Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture beyond the Nation

This volume, eagerly awaited by many scholars of Central and Eastern European literatures and cultures, is a product of many years of reflection and scholarly inquiry by Jessie Labov, linking her longstanding interest in the blossoming of the discourse on Central Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s and her more recent efforts focused on digital humanities. It has already received recognition for its contribution to Polish studies, as it was awarded honorable mention for the Kulczycki Book Prize.Labov's book offers a welcome combination of traditional and innovative methodologies, and brings together analysis of both well-known and unjustly neglected publications, primarily periodicals. While in Slavic literary history the prominent role of periodicals has long been recognized, recent years have also seen the rise of periodical studies as a specialized subfield of literary scholarship in the US and elsewhere, which is an additional factor that should garner Labov's study wider attention beyond Slavic and East European Studies. At the starting point of the volume is an inquiry into the concept of Central Europe as it was developed and championed, approximately from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, by a group of prominent intellectuals, primarily from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, and at the time mostly based in the diaspora—hence the “transatlantic” in the title. While this debate spilled over into many other venues, at its heart was an annual publication titled Cross Currents, edited at the University of Michigan. The in-depth consideration of this periodical and its broader intellectual contexts comprises approximately half of the book.Cross Currents had several eminent Polish contributors, among them Czesław Miłosz, Adam Michnik, and Adam Zagajewski, and Miłosz's essay “Looking for a Center: On the Poetry of Central Europe,” opened the periodical's inaugural issue. In this book, Labov offers a nuanced comparative analysis of the Miłosz vision of Central Europe with the perhaps better-known one offered by Milan Kundera in his famous 1984 essay. Cross Currents also repeatedly focused on the region's past multicultural urban nodes, like the Vilnius of Miłosz's and Tadeusz Konwicki's childhood and youth or Bruno Schulz's Drohobych. However, Polish Studies scholars would be especially interested in a later section of Labov's book, which discusses at length the prominent post-World War II Polish émigré periodicals, Kultura and Wiadomości. Kultura in particular becomes the focus of an innovative digital humanities project employing the methodology of the so-called “distant reading,” or “reading from a distance,” championed by the Italian-American scholar Franco Moretti. Labov uses GIS (geographic information system) tools to achieve an understanding of many aspects of Kultura's global reach. It is especially instructive in presenting the mapping of Kultura's contributors (with two categories considered separately and in depth, the authors and the letter writers), as well as the journal's funders, across the planet. The mapping is also time-sensitive, so we can trace the shifts in the journal's reach and in the body of its supporters.Both the careful analysis of the content of Cross Currents and other intellectual ventures linked to it, like the 1988 writers’ conference in Lisbon organized by the Wheatland Foundation, and the GIS mapping of Kultura help advance a key argument of Labov's study, namely that Central Europe is more productively approached not as a clearly delimited and objectively existing land area; rather, it is a culturally constructed space for intellectual exchange that has operated beyond national borders and fostered productive dialogue between artists and intellectuals from many different countries. The distant reading of Kultura offered by Labov strongly subverts the stereotypical views of this periodical as a “journal for intellectuals and political elites” (p. 152) and of the Polish diasporic community as highly conservative. Throughout the volume, she argues for a vision of a richer, more robust dynamic of engagement between the émigré and underground domestic cultures during communist rule, which are often described using the Russian terms tamizdat and samizdat. As for Central Europe as a “floating” concept denoting both a set of relationships and practices and a cultural-geographic framework, Labov argues forcefully and convincingly that it has not outlived itself with the postcommunist-era EU and NATO expansion; rather, it has actually been migrating eastward, and in one of the concluding sections Labov insightfully discusses the reverberations of this concept and discursive space in twenty-first-century Ukraine and Belarus.Theoretically astute yet lucidly written and highly accessible, Jessie Labov's book follows in the footsteps of other important recent studies, such as Anita Starosta's Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference (2016) and George Gasyna's Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise (2011), that reconceptualize earlier understandings of Eastern and Central Europe by engaging with discourses on cultural globalization, imperialism, and postcolonialism. Together with the work of scholars based in Poland, such as Dariusz Skórczewski, who also productively employ postcolonial paradigms, it ensures continuous fruitful exploration of the legacies of Central Europe's utopian vision in the rapidly transforming world.