ESSAYS

Western ‘Eurasianism’ and the ‘New Eastern Europe’: Discourse of Exclusion*

Mykola Riabchuk

The term ‘Eurasia’ has many meanings but all of them can be subsumed under two main rubrics. The first is purely geographical, referring to a formidable landmass stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and considering Europe and Asia as a single continental entity, with a former as a peninsula of the latter. The second meaning is much more versatile but in all its multi-facet representations it refers typically to a Greater Russia, to some space dominated historically by the Russian Empire and its Soviet (and post-Soviet) reincarnation.

The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity

Hayden White

The current "discourse of Europe" features an effort to "identify" a Europe that is good and noble, capable of serving as a spiritual basis for a new and (let us not fear the term) post-modernist economic system based on consumerism, multinational capitalism, and commitment to what is euphemistically called "the free market". This quest for a Europe that is good and noble and therefore worthy to provide the ethos of a new kind of community (at once democratic and cultivated, both socialistic and capitalistic, Christian and humanistic, scientific and pious) is motivated in large part by the desire to redeem the Europe of the fathers from the onus of guilt born of an awareness that "Europe" had been responsible for the new forms of social violence spawned in the "rotten twentieth century" (Timothy Garton Ash’s term).

Central Europe as a Problem

Leonard Neuger

Towards the end of the nineteenth century there appeared in Germany the idea of Mitteleuropa, a concept related in discursive terms to colonial expansionism, infamous in its intentions. It is worth recalling, however, that the word "colony" (and its derivatives) comes from the Latin colonia, where it meant: a peasant enclosure, a settlement, in order to enter later - via the French colon (one who tills the soil, a settler) - eighteenth-century European dictionaries in its current, rather pejorative, and in any case widely disputed meaning. In the discourse of colonial expansionism, however, it retained a certain heroic aura, since it preferred settlers to nomads, those who cultivated anything at all to ignoramuses. The Latin colonia coincides here with the closely related term "culture" (from the Latin cultus, meaning cultivation, husbandry, breeding) in its original, agricultural association with that which is stable,

In the Shadow of Empires. Postcolonialism in Central and Eastern Europe — Why not?

Aleksander Fiut

The omnipresent, although invisible, shadow of empires has undoubtedly left its destructive, pernicious traces not only on the antipodes, but also on Central and Eastern Europe. Insidiously, day after day, it was shaping reactions and attitudes, ways of thinking and of perceiving reality, influencing not only all aspects of daily life, but also morality. The imprint of subjugation has been stamped everywhere on the region and is hard to erase. But can it be described?

Appearance and Essence in History. According to The "Last Novel" by Teodor Parnicki.

Stefan Szymutko

Regardless of whether we are dealing with expansionism and exploitation (as in colonialism), or with overcoming their effects (as in postcolonialism), that is with the task of rebuilding of identity, it is politics that decides about culture. We abandoned long ago any illusions, if we ever had them (the philosophers of the Greek polis did not), that thought rules over itself. In the 19th century, Hegel proved that the modern state and its culture are a single entity, and in the 20th. Foucault states even more sharply, that governance (power) is the creator of knowledge. Therefore, there are no problems separate from life, and no writing beyond politics. The most abstract ideas are formulated within the most real of realities, and never without connection to it, even when thinking apparently takes its own course.

Modern Polish Literature Through a Postcolonial Lens

Dariusz Skórczewski

Castorp by Pawel Huelle, Poland's most accomplished contemporary writer [Halikowska-Smith, 2003] has frequently been interpreted as a counterpart to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. A reader of Mann's novel may remember that before his arrival at Davos, Hans Castorp spent four terms as a student at the Danzig Polytechnic. It is around this digression that Huelle builds his plot, inserting into the biography of Mann's protagonist an extensive Gdansk-based episode.

Postcolonial Ressentiment — the Ukrainian Case

Tamara Hundorova

A "negative" perspective as a starting-point for the interpretation of identity began with Friedrich Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals" (1887), where he introduces the idea of ressentiment and interprets it as part of an "overturn of the value-oriented view" [Nietzsche 1992, 451]. With time this notion acquired a broader cultural interpretation as a particular kind of "imaginary revenge" on an opponent that became an inspiration in the development of an individual "counter-existentia", or counter-existence. Nietzsche modified the habitual affirmative, self-assertive form of identification and talked instead about ressentiment as a method used by those who are incapable of counteraction in any practical way but rather choose to reward themselves with an imaginary revenge. This moment is positively creative, according to Nietzsche: the moment when the appraising look turns away from oneself and towards the outside.

In Bed with an Elephant: Cultural Wars and Rival Identities in Contemporary Ukraine

Mykola Riabchuk

The metaphor used in the title of this paper was coined by the former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau who, in his 1969 speech at the Washington Press Club, said that sharing a land mass with a neighbor richer and more powerful than oneself was like sleeping with an elephant. "No matter how even-tempered and friendly the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt" [Kennedy 1996, viii].

Central and Eastern Europe from a Postcolonial Perspective

Janusz Korek

The term "postcolonialism" is used today as a collective term for various kinds of theoretical approach that take a critical attitude towards the problems of knowledge, politics and cultural collision. Postcolonial studies, which have become popular as a consequence of literary research, are not confined today merely to literary studies.

Postcolonial Europe

Western ‘Eurasianism’ and the ‘New Eastern Europe’: Discourse of Exclusion*

The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity

Central Europe as a Problem

In the Shadow of Empires. Postcolonialism in Central and Eastern Europe — Why not?

Appearance and Essence in History. According to The "Last Novel" by Teodor Parnicki.

Modern Polish Literature Through a Postcolonial Lens

Postcolonial Ressentiment — the Ukrainian Case

In Bed with an Elephant: Cultural Wars and Rival Identities in Contemporary Ukraine

Central and Eastern Europe from a Postcolonial Perspective

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