Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe

Sarmatia Europea to Post-Communist Bloc

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781351034401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe puts images centre stage and argues for the agency of the visual in the construction of Europe's east as a socio-political and cultural entity. This book probes into the discontinuous processes of mapping the eastern European space and imaging the eastern European body. Beginning from the Renaissance maps of Sarmatia Europea, it moves onto the images of women in ethnic dress on the pages of travellers' reports from the Balkans, to cartoons of children bullied by dictators in the satirical press, to Cold War cartography, and it ends with photos of protesting crowds on contemporary dust jackets.

Studying the eastern European 'iconosphere' leads to the engagement with issues central for image studies and visual culture: word and image relationship, overlaps between the codes of othering and self-fashioning, as well as interaction between the diverse modes of production specific to cartography, travel illustrations, caricature, and book cover design.

This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, and central Asian, Russian and Eastern European studies.

1
Welcome to Slaka

Writing Slaka

Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange, shortlisted for the 1983 Booker Prize and proclaimed a ‘penetrating satire’ on east-west relations, describes the vicissitudes of a ‘hapless Dr Petworth’, teacher of linguistics at a lesser British university on his lecture tour around ‘Eastern Europe’s most rigidly controlled country’, named Slaka.¹ Not to be found on any map, Slaka is a Cold War simulacrum of the other Europe behind the Iron Curtain. Its violent history and politics, unstable boundaries, and its hybrid heritage overridden by socialist realism have been constructed out of a plethora of primary features taken for the essence of the timeless ‘eastern Europeanness’.

Slaka is … the historic capital and quite the largest metropolis of that small dark nation of plain and marsh, mountain and factory known in all the history books as the bloody battlefield (tulsto’ii uncard’ninu) of central eastern Europe. Located by an at once kind and cruel geography at the confluence of many trade routes, going north and east, south and west, its high mountains not too high to cut it off, its broad rivers not too broad to obstruct passage, it is a land that has frequently flourished, prospered, been a centre of trade and barter, art and culture, but has yet more frequently been pummelled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and opposed by the endless invaders through this all too accessible landscape. Swedes and Medes, Prussians and Russians, Asians and Thracians, Tartars and Cassocks, Mortars and Turds, indeed almost every tribe or race specialist in pillage and rape, have been there, as to some necessary destination, and left behind their imprint, their custom, their faiths, their architecture, their genes. This is a country that has been now big, now small, now virtually non-existent. Its inhabitants have seen its borders expand, contract and on occasion disappear from sight, and so confused is its past that the country could now be in a place quite different from that in which it started. And so its culture is a melting pot, its language a potpourri, its people a salad.²

Although the novel is set in the summer of the British Royal Wedding of 1981, and thus firmly anchored in British/western time, the Slakanian time unfolds in a different dimension. It is locked down at the heydays of communism, when the large portraits of the Party leaders surveyed the streets and the pictures of ‘the happy workers and the clean tractors’ monopolised museum rooms. By 1981, however, the communist Slaka had gone, the paraphernalia of Stalinism long demoted, destroyed, or shuffled away to the archives of eastern Europe’s embarrassing past. Moreover, the summer of 1981 was marked by the workers’ revolution in Poland, which made headlines both east and west, dismantling the status quo of the divided Europe. And yet, as testified by Bradbury’s narrative, in the 1980s the end of the Cold War could not have been predicted, and the disjunction between the ‘historic’ western time and the frozen eastern European time could safely be posed as eternal, foreclosing any significant transfer between the two incompatible worlds. The last lines of the book assert the reader that Petworth’s luggage with the smuggled manuscript of Katya Princip’s dissenting novel, to be published in Paris, was destroyed by airport security.

The most ingenious of Bradbury’s fabrications and the most pertinent vis-à-vis the professional expertise of Dr Petworth’s is the Slakan language. This uncanny hybrid of Latin and Slavonic phonemes, morphemes, and syntax made comical by blending familiarity with incongruity, is elaborated into an explicit signifying code of what constitutes the essence of ‘eastern Europeanness’, the evidence of its impurity. During Pet-worth’s visit to Slaka, it is indeed the language which becomes the terrain of ‘a small revolution’, prompted by some unspecified drive towards liberalisation and resulting in a short-lived displacement of doubled ‘i’ with doubled ‘u’ and back again. But in spite of its alterity, the Slakan language is not an obstacle for Dr Petworth. From the moment of crossing the border, his linguistic expertise allows him to mimic basic tenets of Slakan and to introduce himself to a Slakan airport officer with confidence: Prif’sorii universitayii linguistici, hospitalito officiale.³ Even if Petworth’s hosts, Slakan university lecturers, novelists, and ministry officials speak English fluently, they cannot match his skills. Their faults (‘Do you surprise I like Hemingway?’) are the markers of Slakanian otherness.⁴ Petworth’s lectures in Slaka on the ‘transformation of English as a medium of international communication’ discusses the inevitability of its distortion. And yet, behind the detached academic description of the process hides the implied binary of purity versus contamination, and the Self versus Other dichotomy.

The same focus on an inept English lies at the core of the novel’s follow-up Why Come to Slaka? (Figure 1.3), a parody travel guide which grew out of the original introduction to Rates of Exchange, ‘Visiting Slaka: a few brief hints’. Its major part is a phrase book which juxtaposes the comical phrases in faulty English to their ostensibly correct Slakan prototypes: ‘Our artists love socialist realism/No malori amico realismusim social’iskim’.⁵ The implied asymmetry between the incorrect English and the ‘correct’ Slakan makes clear that it is exclusively the Slakan ‘I’, attempting to represent itself in English, which is to be inferiorised and mocked, but not the other way round.⁶ The Slakan speaker of English has been disempowered in advance and doomed to enunciate his/her difference – the English speaker of Slakan/Dr Petworth retains his authority, for his self-proclaimed correctness is unverifiable.

Concerned with the visual construction of eastern Europe, I began, somewhat perversely, from Bradbury’s strategies of writing about Slaka, because they compressed the most pervasive tropes of eastern European discourse during the Cold War. At that time, the region was widely perceived as ‘just one block’,⁷ as a uniform terra social-istica,⁸ and the assumptions of its backwardness, instability, and propensity to subjugation gained the status of Jane Austen’s ‘truths universally acknowledged’. Bradbury’s metaphors, including the emphasis on the region’s ‘cruel geography’, comparing its culture to a ‘pot-pourri, its people to ‘a salad’, carrying the genes of ‘endless invaders’ were satirical versions of the regular tropes in western histories of eastern Europe, produced from the late 1950s onwards. Bearing metaphorical titles, such as ‘lands between’, those books would almost invariably include a paragraph on the absence of natural geographical boundaries, comparing the physical features of the territory to an organism ‘with vertebrae and arteries but no external shell’, open to penetration by ‘marauders and interlopers’ from all directions.⁹ The notion of rape and conquest would indeed serve as the region’s master narrative, turning into a key argument in major cultural disputes on the international scene. Among others, it was successfully adopted in Milan Kundera’s claim of central Europe as ‘kidnapped west’ (1984).¹⁰

Eastern Europe as an imaginary land, however, is older than the Cold War. Bradbury was not the first to produce a satirical vision of a country invented from scratch, together with its name, history, and language. He followed the well-established rules of writing about unknown lands in general and about Europe’s east in particular. Since Mozart’s adoption of gibberish, Slavonic-sounding names for his entourage during his stay in Prague in 1786, or Anthony Hope’s invention of Ruritania and Kravonia (1896),¹¹ an endless string of fictional kingdoms and dictatorial ‘republics’, located in this remote part of Europe and ruled by officials bearing names as bizarre as those of their countries, have been conjured up by twentieth-century novelists and satirists. They include Agatha Christie’s Hertzoslovakia,¹² and more recently, a counter-guide to Molvania, ‘the world’s number one producer of beetroot’, which was plainly modelled on Bradbury’s Slaka, not to mention Slovetzia and Krakozhia, the autocratic countries invented for the sake of Hollywood.¹³ As argued by Larry Wolff, ‘the employment of nonsense in the rendering of Eastern Europe’ constituted one of the ways of dealing with its disorienting geography and history, as well as with the incomprehensibility of its languages roundly perceived as hilarious.¹⁴

It was also Wolff who in his influential study of 1994 initiated the process of inquiry into the western invention of eastern Europe tout court. Examining eighteenth-century literature, travel diaries, and philosophical and socio-political pamphlets centred on Russia and Poland, he argued that the idea of a backward, barbarian, and underdeveloped eastern Europe was a cultural product of the Enlightenment, inseparable from the process of the invention of the modern western Self. Wolff’s study was soon complemented by Maria Todorova’s deconstruction of the derogatory discourse on the Balkans,¹⁵ as well as by Vesna Goldsworthy’s analysis of the literary perceptions of the Balkans in novels.¹⁶ Those three books became the point of departure for an extensive transdisciplinary analysis of the rules of the discourse, representing eastern European societies and their culture in literature, the media and movies as well as in academe itself. Books, conferences, PhD dissertations, and articles followed in great numbers. Among the key topics examined were the notions of the ‘east’ and ‘eastness’ as the Other in identity formation, the Balkans as a metaphor, post-communist transition, gender politics, human rights and ethnic minorities, the rise of nationalist movements, as well as post-communist memory and nostalgia.¹⁷ In the new millennium, the perception of eastern European migrants turned into the theme of TV documentaries, novels, and films, transgressing the boundaries of academic inquiry.¹⁸ Although the terms ‘image’, ‘imaging’, and ‘imagining’ abound in the titles of those studies, the issue of visual representation of the region was raised just in a handful of texts.¹⁹ As far as methods were concerned, the usability of postcolonial discourse analysis and its interpretive tools, as well as the question of the postcolonial status of the region dominated the debates.

Is ‘Post’ in Post-Communist the Same as ‘Post’ in Postcolonial?

So what kind of Other is the eastern European Other? The centuries of territorial conquest by the Habsburgs, Prussia, as well as by the Ottoman and Russian empires, experienced in different ways by individual states and regions, were followed by a political and economic submission to the Soviet Union, misleadingly seen as homogenous. Subsequently, at the post-communist stage, another form of surrender to western/global hegemony was underscored by the rhetoric of liberation and return to Europe. But how does the eastern European alterity compare to that invested in the postcolonial Other in Asia and Africa?

The image suggests an answer before the text. At the heyday of the Cold War confrontations, the colonial condition of eastern Europe and its affinity to that of the Third World was declared in almost purely visual terms, and with a surprising directness, by Leslie Illingworth’s cartoon, published in Punch in April 1958 (Figure 1.1). Harold Macmillan and Nikita Khrushchev appear as boys...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Welcome to Slaka
• 2 Mapping Eastern Europe
• 3 The Lure of Ethnic Dress: Eastern Europe in the Traveller’s Gaze
• 4 Mr Punch Draws Eastern Europe
• 5 The Battle of the Dust Jackets
• 6 Farewell to Slaka
• Bibliography
• Index