COLUMBIA GUIDE TO THE LITERATURES OF EASTERN EUROPE SINCE 1945, THE

Comparative Literature, Fall 2004 by Emerson, Caryl

THE COLUMBIA GUIDE TO THE LITERATURES OF EASTERN EUROPE SINCE 1945. By Harold B. Segel. Chronology of Major Political Events, 1944-2002; List of Journals, Newspapers, and Other Periodical Literature; Introduction; Bibliography; Author and Nation Index. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. xxxi 641 p.

When empires come to an end and maps are redrawn, names matter. In 1984, several years before the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union-indeed, before that end was even dreamed of-Milan Kundera, already one decade in emigration in Paris, published a polemical essay in The New York Review of Books entitled "The Tragedy of Central Europe." We are Europe, he insisted, not the "East." The fact that militant East Slavs moved their tanks into a number of Central European countries at the end of the last war cannot undo the fact that Prague is further west than Vienna, nor the fact that Central Europeans, who witnessed such a brutal destruction of their national cultures, hold European values more dear than do their untested fellow intellectuals in Paris or London. This essay became famous for its "small-nation chauvinism," for its advocacy of two virtues that Kundera believed were quintessentially "Central": a distrust of history (for victims are outside history, always written by the conquerors) and an ability, under almost any conditions, to laugh. From Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Ljubljana came voices firm in the wisdom that they could not afford to take the big solutions-and the big sacrifices-seriously; and in this modest survivorship amidst the greedy empires, Kundera saw the salvation of Europe. But the Soviet Russians (who were a mistake, a bad joke) must not be seen by the rest of the world as somehow organic to this precious, richly diversified central zone.

Then came 1989, 1991, the Iron Curtain was rolled back, and Central European nations were reborn. In debates throughout the 1990s, "Central" gradually became the politically correct appellation for this part of the world. The burden this placed on American literacy about other countries-never very strong-was tremendous. We could continue to ignore the Russian language; it was an entirely foreign alphabet, exotic like an arabesque, with familiar transliterations long in place. Its novels were already part of our canon, and since visitors from the West had always been supplied with guides and spies, there was no need to navigate on our own. But here suddenly were nations speaking up and getting into the news with names and places that had to be pronounced, that seemed to be in "Western" scripts but that seemed to lack the necessary vowels, or had so many diacritical marks that we were at a loss for fonts to register them. And we were free to visit their cities, read their literature. Some of these nations had almost no presence in English translation (Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Slovakia, Slovenia) ; others had long been well represented, at least in novelistic prose (Czechs and Poles). Most fell somewhere in between. Then came that miraculous series from Northwestern University Press, "Writings from an Unbound Europe," which began to publish, translate, and reprint in paperback dozens of Central European authors, with the diacriticals in place and with the authors placed in history. There arc still huge blank spots on this map, but it is now possible to leach a course, in English translation, on the literatures of Central Europe-and be overwhelmed by the choices among excellent, accessible texts that must be made.

A most welcome role will be played in this restoration by the volume under review. It is clear that Harold Segel has thought hard about "Central" versus "Eastern," and also about the difference between an encyclopedia, a dictionary, a handbook, an introduction, and a guide. Two competing texts are instructive benchmarks: Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe from the Congress of Vienna to the Fall of Communism, edited by Richard Frucht (Garland 2000), and volume 215 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, 20th-century East European Writers, First Series, edited by Steven Serafin (Gale Group 1999). Frucht's lavish volume covers two centuries and answers for history and politics as well as literature, but still does a serviceable job with the major writers, providing all titles in the original languages (the acid test) and a modest rubric for Further Reading. The DLB is more generous: full-length essays by major scholars for each writer, with photographs and a multilingual bibliography. Such detail necessarily restricts the number of writers included (under twenty each for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, the four nationalities covered). The Columbia Guide is somewhat differently conceived. Among its more astonishing features is the fact that Harold B. Segel is not the editor of the volume, but its author. Thirteen languages and nations, 700 author entries, it's all him. In the Preface, he notes briefly that the staggering geolinguistic scope was a challenge "too enticing to turn aside without making at least a fair try" (p. vii). It is, of course, thrilling when a senior scholar of Harold Segel's distinction undertakes such tasks. It means that the priorities and emphases in all parts of the book will cohere; even though its parts are designed to be read separately, the volume is still, literally, a guide.