GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE

“Eastern Europe is disappearing. Not the physical place, but the idea. Whatever held the region together in the mind's eye — a shared experience of occupation and exclusion, the permanent-seeming weight of economic backwardness, treasured memories of defeat — is gone, or at least not as present as it had been.”

In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, the bonds that held all the various nations of Eastern Europe together as Soviet satellites have dissolved, calling into question what exactly connects them, and whether there was ever any such place to begin with. But, Jacob argues, there really was something more to Eastern Europe than shared political subjection. Eastern Europe had a particular character, and it will be his goal in this book to name and describe the peculiar flavor of the place, from the Baltics to the Balkans, from Prague to Kiev. Part history, part travelogue, part reading of the disparate canon of Eastern European literature, GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE will be a work in the tradition of Ian Frazier's Travels in Sibera, or Simon Winder's Germania or Danubia—an anatomy of a region as refracted through its literature, and a fascinating exploration of an incredibly diverse, complex, and surprising terrain.

JACOB MIKANOWSKI is a graduate student in Eastern European history at Berkeley, but has worked for years as a journalist, critic and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Guardian, Lapham's Quarterly, and elsewhere. He grew up in the US, but his family is Polish.

You can learn more about Jacob, and find more of his work, on his website: https://jacob-mikanowski.com/

Goodbye, Eastern Europe! will be an expansion of Jacob's piece of the same name in the LA Review of Books last year, which was one of the more popular pieces that LARB has published. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/goodbye-eastern-europe#!