Eastern or Central Europe? [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 253-269]

EASTERN OR CENTRAL EUROPE?
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that, in the West and in Russia, gave birth to giants whose works painted
for us every important feature of their era, is puny, feeble, weak in other
parts of Eastern Europe, because of the lack of institutionalized national
life; the instable and unreal character of national reality, fragmented into
immoral facts and principles unsuited for action. In other words, realist
authors appear where and when a framework of national life somehow
evolves: between the two World Wars, again lagging far behind Western
European, that is, "world literature," whose advantage was already well
overcome by romanticism. It is precisely this national reality that is voiced
in the Lithuanian Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas' novel In the Shadow of
Altars, in the works of Miroslav Krleia, Ivo Andric, and Ivan Olbracht.
I omit the great realist "peasant authors," Sadoveanu, Mdrics, Tamsaare,
Rebreanu, intentionally, they will be needed in the context of another
line of thought, although they would fit in here as well. The critical reception of Maria Dabrowska's 1934 novel Nights and Days, is typical: "At
last, realism gains a decisive voice-accompanied by general approval-in
her works. Realism, which in Polish literature has always endured a plebeian
existence, and in her pre-romantic novels bore the marks of artistic childhood disease, finding its way with difficulty through the labyrinth of the
romantic rules of etiquette, lagging behind European contemporaries in
sentimentalism, and burdened with didacticism in the era of positivism,
later on despised or degenerated, appears before us today in its most human
and most beautiful form."7 If this is a valid assessment of Polish literature,
it is just as valid for all the others!
2
The aforementioned lack of national reality leads into the problem
area of social development. A. Gerschenkron distinguishes three types of
European industrialization: the most developed English, where the capital
necessary for industrialization was provided by internal accumulation;
the less efficient Western European, where the needed capital had to be
accumulated by the banks; and finally the Eastern European, the "Russian"
type, where capital was so scarce that the state had to intervene. The state,
that-with the exception of Russia-either did not exist, or was not independent! This path toward industrialization led to increased dependence
on foreign capital, well exemplified by the fact that around the turn of
the century the major portion of the state revenue sources of Serbia,
Bulgaria and Greece-taxes, rail revenues, etc.-was impounded by foreign
capitalists.
The formation and re-formation of Eastern European national states
in 1918 intensified the role of the state and its concomitants: bureaucratic
centralization, the unconditional respect and hatred forsuperiors, managers