Piotr Florczyk at The American Scholar:
The opening sentence of Jacob Mikanowski’s sweeping history of Eastern Europe—“a place,” he asserts, “that doesn’t exist”—calls to mind a seminal 1983 essay by the recently deceased Czech-French novelist, Milan Kundera. In A Kidnapped West: A Tragedy of Central Europe, Kundera reminded his readers that Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were historically and culturally closer to the West than to the Soviet East, and should therefore be thought of as central rather than eastern European. Alas, his appeal fell on deaf ears, and the region remains “eastern,” shorthand for a place where, rumor has it, nobody smiles and the smell of burned cabbage wafts through the corridors of charmless, concrete apartment blocks. Indeed, western prejudice was never more in evidence than during the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when many commentators painted the war as just another incomprehensible scuffle in the other Europe, among the denizens of lands once obscured by the Iron Curtain.
more here.