of exemplary socialist behaviour did have an effect on Bulgarian citizens’ first meetings with Western culture, and conditioned to a great extent their perceptions of the West. Although pre-set and prescribed, their responses were not uniform, standardised and homogeneous: they accommodated in a variety of ways the imperatives of different actors— the public, the censor and the state. The travelogues written upon return represented trips to the West as cognitive learning experiences, or as monolithic representations (without development), or as total anathematisation, or as a combination of all of these. All these are figures of the compromise between the actors engaged in the production of travelogues. Censors allowed this divergent response because travel 5 Liliana Mihailova, Pǔtuvashti godini. Dokumentalna povest za dva pǔti geroia na sotsialisticheskiia trud Liliana Dimitrova (Sofia: 1981), 7–12. 6 Ilcho Dimitrov, Vsichko teche. Spomeni (Sofia: 2000), 132. Ridiculing these warnings, the author added: ‘Then the clerk said: “Do use this opportunity, if you can, and do not be afraid; the pictures will come to us and not to your wife.”’ 7 Stoian Daskalov, Evropa bez slǔntse. Pǔtepisi (Sofia: 1967), 6, 47, 198, 216, 219.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 360

4/14/08 2:53:23 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

361

writing needed to be credible, in addition to being politically correct. In order to transmit the message of the corrupt capitalist West adequately, the message had to be convincing and believable. Writing about Soviet travelogues, Marina Balina has noted that they were more than just made-to-order items of socialist literature, a sort of governmental service, or a ‘command performance’ in print. Yet she thinks that the imperative to produce ‘homework’ assignments was overridden by the element of subjectivity, through which writers managed to violate the schemes prescribed for them. Through human and personal narrations and reminiscences as well as other literary strategies, Soviet authors were able to subvert the officially prescribed genre and succeeded in telling the reader the ‘truth about the world’ and about themselves.8 My reading of Bulgarian socialist travelogues goes beyond interpreting them as a clash of Literature against the Party and beyond acknowledging the writer’s grip on truth. In what follows, I will present different actors’ engagement with truth, authenticity and the credibility of travel writing, laid bare in debates over various travelogues.

UNACCEPTABLE IMAGES OF THE WEST—FORBIDDEN TRAVELOGUES

Let us first turn to the forbidden travelogues, the ones that were thought dangerous by the Bulgarian censors and critics. Characteristically enough, their authors could hardly be qualified as dissidents, but rather as victims of the ideologically vague and unstable environment of the late 1940s and early 1950s. I will present two such travelogues, both of them written and published at a time when it was not yet clear what constituted a viable and admissible picture of the West. The first was written by Dr Khristo Zaimov and was published in 1947 under the title of Swiss Sketches. Although this passionate eulogy of Switzerland was approved by a censor before being accepted for publication, it soon fell into disgrace and reading it was explicitly banned. The book was not removed from the Bulgarian National Library, but its catalogue card carried a red stamp saying: ‘To be used only with the director’s permission.’ 8 Marina Balina, ‘A prescribed journey: Russian travel literature from the 1960s to the 1980s’, Slavic and East European Journal 38:2 (1994), 269.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 361

4/14/08 2:53:24 PM

362

Under Eastern Eyes

While reading the book, it is not hard to understand what would have embarrassed the socialist reader. Its author described at length ‘the ideal political system [of Switzerland], which ensures the country’s true and full democratic governance, in which the people enjoy wide and unlimited freedom in every respect’.9 Not only did Zaimov dare make a direct comparison between Switzerland and Bulgaria, but he also expressed regret at the perceived disadvantages of his own homeland. He wrote: ‘Every foreigner, after only a short stay, says to him/herself: “Ideal, exemplary country—a real heaven; a perfect people that deserves my veneration and respect! Ah, if only my own country could be so well organized! How I wish I could spend the rest of my life in this true earthly paradise!”’10 Probably an even greater insult to socialist Bulgaria was Zaimov’s vision of Switzerland as a virtually classless society, meaning a society where class divisions and class hatred had almost become extinct due to the workers’ and peasants’ high standard of living. It is clear why the travelogue was proscribed: its author campaigned for change in Bulgarian society on the basis of the Swiss model.11 It was immured in the National Library’s storehouses and never ‘resurrected’ despite significant changes that later took place in the socialist vision of the West. The second desecrated travelogue was Konstantin Katsarov’s book The world close up, which was an account of the author’s aroundthe-world trip undertaken in 1937 but written up somewhat later. First published in 1946, it quickly became a bestseller, and was given a second edition in 1948. Despite several positive reviews in the Bulgarian 9 Khristo Zaimov, Shveitsarski skitsi (Sofia: 1947), 6. 10 Ibid., 10. 11 A son of a wealthy textile industrialist, Khristo Zaimov studied at the University of Geneva, and received a doctoral degree in finance and trade at the end of the 1930s. After the Second World War, he was brought to a People’s Court that tried persons loyal to fascism and Nazism—among them prominent public figures of the pre-socialist establishment—but was acquitted because of insufficient evidence. Identified as a potential ‘enemy of the people’ and the author of a proscribed book, he was not allowed to practice his profession, and worked in the Bulgarian Union of Sports till the end of his life in 1973. As a sporting referee he slowly regained permission to travel abroad, but he neither returned to Switzerland nor wrote another book. (Interview with Khristo Zaimov’s brother Kosta Zaimov, Sofia: 28 March 2005).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 362

4/14/08 2:53:24 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

363

press, shortly afterwards the book was judged to be dangerous. Its National Library catalogue card acquired the same prohibitive stamp: ‘To be used only with the director’s permission.’ In 1949 a severe critique of the travelogue appeared in the ideological journal of the Bulgarian Communist Party, entitled: ‘A callousreactionary book’. Konstantin Katsarov was accused of a variety of offences. Mistaken priorities, said the review article, had guided Katsarov in describing religion rather than economic development in the countries he had visited; and in characterising the ugly chauvinism of Japanese imperialism and aggression as patriotism. Several countries in which capitalist exploitation and colonial oppression had reached their extremes were depicted romantically, through their ‘traditions’ and ‘mysticism’. A completely false picture was given of the US, where the author had described the Ford factories in Detroit with reverence and had marvelled at Ford’s ‘creative genius’. ‘At a time of revolutionary upheaval’, concluded the review: when the great ideas of Marxism-Leninism have penetrated the consciousness of the oppressed from all the lands on earth and have inspired them to struggle for freedom, the author advertises the reactionary ‘philosophy’ of patience and seeks the help of religion in order to continue dominating the ruthlessly exploited human masses. And such a reactionary book appeared in a second edition in the Bulgaria of the Fatherland Front! We can only express our astonishment that the former Ministry of Information could sanction such a denigration of the freedom fight of the colonial peoples!12

Thus The world close up was also put on the list of proscribed books and was imprisoned in the vaults of the National Library. Yet in 1956, after the first signs of détente in the USSR appeared in Bulgaria, Katsarov made a desperate attempt to resurrect his discredited work. Believing in compromise, he rewrote the travelogue, attempting to incorporate all the criticisms from the 1949 review.13 He entirely deleted the word ‘God’: for example the phrase ‘in God’s wide world’ 12 A. Bankovska, ‘Edna grubo-reaktsionna kniga (Svetǔt otblizo ot Konstantin Katsarov)’, Novo vreme 25:5 (1949), 530. 13 Konstantin Katsarov, Svetǔt otblizo, 2 vols. (Sofia: 1995), 5.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 363

4/14/08 2:53:24 PM

364

Under Eastern Eyes

became ‘in the wide world’, while the expression ‘God’s reason’ became ‘unknown reason’. Some passages relating to the efforts of the colonial powers to improve the lives of their subject populations were left out. Without making any essential changes in the way he saw the world in his 1937 trip, Katsarov added lengthy appendices in which he described post-Second World War developments for the countries in question, as well as a closing chapter entitled ‘The rise and fall of colonialism (1492–1956)’. Despite the fact that Katsarov condemned the expropriation of the colonies’ material resources by the main colonial powers, the US and Germany, as well as their total social, economic and spiritual destruction, he was not successful in ‘relaunching’ his travelogue. In spite of his sincere belief that his vision of the West had been ‘repaired’, both versions were withheld from the Bulgarian public throughout the socialist period.14 The double rejection of the travelogue is all the more interesting because the author (unlike Zaimov) had not advocated changes to Bulgarian society, at least explicitly. However, Katsarov had promoted a different sort of transformation—that of his own personality—through travel as Bildung, molded on the legacy of the Grand Tour. Travel, especially to the capitalist West, was not supposed to transform the socialist citizen, who had to return from the enemy territory unaltered, unaffected by novel ideas, experiences and values.

14 In 1953 Konstantin Katsarov, who was also one of the most prominent lawyers of pre-socialist Bulgaria, had received a 15-year prison sentence for being an ‘enemy of the people’, of which he spent only two years in jail. In 1954 he was rehabilitated, and at the end of 1956 immigrated to Geneva where he re-opened his law practice. The newly written appendices, smuggled out of the country in manuscript in the 1950s, became the basis for two books, Analyse des sièges and La victoire manquée, both published by La Baconière, Boudry-Neuchâtel (Switzerland) in 1964 and 1968. The Bulgarian version of the first book was smuggled into Bulgaria in the mid1970s in violation of the unwritten rules of the movement of goods in socialist Bulgaria and was exchanged among friends for a period of 24 hours in utmost secrecy. It was available to the members of the Politburo of the BCP upon signature. See Konstantin Katsarov, 60 godini zhiviana istoriia (Montreux-Suisse: 1970) and Konstantin Katsarov, Proigranata pobeda (Sofia: 1994), 397.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 364

4/14/08 2:53:24 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

365

ACCEPTABLE IMAGES OF THE WEST—CRITICISED TRAVELOGUES

Some of the travelogues written in the late 1940s were subjected to critiques, or rather to suggestions and advice, without however being proscribed or having their free circulation circumscribed. Their fate demonstrates the constantly shifting power relations between author, censor and party ideologues, as well as the continuously evolving positions occupied by each of these. Even the most rigid element of this triadic nexus—the censor—was not monolithic, as will be demonstrated by the example of the treatment of Western consumer goods in literary accounts of travel abroad. ‘Criticised’ travelogues were usually written by devoted communists, with a long pedigree of faithfulness to the workers’ movement or to revolutionary topics. In spite of their ideological loyalty and their humble origins, what they saw in the West and thought worth describing upon return could also turn out to be wrong. Such was the case of Gioncho Belev—a workers’ writer with only an elementary education—who travelled to the US in 1946 and recorded his impressions under the title of What I saw in America. Belev’s visit to New York set a pattern followed by practically all Bulgarian travel writers during the socialist period. Almost all of them saw the West during official trips, quite often in the framework of an official delegation, sometimes having been sent there with the explicit task of producing a travelogue. Gioncho Belev travelled to New York for the Congress of Slav Emigrants in the USA, as a representative of the Union of Bulgarian Writers. He was part of a delegation headed by Tsola Dragoicheva, chief secretary of the National Committee of the Fatherland Front and one of the most important communist leaders in Bulgaria. Because of the requirements of airplane travel in 1946, the flight took them several days, with stops in Prague, Paris, Dublin and Newfoundland. Hence Gioncho Belev was able to meet his first Americans while still in Europe. These were either drunken soldiers who cursed and spat on the floor, smoked cigarettes, chewed gum and drank Coca-Cola, or tired women with heavy makeup and polished nails dancing to the vulgar sounds of jazz, playing cards, or flirting with men. Subsequently Belev saw the streets of New York haunted by sick, dirty, poor people dressed in rags. Workers were plagued by a hous-

iBracewell_A_book.indb 365

4/14/08 2:53:25 PM

366

Under Eastern Eyes

ing crisis owing to the capitalists’ hunger for maximum profits. While in Detroit, he did not go to the Ford factories like Katsarov, but he saw people with bodily defects incurred through the repetition of thousands of identical movements at the workplace. ‘Such is the care for workers in capitalist America’, concluded the author, condemning the uniformity and boredom created by American rationalisation which in a capitalist society could only be inhuman, either physically deforming people or leaving them jobless.15 Belev described American goods minutely, listed what he himself bought, and provided prices. He visited Macy’s department store and found the clothes there of bad quality. He explained the rationale behind producing such inferior goods: ‘the outward appearance of this low-quality production is beautiful, it increases demand, and increased demand appears at first glance to lower unemployment, but in fact it only brings bigger profits: that is the essence of the capitalist economy. But unemployment in America rises, misery proliferates and people keep wearing their old clothes.’16 In describing the fruits and vegetables in the markets, Belev noted that their outward appearance was the only thing which pleased the customer; their taste was disappointing because of capitalist standardisation. Belev depicted in detail the standard of living of the average American, who ‘lives usually in 1–2 rooms and has at his disposal a nice bathroom and numerous technical appliances’.17 His kitchen had ‘a gas or electric stove, a refrigerator, which functions automatically […] as well as other technical appliances facilitating the work of the housewife such as a washing machine, dishwasher, etc’. Emphasising that as a rule Americans were seduced by ads into taking all these appliances on credit, Belev warned: If everything is all right, then there is comfort and satisfaction at home, there is indeed a high standard of living. If, however, illness and unemployment occur—which happens quite often—this is a catastrophe. Any inability to make a payment means that all these ‘belongings’ return to the creditor. As with the house, it does not mat15 Gioncho Belev, Kakvo vidiakh v Amerika (Sofia: 1948), 107. 16 Ibid., 187–8. 17 Ibid., 226.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 366

4/14/08 2:53:25 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

367

ter how much one has already repaid. […] Houses, cars, refrigerators, etc., can disappear from one day to another and the one-time proprietor of all these goods turns into a destitute pauper.18

Although Belev recorded the West’s huge class polarisation and described the extreme luxury and wealth of capitalists as opposed to the appalling misery of the working class, his travelogue was criticised for not having portrayed the real truth about the US. In a review article in the main ideological journal Novo Vreme, Belev was attacked for not having shown the most important traits of the American way of life, namely the US’s militaristic and imperialist drive, its campaign against the USSR and the democratic countries of Eastern Europe, and its colonisation of western Europe through the Marshall Plan. The political struggle of the American workers had not attracted the author’s attention either. Whereas an excuse was found for these shortcomings in that they had not yet been explicitly manifested in 1946, there was no excuse for the portrayal of the standard of living. The reviewer regretted that the: vices of American civilization were often lost and invalidated by lengthy descriptions of the material aspect of this ‘civilisation’—the skyscrapers, the railway, the outward ‘glittering’ side of technical development, etc. These descriptions quite often overlook the typical characteristics of this fortress of imperialism, the USA, namely the capitalist character of its society, its class divisions, the social side of American life. […] The incorrect accent on the ‘technical-standard’ aspect is also reflected on the picture on the cover: instead of presenting the unemployed or some other feature of American social life, the cover picture (like an advertisement for capitalist America) represents a group of elegant skyscrapers.19

What a visitor in a Western capitalist country was invited to see was a state with two faces, ravaged by deep class divisions. To put it another way, there was not one American culture, but two conflicting 18 Ibid., 227. 19 Angel Todorov, ‘Gioncho Belev—‘Kakvo vidiakh v Amerika’, Novo vreme 25:5 (1949), 525.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 367

4/14/08 2:53:25 PM

368

Under Eastern Eyes

American cultures, that of the proletariat and that of the capitalists. Moreover, these two class cultures had their precise attributes. The West’s two faces were to be seen in a very specific way. As the case of Gioncho Belev demonstrated, it was not enough to depict the poverty and suffering of the working class. Workers had to be seen protesting, amidst their battle for a better life, and their organisational and political maturity had to be emphasised. On the other hand, it was entirely unacceptable to describe material wealth, luxury and the accumulation of goods by the rich, even under the guise of a critique of conspicuous consumption. How to depict the wealthy and the rich, without slipping into the veneration of material affluence, was a real problem. A solution to this dilemma was found through returning to history and describing cultural achievements in the arts and sciences. Instead of listing refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers, the traveller was to list paintings, sculptures and monuments. Instead of going to shops and department stores, he/she was to visit museums and archeological treasures. These precepts for seeing and writing about a Western capitalist society would be perfected in the 1950s, in descriptions by Bulgarians visiting Italy, France, the UK, Belgium, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, Austria, the US, etc.

THE WEST’S TWO FACES—THE CANON IN THE 1950S An exemplary work following these precepts for seeing and writing about the West was Dimitŭr Bratanov’s book about Italy, which had the model title In the land of Dante and Togliatti. Its cover picture was also canonical—it features a portrait of Dante and a sketch of a workers’ demonstration for peace. Bratanov visited Italy in 1946, 1947 and 1948–50, becoming the Bulgarian ambassador in Rome, but he wrote down his travelogue only in 1954, when the manner of representing a Western capitalist country had been sufficiently formalised. Always a member of an official delegation, he had numerous meetings with high-ranking local communists, such as the communist Mayor of Florence or the members of the Italian Socialist Party club in Bari. Bratanov travelled to Italian cities in all regions of the country, but he saw them all in an identical way—as sites of architectural, artistic or natural glory and as places of intransigent proletarian struggle.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 368

4/14/08 2:53:25 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

369

When in Rome, he visited the Coliseum, the Forum, the Curia, the fora of the emperors Augustus and Trajan, Constantine’s Arch, the Campidoglio, etc. He stumbled on St. Peter’s, where the black clothes of monks and priests reminded him of the ‘brutal reactionary power of Catholicism’. Commenting that the whole church was built in order to display the power and glory of the popes and the inferiority of normal mortal people, Bratanov described the interior of St. Peter’s as disorderly and chaotic. He quickly turned his attention to the ‘Other Rome—the Rome of Giordano Bruno and Garibaldi, of Mateotti, Gramsci, Lauro de Bosis and Fernando de Rosa, of the working people of the neighbourhoods, of Togliatti and Pietro Nenni.’20 As sites worth seeing, there followed the monument to Garibaldi (‘this son of the working people’), Piazza di Spagna (where the young anti-fascist pilot Lauro de Bosis had scattered leaflets in 1931 before crashing with his plane near the Balearic islands), and the Piazzale Napoleone (where unhappy unemployed Italians commit suicide). There followed Pisanelli street No. 40—the home of the anti-fascist MP Giacomo Mateotti, killed by fascists in 1924. Workers’ neighbourhoods figured among the places of interest—‘Trastevere, Pietralata, Primavale, Torpigliata, Cento Celle, Prato, Borgo, etc. are the names of these entirely different worlds of the working people.’21 The squares of Rome or Florence, Milan or Bologna deserved attention only if they served as sites of communist gatherings, and they were depicted only if overtaken by angry marching workers. The streets of Rome, as the canon required, were not given special attention.22 In other Italian cities Bratanov had similar experiences. He liked Florence where he felt the spirit of the Renaissance and the victo20 Dimitŭr Bratanov, V stranata na Dante i Toliati (Sofia: 1954), 23. 21 Ibid., 116. 22 Bratanov went to the opera and recommended Verdi as a composer of the Italian people, saw films and recommended Rome 11 o’clock as showing the people’s fight against fascism, visited an art gallery and recommended the communist painter Renato Guttuso, a representative of new Italian realism. It is symptomatic for socialist control of artistic production that an exhibition by the same Renato Guttuso in Sofia in 1955 received negative critiques from mainstream Bulgarian painters for his abstract ‘formalist’ style, dominated by unclear colour spots and deformed, unnatural lines. See Dimitŭr Avramov, Letopis na edno dramatichno desetiletie. Bǔlgarskoto izkustvo mezhdu 1955–1965 g. (Sofia: 1994), 48.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 369

4/14/08 2:53:26 PM

370

Under Eastern Eyes

rious struggles of the proletariat, with the house of Dante and the Murate prison, the home of many anti-fascists during the interwar period. In the fields of Umbria, Bratanov talked to peasants and workers who asked him about Bulgaria, ‘the land of Georgi Dimitrov’, or shared their memories from having worked there. At the end he exclaimed: Beautiful but poor Italy! The brilliant culture which left its imprint on your land is stained today by social injustice. Your true greatness will shine when this centuries-old culture is liberated from the oppression, exploitation and darkness of reactionary minorities kept in power by violence, fraud and illiteracy.23

The leitmotiv of two Romes, two Londons, two Viennas was repeated in the collection of travel writings entitled What we saw outside the borders of the homeland, published in 1952. The contributors were young Bulgarians visiting the West for various youth activities, primarily communist gatherings and peace festivals. All of them were struck by the misery, poverty and Americanisation of western Europe. During meetings and discussions with progressive local proletarians, the young Bulgarian travellers came to understand the tragedy of life in a capitalist world, a tragedy that could not be masked by the beauty of antique ruins and famous places. Housing crises, due to spiralling militarisation, plagued Rome, London and Vienna. The typical figures of this collective travelogue are the poor worker talking about his small salary, enormous expenses, or unemployment, and street beggars who are otherwise talented painters. ‘The aesthetic pleasure one experiences when contemplating the works of renowned masters in the gallery transforms into revulsion when one leaves the gallery and sees other “works” by unknown masters on the pavements of St. Martin’s, the Strand and Charing Cross, painted with coloured chalk’, wrote Zlatko Popzlatev about the National Gallery in London.24 Bogdan Gloginski was left with an ambiguous vision of Vienna, where he attended a meeting of 50,000 young fighters for freedom and peace. Official Vienna—the Vienna of the pro-American government—greeted the cultur23 Bratanov, V stranata na Dante i Toliati, 168. 24 Zlatko Popzlatev, ‘V London’, in Kakvo vidiakhme zad granitsite na rodinata (Sofia: 1952), 119.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 370

4/14/08 2:53:26 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

371

al delegation of young Bulgarians frostily, ‘with a frown’.25 Yet it was warmly greeted by workers’ Vienna, ‘wholeheartedly, with admiration, and with songs for friendship and the struggle for peace’. Instead of seeing the city of the ‘Blue Danube’ and hearing the merry waltzes of Johann Strauss, they heard the pain and hopelessness in the sad melodies of the street musicians and violinists. Visiting the West helped the Bulgarian socialist youths to reconsider their idealised picture of the West as a site of cultural triumph and to complement it with the picture of a decaying bourgeois society. Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, France and Switzerland were also described as countries with two faces, this time through the eyes of Bulgarian sportsmen and transport workers—two of the social groups for whom travel in the capitalist West was comparatively easy. The first-ever visit by a Bulgarian football team to Sweden in 1957 allowed a delegation of 20 people to see Brussels, Stockholm and Copenhagen, as well as adding new elements to the conventional description of the capitalist West. Material goods found their way back to the travelogues, not in their sheer materiality, but as neon advertisements on shops and streets. The glittering ads, perceived as deceitful, seductive and misleading, had invaded the city space in a cruel competition for clients.26 The second trip—of transport workers—is somewhat unusual in that it was privately organised by a group of individuals with the intention of going to watch a football match between Bulgaria and England in London. In addition to transport workers, the group consisted of engineers, cameramen, ‘public figures’ and one journalist. They chartered a special train: No. 14053, which travelled through Europe on a special schedule. On reaching Calais, it turned out that the ferry the transport workers thought they could board to cross the Channel had been severely damaged in the Second World War, and the connection had not yet been restored. The group’s experiences in Paris were unique in that its members managed to see several famous places in the city in a new light, thereby significantly rewriting the cityscape of 25 Bogdan Gloginski, ‘Amerikantsi, vǔrvete si u doma!...’, in Kakvo vidiakhme zad granitsite na rodinata (Sofia: 1952), 123. 26 Ivan Mirski, Prez devet zemi (v chuzhbina s armeiskite sportisti) (Sofia: 1957), 8, 34–5.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 371

4/14/08 2:53:26 PM

372

Under Eastern Eyes

the French capital. After declaring that the beauty and charm of Paris lay not in its shopping streets, but in its spirit and tumultuous history, the Bulgarian travellers explored the tangible expressions of the city’s memory. The Place de la Concorde was the place where in 1793–1795 a guillotine had severed 1,343 heads; the Place de l’Etoile, the location of the Arc de Triomphe, was notable as the site of a (failed) strike by 500 construction workers, whereas Le Palais de Versailles (its forest) was the location of a part of NATO’s command. As the Bulgarian visitors commented, this choice was no coincidence, since Versailles had always been a traditional fortress of reactionary forces. The Eiffel Tower was the place from which 116 hungry and destitute people had committed suicide, while the wide streets of Paris owed their shape to Baron Hausmann’s desire to make them unsuitable for demonstrations and revolts. The description of Paris concluded with the following old song: Paris is a noisy city, it’s a paradise, but also hell; one is singing, another is spending, and a third is crying for bread.27 Seeing capitalist cities as having two faces helped describe foreign lands as enemy territory, where the counterparts of socialist citizens— the workers in a Western society—were oppressed and exploited. Yet this vision became obsolete by the early 1960s when the imperatives of economic and technical cooperation with the West came to require contacts not with workers but with their capitalist employers. Changing the focus to capitalist employers undermined the fractured vision of capitalist cities and integrated their two divided faces into a single whole. In subsequent travel writing, the capitalist countries regained their integrity, with social cleavages receding into the background. However, describing capitalist cities as possessing a unified culture rather than in terms of antagonistic social classes also meant depicting the material abundance and wealth of the West. It became increasingly difficult just to dismiss material prosperity. While goods and commodities were missing from the canonical travelogues of the 1950s, they 27 Ibid., 102.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 372

4/14/08 2:53:26 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

373

started reappearing, compelling socialist authors and censors to address new problems and delineate different categories of objects.

CHANGES IN THE CANON (1960S –1980S) After the Bulgarian government embarked on a policy of raising the standard of living in the early 1960s, travellers’ attention to the material goods in Western shops started being tacitly tolerated. The new vision of the West recorded a re-interpretation of the power relationship between writers, censors and party ideologues. To be sure, descriptions of machines and technical appliances were more than welcome. Machines served the public good and were the natural allies of communist governments. They were often compared to Bulgarian machines and no one was surprised that the Bulgarian ones turned out to be worse, ineffective, and in need of replacement. But consumer goods were more problematic. They served individual ends and their acquisition required better and more extensive justifications. Unlike machines, goods could still be regarded as capitalist and western, as carrying significant ideological connotations. This notwithstanding, since socialist Bulgaria had also pledged to compete with the capitalist West in the sphere of consumption, comparing Western goods with Bulgarian ones was no longer off limits. What is interesting is that in the course of this comparative endeavour, Western capitalist objects quite often featured as worse, deficient and lacking the advantages of their socialist counterparts. Western consumer goods re-entered the descriptions of travelling Bulgarians, but through a series of interpretive strategies that cut off their potentially dangerous ideological connotations. Bulgarian travelogues of the 1960s–1980s established a tradition of dealing with Western affluence in a way that prevented socialist travellers from seeing Western goods as symbols of a healthier economy and a superior social order. One of the simplest techniques for depreciating Western goods was to show abundance as a goal in itself, not for the people but for a limited few. This technique of accounting for abundance is familiar from the travelogue of Gioncho Belev that was critiqued in the late 1940s, but it now became perfectly acceptable. Capitalist shop windows were full of goods, but they were nevertheless inaccessible to the population. On an official trip to Munich, the writer Stoian Daskalov

iBracewell_A_book.indb 373

4/14/08 2:53:27 PM

374

Under Eastern Eyes

saw West German shops as an accurate reflection, a mirror of the capitalist economy. ‘Window shops are overloaded with objects, yet the luxury department stores are virtually empty’, concluded Daskalov after noting the ‘Salamander or Italian shoes, the Scottish woollen fabrics, the American and French textiles, the Spanish grapes and the Dutch vegetables’.28 He was unpleasantly surprised by not being able to see queues, which signified to him the accessibility of material goods for the entire population. He noted, further, that ‘one does not wait to be served, two to three people immediately jump to your assistance’.29 Western goods were plentiful and the window shops were lavish, because German people could not afford to buy them; shopkeepers were oppressively polite, for they had no clients, implied this travelogue. The burdensome courtesy of shop assistants was often cited as the reason for acquiring a particular Western object. In this way, constantly resisting but in the end succumbing, Bulgarian travellers found themselves buying trousers, boots, and even Omega watches. Other excuses were also given: one could buy a cardigan because the weather was too cold; a radio to learn better English; an insignificant spare part for a Philips tape recorder that cost only 65 pence. A suitable pretext was the buying or receiving of presents. Travellers bought shoes and clothing for their grandchildren; and while abroad, they were happy to accept towels, bags, scarves, fans, albums, and even matchboxes as gifts.30 Another way of devaluing Western material progress was to dispute the quality of these abundant goods. Not being familiar with the Western practice of sales, socialist travellers often interpreted the seasonal reduction of prices as proof that they had discovered their poor quality. Since socialist fashion was closely related to functionality, Bulgarian visitors to the West could not understand the principle of sales unless as a result of defects in the goods. Poor quality could also be covered by simple tricks, as in West Germany: You are going to see meat that is as red as if the animal has just been slaughtered, but many people do not know that this meat is treated

28 Daskalov, Evropa bez slǔntse, 30. 29 Ibid., 31. 30 Bolgar, Sviat na dlan; Iako Molkhov, Spomen ot edno neochakvano pǔtǔvane (Sofia: 1989).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 374

4/14/08 2:53:27 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

375

with a chemical substance so as to appear fresh. There was a huge trial because of poisoning by such meat. We learnt about the margarine affair in which fraudulent tradesmen earned millions of marks, but which caused the deaths of thousands of people.31

Furthermore, part of this abundance was attributed to the production of goods that no one needed, like food, clothes and services for animals. The shops for dogs that offered food rich in vitamins, special shoes, rain covers, coats—‘in trendy shapes and fashionable colours for the season’ testified to ‘an endless stupidity and hysteria which a person from the socialist world cannot even imagine’.32 Sometimes, all the glamour and material bounty would simply be attributed to centuries-long colonial exploitation and social injustice. The members of one of the first officially organised Bulgarian tourist groups to a capitalist country were amazed by the excellent Dutch furniture, but kept in mind that it had developed through the oppression of Indonesia. Other sanitising strategies piled up as well. The opulence of the streets and the clothing was regarded as an outward gloss that would dull after a longer stay in the West. Material abundance and luxury were a thin veneer that would melt away if one had sufficient time to discover the life of the underground, the poverty and moral decay which tended to escape the view of the normal tourist. And a sweeping critique was mounted against Bulgarians trading goods from the capitalist West. Travellers who bought TV sets and tape recorders from the West in order to sell them back home were portrayed in a strongly negative light. In addition to participating in this debased trade, they possessed a multitude of other vices. Such people would also have broken families, lie and beg for money from their friends. In the end, a direct comparison between Western capitalist goods and Eastern products might conclude by announcing the triumph of socialist material production. The best place for such a comparison was the divided city of Berlin. Visiting both parts of Berlin for Easter in 1972, Stoian Daskalov saw something that could only have been described in a socialist travelogue—a migration eastwards. He witnessed 31 Daskalov, Evropa bez slǔntse, 30. 32 Ibid., 167–8.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 375

4/14/08 2:53:27 PM

376

Under Eastern Eyes

the inhabitants of West Berlin crossing the Wall and visiting their relatives in East Berlin. This is what he saw: We saw [the West Berliners] rushing to the shops and marvelling at the low prices. They were sitting in the restaurants and ordering profusely, amazed that here one could eat at such a low cost. They were going to the hairdresser, something inaccessible to them out there, behind the Wall, except for twice a year. One hatred has been overcome. West Berlin has become the bridge between the West and the East. A dying city has been transfused with new blood through its long-awaited contact with the East.33

IN CONCLUSION Socialist travelogues were the product of a particular form of travel with specifics of its own, and very few historical precedents. One of the closest parallels might be Plato’s conviction that the ideal society had to be spared infection by bad foreign habits, achieved by letting only older citizens of proven loyalty travel abroad, and then only as members of government-supervised delegations. During trips to the West, socialist citizens learned new things, yet these excursions differed from Goethe’s educational trips to Italy, for example. A transformation of personality was completely undesirable and was ruled out. During trips to the West, one bought new things, yet these trips differed from normal trade visits because of the careful selection of contact persons. Socialist travellers constantly felt the hostility of their new location, so their visits were perhaps similar to military intelligence, yet without being the same. As the Cold War was a specific type of war, so crossing the front lines and penetrating deep into enemy territory in this period had specific features of their own. Socialist travelogues performed a kind of authenticating function, serving to verify and register the truth about Western society in empirical terms. This type of literary production posed the problem of authenticity, and the related problem of the authority of the writer and traveler, in acute fashion. The authority wielded by socialist writers relied on the authenticity of their observations and was derived from 33 Stoian Daskalov, Slǔntseto e za vsichki. Pǔtepisi (Sofia: 1975), 117.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 376

4/14/08 2:53:27 PM

Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing During Socialism

377

their ability to witness certain phenomena directly, with their own eyes, but it also depended on their capacity to pinpoint ‘truth’ and to differentiate it from an apparent reality. The intellectual tools supplied by the reigning ideology of Marxism made the socialist traveller appear capable of uncovering truths about Western society that were invisible to others, even to the indigenous population. In the travelogue In the country of Dante and Togliatti, the socialist visitor manages to unmask reality and see a ‘truth’ about Italy which remained hidden from the conventional tourist, and even from the local residents themselves. The ‘truth’ about the triumphant struggle of the Italian working class was not included in the classic tourist guides but it could be unveiled by the Bulgarian traveller, in spite of the fact that it remained outside the traditional tourist itineraries. Socialist travel writing demonstrates a unique dimension of travel as Bildung, during which visitors not only assimilate knowledge but also, due to the exclusive instruments with which communist ideology endows their gaze, they are capable of seeing things that even the native inhabitants find undetectable. The shifting images presented by Bulgarian travellers to the West were the product of the intersecting efforts of writers, censors and party ideologues at different periods of the socialist regime. They were shaped by the combined effects of increased trade and cultural relations between countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain and by sustained ideological confrontation. In this specific context, socialist travellers and writers travelled to the West, yet had to remain unaffected by capitalist ideas. Travellers to the West were regarded in an ambiguous way in socialist Bulgaria, while they themselves experienced travel as a combination of danger and privilege. The mobility of bodies and the stability of ideas contributed to a particular way of seeing the West, conditioned by police surveillance of travel and by socialist censorship. For the socialist travellers, machines and commodities moved in a different fashion, with their own logic of travel and their own separate justifications. Certain segments of Western culture were useful and desirable, while others needed to be isolated and their transmission to the socialist homeland blocked and prevented altogether. However, in spite of tangible changes in the image of the West over time, perceptions of the West remained profoundly Occidentalist, exhibiting internal variations and gradations of Occidentalism, a kind of ‘nesting Occidentalism’, to build on Milica BakiΔ-Hayden’s concept

iBracewell_A_book.indb 377

4/14/08 2:53:28 PM

378

Under Eastern Eyes

of ‘nesting Orientalisms’.34 Although they developed and changed, the images of the West presented by Bulgarian travelers during the different periods of socialism persisted in essentialising and homogenising the ideological enemy. Even though some of their elements became obsolete even before 1989, visions of the West, as a whole, did not permit the socialist citizen either to compare the capitalist with the socialist world to the detriment of the latter, or to use what had been seen abroad to mobilise resistance to the reigning socialist regime.

34 Milica BakiΔ-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The case of former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review 54:4 (1995), 917–31. See also Occidentalism: Images of the West, ed. J. Carrier (Oxford: 1995).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 378

4/14/08 2:53:28 PM

Notes on Contributors

WENDY BRACEWELL is Deputy Director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, and director of the East looks West project; she has written primarily on South Slav social and cultural history. DAVID CHIRICO was formerly a research fellow in Czech Studies at SSEES, specialising in Czech Symbolist and Avant-Garde poetry and in Czech and Slovak travel narratives. He currently works as a barrister, practising in immigration law at 1 Pump Court Chambers, London. ALEX DRACE-FRANCIS is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool. He has published a book, The making of modern Romanian culture (2006), as well as a number of articles on Romanian and Balkan history, literature, travel, identity and historiography. DIANA GEORGESCU is a doctoral student in History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include the cultural history of south-eastern Europe, especially autobiographical and generational memory, gender and nationalism, everyday socialism, and post-socialist historiography. ROSSITZA GUENTCHEVA is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia. She works on the social history of language, social and cultural history of socialism, as well as on migration and mobility before and after 1989. She has published articles in Language and Communication; in the European Review of History; and in several edited volumes. MARIA KALINOWSKA is a professor and researcher at the Institute of Polish Literature, Mikołaj Kopernik University, Toru≈, specialising in Polish Romantic literature.

iBracewell_A_book.indb 379

4/14/08 2:53:28 PM

380

Under Eastern Eyes

ANDI MIHALACHE is a researcher at the ‘A.D. Xenopol’ Institute of History, Iaşi, Romania, specialising in cultural history, history of communism, theory of history. He has published two books: History and discursive practices in ‘People’s Democratic’ Romania (2003) and In Marx’s footsteps (2005). His piece in this volume is part of his research into the idea of heritage in modern Romanian culture. ZORAN MILUTINOVIĆ is Lecturer in Serbian and Croatian Literature and Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He has published three books: A meeting at a third place (2006), Metatheatrality (1994) and Negative and positive poetics (1992). KATARZYNA MURAWSKA-MUTHESIUS teaches art history at the Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published widely on the exchange of the gaze on the East–West axis during the Cold War, and edited a collection of essays Borders in art: Revisiting Kunstgeographie (2000). Her current research, supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, examines the image of Eastern Europe in twentieth-century western visual culture. GRAEME MURDOCK is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham. His publications include Calvinism on the frontier (2000) and Beyond Calvin. The intellectual, political and cultural world of Europe’s Reformed Churches, c. 1540–1620 (2004). IRINA V. POPOVA-NOWAK (Ph.D., Central European University, 1999) currently teaches Sociology and Western Civilisation at Strayer University and the University of Phoenix, US. She has been a recipient of a number of fellowships and has published several articles, for instance in the book Creating the Other, ed. Nancy Wingfield (2003).

iBracewell_A_book.indb 380

4/14/08 2:53:28 PM

Index

Adamovsky, Ezequiel 118 Adams, Percy G. 33, 42 Africa, Africans 90, 91, 151, 179, 261–91 Aksakov, Ivan 167, 169, 182 Albania/Albanians 20, 86, 88 Alecsandri, Vasile 108 Alexander I, Emperor of Russia 151, 152 Alexander I, Prince of Bulgaria 189, 190 America, Americans 100, 212, 296, 300, 312, 344, 346–47, 357, 363, 365–68 Amsterdam 24, 69, 72, 97, 132, 138 Anghelescu, Mircea 320 Antiquity 70, 73, 163, 226–31, 248, 252, 259 Antohi, Sorin 103, 108 Apáczai Csere, János 124, 126, 143 Arens, William 273 Arnold, Emanuel 44, 45, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59 Arski, Stefan 341 Asch, Shalom 308–09 Asia, Asians 74, 82, 84, 91, 92, 93, 107, 114, 115, 164, 192, 203, 211 Asiatic (see also Europe/Asia) 82, 93, 98, 113, 152, 157, 172, 176, 186, 207 AtanackoviΔ, Bogoboj 161 Athens 24, 227, 231 Athos, Mt. 67, 75, 76, 89, 90

iBracewell_A_book.indb 381

Austria, Austrians viii, 13, 23, 94, 102, 119, 122, 150, 181, 184, 190, 197, 199, 200, 207, 212–14, 217, 222, 313 BakiΔ-Hayden, Milica 377 Bal, Mieke 52 Balaton 200, 210, 221 Balina, Marina 361 Balkanism (see also Orientalism) 103, 149, 180, 182, 191, 262, 263 Balkans 10, 14, 15, 21, 68, 70, 74, 89, 96, 106, 111, 115, 117, 118, 120, 149, 153, 166, 179, 189, 192, 187, 245, 254, 262, 264 Baltazar, Camil 300, 302, 306, 307, 322 Barbarism, barbarian (see also Civilisation) 5, 61–63, 73–74, 82, 85–85, 90, 114, 125, 156–58, 168, 170, 171, 187, 192 Bari 77, 88, 368 Batthyány, Vincze 207 Bauman, Zygmunt 304 Bél, Mátyás 201–02 Belev, Gioncho 365–68, 373 Belgrade 24, 105, 183, 188, 189, 268, 270, 282, 286 Bentham, Jeremy 292 Berecz, Károly 198, 217 Berlin 296, 375–76 Bessarabia 117, 239 Bethlen, Gábor, Prince of Transylvania 131, 135, 140, 141

4/14/08 2:53:29 PM

382

Index

Bethlen, Miklós 80, 132, 134, 135, 137, 143 Bethlen, Péter 131–32, 135 Bhabha, Homi 111 Billewicz, Teodor 72 BjelanoviΔ, Sava 161 Blisters, prevention of 200–01 Bohemia, Bohemians 11, 13, 16, 20, 44–45, 49, 59, 67, 129, 138, 139, 141, 142, 214, 220 Bölöni Farkas 100, 103, 212 Boscovich, Ruggiero 61–62, 63–64 Bosnia 68, 152, 183–84 Boué, Ami 118 Brăila 306, 322–23 Bratanov, Dimitŭr 368–70 Bratislava 24, 88, 197 Bredetzky, Samuel 229 Briand, Aristide 314 Britain see United Kingdom Bronevskii, V.I. 93, 167 Brown(e), Edward 93, 214, 217 Bucharest 10, 24, 92, 102, 105, 253, 255, 256, 294, 302, 321–23, 324 Budapest 10, 24, 197, 207, 218 Bulgaria, Bulgarians 12, 16, 20, 21, 61–63, 73, 75, 96, 113, 115, 117, 166, 187–92, 343, 355–78 passim Buzard, James 2–4 Byron, Lord 224–25, 229–30, 232 Byzantium 9, 10, 15–16, 252 Calvinists see Protestantism Cambridge 122, 126–27, 142–43 Canterbury 126–27, 131, 142–44 Castoria 88 Catherine II, Empress of Russia 63 Catholicism, Catholics 19, 22, 63, 69, 70, 77, 85, 88, 91, 121,122, 138–41, 144–45, 183, 206, 369 Censorship, censors 100, 304, 355– 56, 361–64 ‘Central Europe’, as an entity 114–16 Centre/periphery 22, 67, 71, 94, 119, 228 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 109

iBracewell_A_book.indb 382

Chateaubriand 229, 237, 248 Chesterton, G.K. 195, 339 Christendom, Christianity, Christians 62, 68–69, 76, 78, 80, 82, 130, 158, 223, 226, 234, 240n3, 245, 253 Christian/‘Turk’ 50–51, 78, 166 Civilisation (see also Barbarism) 62, 83, 91, 94, 103, 110, 112, 124, 152, 155–58, 167, 169, 178, 185, 204, 233, 272–73, 284–86 Codru Draguşanu, Ion 108, 163 Cold War 325–78 passim Colonial and postcolonial studies 34, 111 Colonialism 65, 96, 152, 209, 289, 315–18, 363–64, 375 Comarnescu, Petre, 296, 324 Conrad, Joseph 280, 287–90 Constantinople (see also Istanbul) 9, 10, 12, 51, 61, 65, 67, 70, 74, 75, 218 Consumerism 322, 357, 365–68, 371–76 Corfu 89, 231 Coxe, William 92 Croatia, Croats 16, 20, 79, 86, 147, 152, 220 Csaplovics, János 215, 218 Cseffei, László 132, 133 Csoma Kőrösi, Sándor 203 Curipeschitz , Benedict 18, 19, 75 Czartoryski, Adam 151, 152, 157 Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovaks (see also Bohemia, Slovakia) 20, 343 Dacia, Dacians 247, 251, 252, 263 Dalmatia 20, 63, 152–54, 166 Danube 129, 198–99, 214, 221, 250, 251, 261 Danubian Principalities see Romania Danzig 129, 133, 134, 136, 139 Daskalov, Stoian 373–75 Derrida, Jacques 34, 271 Dessewffy, József 216

4/14/08 2:53:29 PM

Index

383

Dimitrova, Liliana 360 Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin 239 Domopis 105–07; defined 192–93, Hungarian: 205–07; Romanian 253–55; Slav 147–94 Dostoevskii, Fedor 180 Dragoicheva, Tsola 365 Dubrovnik 63, 182–83 Duda, Dean 42, 54n56 Durand, Gilbert 243

Europe/Asia 82, 83, 84, 91, 92, 93, 107, 112, 176, 179, 180 ‘Europeanisation’ 92, 98, 101, 189 Europeanness viii, ix, xi, 65, 92–94, 103, 105, 107, 178–80, 182, 184–85, 188–89, 282, 289, 298, 315, 318 Evans, R. J. W. 193 Exoticism 35, 79, 149, 225, 232, 254, 260–64, 320–21

East, the; Orient 64, 67, 74, 79, 97, 111, 113–15, 117, 118–20, 125, 156, 164, 166, 174–75, 186, 188–90, 193, 218, 232, 240, 253, 258, 331–32, 376 East/West ix, x, 8, 62, 87, 88, 105, 106, 112, 118–20, 156, 159, 175, 176, 185, 192, 211, 221, 225, 240n3, 244, 252–55, 260–64, 329 ‘Eastern Europe’, as an entity (see also Europe, eastern) ix, 5–6, 46, 62, 66, 112–8, 130, 149, 175, 332, 336, 344–45, 349, 353, 367; defined, viii, 5–6 Educational travel see Travel, educational; Grand Tour Egypt 68, 77, 149, 203, 229, 231 Eliade, Mircea 296 Emigration, Polish see Poland, Poles Eminescu, Mihai 258 England, English 76, 84, 102, 126– 28, 142, 143, 168, 170, 184, 204, 289, 325–54 passim Enlightenment, the 93, 94, 155, 178, 180, 207 Essay form 25, 41, 50–52 Euro-Orientalism see Orientalism Europe, eastern (see also ‘Eastern Europe’) 96, 112, 119, 296; defined, viii, ix, 6, 66 Europe, idea of viii, 61, 65–66, 69,72–74, 78, 81, 90–92, 99, 100, 111–112, 114, 120, 135, 158, 180, 223, 252, 281–82, 286, 294, 315

Fictional travel see Travel, fictional Fortis 153–55 France, French 101, 130, 137, 142, 233, 243, 253, 298, 311–13 Franzos, Karl Emil 117 Freud, Sigmund 46, 272, 333, 335 Frölich, David 19, 71, 142 Frontiers, boundaries: political 162, 204, 207, 213–14, 294, 329; linguistic & ethnic 209, 214; of Christian Europe 68–69, 126; with Muscovy 82–87; with Ottoman Empire 78–81, 207; symbolic viii, 64, 68–69, 78, 79, 88, 92, 93, 112, 114–15, 156, 159, 168, 176, 204, 205, 222, 278–79, 284–86, 320, 334–35, 353

iBracewell_A_book.indb 383

Gaze, traveller’s 66, 67, 103, 154, 156, 240n8, 252, 261, 334–36, 345–47, 350, 377 Genette, Gérard 36–38, 47n42, 287, 290 Geneva 310, 314–15 Genre x, 11, 15, 27–59, 90, 98–99, 192, 225, 229, 230, 276, 290, 295, 332 Georgievits, Bartolomæus 18, 19, 79 Georgirenes, Joseph 76–77 German (language) 13–14, 19, 141, 142, 162, 182, 187, 205, 208, 209, 217 Gide, André 301, 305, 321 Gil’ferding, A.F. 181, 183–84 Gloginski, Bogdan 370

4/14/08 2:53:29 PM

384

Index

Goethe 29, 237, 376 Goffman, Erving 240 Golescu, Constantin (Dinicu) 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106 Gorove, István 100, 218 Grand Tour (see also Travel, educational ) 224, 226, 229, 364 Greece, Greeks 112, 116, 166, 230– 32, 234–35, 252 Greek (language) 9–10 Guidebook 40, 41, 50, 56, 356 Gvadányi, József 207 Habsburg Monarchy 20, 44, 74, 75, 80, 88, 90, 121, 141, 186, 202, 206, 208, 213, 220, 221, 222 Hagarenes see Muslims Halle 90, 100 Haller, Gábor 132–33, 135, 143 Harant, Kryštof 18, 69 Harden, Theo 35 Havlí∑ek, Karel 185–86 Hazard, Paul 73 Hegel, G.W.F. 158, 178 Heidelberg 136, 137, 140 Herbert, Zbigniew ix Herder, Johann 158, 164, 165 Herzegovina 181, 183–84 Herzen, A.I. 174 Hogarth, Paul 342–45, 347, 350 Hole∑ek, Jozef 162, 167, 168, 169 Holland see Netherlands Holy Land, the (see also Palestine) 67–69, 115, 229 Horváth, Elek 209 Hrabal, Bohumil 45–46, 50, 52, 54, 55, 58 Hryhorovych-Bars’kyi, Vasyl’ 70, 77 Hugo, Victor 242, 245, 258 Hume, David 94 Hunfalvy, Pál 212 Hungary, Hungarians/Magyars (see also Travel writing, Hungarian) 14, 79–81, 85, 93, 99–103, 104– 05, 108–09, 111, 113–14, 121–45 passim, 172, 195–222 passim

iBracewell_A_book.indb 384

Hurban, Jozef Miloslav 219, 220 Iaşi 10, 24, 62, 105, 253, 306 Iceland 20, 43, 48–49 Illés (Edvi), Pál 200–01, 202 Illyrian Provinces 155 Illyrism, Illyrian Movement 147, 161 Imaginary travel see Travel, fictional In-betweenness 94, 156, 144, 213– 14, 218, 222 India 82, 295, 296, 297, 298 Intellectuals viii, 21, 22, 46, 62, 111, 206, 219, 220–21, 261, 264, 294, 296–97, 303 International Colonial Exhibition (1931) see Paris Iorga, Nicolae 238–64, 314 Istanbul (see also Constantinople) 24, 113, 118 Italy 163, 171, 368–70, 377, journey to, as genre 29, 51, 58, 70–71, 224–25 Japan 355, 363 Jerney, János 204 Jerusalem 12, 68, 69, 231, 234, 235 Jews 198, 294, 303–11, 314 Jire∑ek, Konstantin 186–92 Jókai, Mór 210 Joseph II, Emperor 23, 89, 90, 23, 205 Kallimachis, Grigorios, Prince of Moldavia 62 Karacs, Teréz 218 KaradjordjeviΔ, Aleksandar, Prince of Serbia 183 Kassa see Košice Katsarov, Konstantin 362–64, 366 Kazinczy, Ferenc 199–200, 206, 208 Kemeny, János 135 Kiossev, Aleksander 103 Kitromilides, Paschalis 87 Klátik, Zlatko 29, 30, 42, 47, 53–54, 57, 221 Kogălniceanu, Mihail 97, 242

4/14/08 2:53:30 PM

Index Kollár, Jan 160, 162–65, 169, 171, 176, 181, 219, 220 Kopitar, Jernej 23, 114 Korabinszky, Mátyás 202 Košice 77, 124, 128, 129, 135, 136, 141, 142, 144 Kovalevskii, E. P. 168 Kraków 16, 134 Krasi≈ski, Zygmunt 170, 171 Kraszewski, J. I. 174 KrižaniΔ, Juraj 85–87 KukuljeviΔ Sakcinski, Ivan 160 L’Estoile, Benoît de 316 Lamanskii, V.I. 182 Lamartine, Alphonse de 118, 229 Landscape 45, 73, 212–13, 217, 225, 254, 257–60 Latin (language) 10–11, 15, 16, 19, 32, 88, 109, 125, 142–44, 225, 261 Latin/Orthodox 66, 69, 74, 77–78, 88–89, 90 Latins see Catholicism League of Nations 296, 297, 314–15 Leiden 130, 135 Lejeune, Philippe 37–40, 47, 58, 268 Lenica, Jan 325–54 passim Levant 20, 63, 77 London 89, 90, 135, 137, 144, 170, 233, 325–54 passim, 370 Louvre 311–12 LovriΔ, Ivan 109n96, 154 Lutherans see Protestantism Maciej z Miechowa 19, 82 Macura, Vladimír 30, 56–57 Malczewski, Antoni 224–25, 230 Manolescu, Anca 252 Maps 17, 202, 215, 259; Šafařík’s ‘Slav map’ 147–48, 194; symbolic 62, 64, 159, 221 Maria Theresa of Austria, Empress 206 Mediterranean 10, 20, 89, 166, 225–32 Mednyánszky, Alajos 210, 221

iBracewell_A_book.indb 385

385

Men xi, 99, 135, 270, 319, 348 Mickiewicz, Adam 169, 226–29 Mikes, Kelemen 80–81 Miloitis, Iakovos 75 Miłosz, Czesław 228, 336 Mishkova, Diana 191 Mitteleuropa see ‘Central Europe’ Modernity viii, ix, 67, 95–97, 104, 170, 173, 191, 232, 261, 333, 349 Modrányi, Karol Alexander 221 Moldavia (see also Romania) 62, 179, 204, 207, 253, 255 Montenegro 152, 166–70, 182 Morlachs 154–55, 156, 157, 170, 185 Moscow 46, 84, 85, 87, 88, 92, 115, 159, 185, 211 Moszy≈ski, August 97 Muscovy see Russia Muslims 51, 63, 68, 87, 88, 115 Nagy, Titusz 197–98, 208–09 Naples 88, 178–79, 232, 233 Napoleon 151–53, 155, 157, 299 Nem∑iΔ, Antun 108, 171–72 Nemoianu, Virgil 264 NenadoviΔ, Ljubomir 106–07, 111, 167, 168 Netherlands 124, 132, 134, 135, 138, 140 New York 365–66 Newspapers 18, 23, 25 Nikitin, Afanasii 12 North 24, 74, 164, 224–25, 235 North/South 74, 112, 113n104, 224–25 Norwid, Cyprian 226 Notre–Dame 131,300 Noukios, Nikandros 75 Novel 25, 29, 35, 40, 42, 47, 66, 161, 218, 225, 269, 303, 305, 308, 309, 321 ObradoviΔ, Dositej 89–92, 95, 98, 101, 102

4/14/08 2:53:30 PM

386

Index

Occident see West Occidentalism 96, 191n91, 329, 331–32, 336, 339, 343–45, 349, 353, 377 Odessa 179, 233 Orient see East Orientalism, Euro–Orientalism (see also Balkanism) ix, 113, 117–18, 175, 186–87, 192, 331–32, 345, 349, 353, 378 Orosz, József 217 Osiecka, Agnieszka 325, 336 Others, otherness (see also Self/Other) viii, 35, 39, 73, 94, 149, 154, 192–93, 195, 209, 244, 257, 264, 271, 335, 336, 338, 342 Ottoman Empire (see also Turkey, Turks) 14, 19, 61–62, 68–69, 74, 78–81, 113, 115, 120, 121, 175, 179–82, 214, 281 Oxford 143 Paget, John 215 Palacký, František 115 Palestine (see also Holy Land) 75, 77 Pan–Slavism see Slav idea Pardoe, Julia 216 Paris 89, 101, 105, 130–31, 137, 223, 233, 253, 298–301, 304, 311–12, 318–22, 323, 371–72 International Colonial Exhibition (1931) 314–18 Pasek, Jan 83–84 Pavel, Toma 260 Pavlovich, Partenii 88, 90 Pest see Budapest Peter I, Emperor of Russia 23, 61, 77, 91, 92, 96, 179 Petőfi, Sándor 198 Petrescu, Camil 300, 302, 321, 322 PetroviΔ, Rastko 267–91 passim Picturesque 166, 260–63 Pilgrims, pilgrimage accounts 12, 18, 67–69, 70–71, 76–78, 88, 90, 224, 229, 235, 264 Podmaniczky, Frigyes 211

iBracewell_A_book.indb 386

Pogodin, Mikhail P. 175–79, 180, 182, 185 Poland, Poles 16, 61, 62, 73, 81, 82–84, 92, 93, 97, 98, 134, 141, 149–58, 165, 178, 185–86, 223– 35 passim, 325–54 passim; emigration 223–24, 329, 339–42 Polit–Desan∑iΔ, Mihailo 115 Pongrácz, Lajos 212–14 Poniatowski, Stanisław August, King of Poland 63, 97, 98 Poniatowski, Stanisław, Prince 61, 62 Popov, Aleksandr 167, 169 Popzlatev, Zlatko 370 Portugal 253, 256 Poszony see Bratislava Potocki, Jan 149–52, 157, 160, 163 Prague 44–45, 46, 177, 186, 187 Pressburg see Bratislava Pringos, Ioannes 97 Protestantism, Protestants 17, 70, 77, 85, 121–24, 139, 141, 144, 206 Proust, Marcel 267–68, 281, 301 Prussia 13, 108, 141, 150, 151, 168, 207 Pulszky, Ferenc 205 Pushkin, Alexander 179 Radvánszky, György 206 Radziwiłł, Mikołaj Krzysztof 68 Ragusa see Dubrovnik Ranke, Leopold von 158 Reguly, Antal 203 Reutenfels, Jakob 84–85 Robert, Cyprien 118, 174 Romania, Romanians (see also Moldavia, Wallachia) 117, 163, 238– 65 passim, 293–324 passim Romanticism (see also Travel writing, Romantic) 118, 155, 157, 159, 172–75, 187, 223–35, 238, 241, 245, 248, 254, 258, 263, 294, 319 Rome 19, 67, 70–71, 163, 226–28, 250, 252, 253, 267–68, 369

4/14/08 2:53:30 PM

Index Ruskin, John 249 Russia, Russians (see also Soviet Union) 24, 77, 82–87, 88, 91, 92, 96, 112, 115, 120, 138, 151–52, 159, 166, 167, 169, 175–86, 193, 203, 211 Russo, Alecu 105–06 Sándor, István 207 Sapieha, Alexander 152–57 Sarajevo 184 Sarmatia, Sarmatians 82, 84, 185 Scythia, Scythians 84, 157 Sebastian, Mihail 293–324 passim Self/Other ix, x, 38, 66, 103, 120, 149, 329, 330–31, 344–45, 350–51 Semiotic oppositions (see also Centre/ Periphery; Christian/Turk; East/ West; Europe/Asia; Latin/Orthodox; North/South; Self/Other) 38, 50, 55, 64, 78, 112, 118–20, 130, 174–75, 179–80, 192, 221, 225, 331, 349, 353 Serbia, Serbs 73, 75, 90, 106–07, 117, 153, 166, 179, 181–84, 188, 189, 281, 286 Shevryev, S.P. 185 Siberia 87, 152, 203, 223 Slav idea, Pan-Slavism 115, 118, 120, 148–94, 219–21 Slavdom, Slavs 82, 84–87, 112–15, 147–94, 219, 220–21, 223, 225 Slavic (languages) 11–13, 19, 63, 79, 90, 109, 147, 160, 182 Slavophiles 96, 169, 173, 175, 180–85 ‘Slav world’ 114–15, 148–49, 162, 174–75, 180, 193 Slovakia, Slovaks 219–221 Słowacki, Juliusz 223–35 passim Smyrna 89, 90, 91 Sobieski, Jakob 69 Solomos, Dionysios 231, 232 South 74, 166, 224–25, 232 South Slavs 152, 155, 166, 179,181, 184

iBracewell_A_book.indb 387

387

Soutsos, Nicolas 97 Soviet Union (see also Russia) 58, 331, 357 Spain 242, 255, 261 Sremski Karlovci (Karlowitz) 88 Staël, Madame de 225 Staňek, Václav 162 Ştefănescu, Cornelia 306 Sterne, Laurence 171, 231 Strassburg 130, 137 Štúr, L'udevít 220–21 Styria 94 Sweden 204, 371 Switzerland 176, 213, 361–62 Szallai, László 214 Széchenyi, István 97, 104, 113, 199, 204, 215–16 Szemere, Bertalan 100, 101, 108–09, 111, 113–14, 219 Szenci Molnar, Albert 137, 140 Szepsi Csombor, Márton 18, 72, 124, 126–31, 133, 134–43, 144 Tartars 82, 93, 180, 255 Tatras 166, 219 Telegdi, László 213 Todorov, Tzvetan 30–34, 37 Tolstoi, Petr 77 Tourism, tourists 3, 4, 232, 237, 241, 299–300, 312, 334–35, 345–47, 375, 377 Townson, Robert 93 Trajan, Emperor 163, 252, 261, 369 Transportation 196–201, 208, 210, 214; trains 161–62, 211, 357, 367, 371; steamboats 161–62, 165, 171–72, 198–200, 204, 231 Transylvania 22, 104, 121, 124–26, 142, 145, 197, 210, 221, 239 Travel (see also Tourism, tourists) defined 2–5, 195, 237–38; Cold War 329–331; 356–60; Hungarian, early modern 121–23, 131– 34; Hungarian, 19th-c. 195–204, 222 Travel narrative, defined 37–42

4/14/08 2:53:31 PM

388

Index

Travel writing traditions, American 26; Croatian 25; East European 18–26, 64–67; Enlightenment 29; German 14; Romantic 29, 53, 166, 169, 53, 223–35; Russian vii, 166, 179–86; Slavic 12, 42; Slovak 53, 57; Soviet 361; Western 66–67, 85, 92–95, 119, 214–19, 237 Travel, educational (see also Grand Tour) 23–24, 89–90, 122–23, 131, 201–04, 226, 295–97 Travel, fictional 201–2, 207, 218 Trefort, Ágoston 211 Turkey, Turks (see also Muslims) 51, 63, 68, 82, 113–14, 183, 207, 232, 281, 286 Turkish (language) 6, 14 Tyrmand, Leopold 352 Tyrol 94 Ukraine, Ukrainians 61, 70, 117, 151, 185, 224–25 United Kingdom (see also England) 45, 75, 217, 328–29, 339–50 United States see America Urhazy, György 117 Urry, John 335 Utopias (see also Imaginary travel) 101, 180, 182, 234, 331

Vetter, Daniel 20, 43–44, 48–49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 58 Vianu, Tudor 244, 248 Vienna, Viennese 89, 90, 184, 186, 189, 192, 197, 206, 313, 370–71 Virgil, tomb of 233 Vratislav, Václav, z Mitrovic 18, 51 Wagner, Jan 118 Wallachia, Wallachians (see also Romania) 63, 99, 104, 207, 254, 255 Warsaw 61, 134, 155, 177–78, 233, 329, 339, 352 Wesselényi, Miklós 97, 104, 204 West, the; Occident viii, 11, 65, 66, 87, 89, 100–01, 105, 111, 114, 116, 118–19, 125, 156, 159, 167, 173–76, 189, 211, 237–38, 251– 52, 262–64, 331–32, 336–37, 356–60, 376–78; ‘rotten’ 156, 170–74, 233, 330–01, 339–40, 343–44, 366 ‘Western Europe’, as an entity (see also West, the) 5, 114, 129 Westernisers 96, 182 Wolff, Larry 5, 62n3, 113n104 Women xi, 100, 135, 209, 218, 268– 70, 348–49 Yugoslavia ix, 343

Varna 113 Vautrin, Henri 156–57 Vedres, István 203 Venice 80, 163, 171, 247, 249, 254 Verantius, Antonius (Antun Vran∑iΔ) 18, 19, 73–74 Vernacular languages, vernacularization 9–19 21, 32, 65–66, 89, 90

iBracewell_A_book.indb 388

Zagreb 147 Zaimov, Khristo 361–62, 364 Zaleski, Antoni 117 Zaruba, Jerzy 339, 340, 341–42, 351 Zorkóci, Karol 221

4/14/08 2:53:31 PM