Jacob Mikanowski

“Motion is the enduring principle of Eastern Europe. Motion of people, motion of faiths, motion of ideas. This is the reason why population maps of Eastern Europe, especially old ones, look so disorderly, like slabs of marbled beef or a cup of coffee before the cream has settled. The migrations leading to the creation of Western European nations happened in the very distant past. In Eastern Europe, they never stopped. Long after the Visigoths and Franks, Saxons and Jutes of the West were a distant memory, nomadic Cumans and Pechenegs were still arriving from the steppes. Tatars were still conducting great slave raids in the territory around Lviv in Mozart's day, and only ceased when Catherine the Great finally put a stop to them.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“A new spirit had taken hold of Eastern Europe by 1900. It might be most easily characterized as a violent disjuncture between the heart and the head. Materially, things had never been better. Europe was nearing the end of almost a half-century of (barely) interrupted peace. Most adults had never heard a shot fired in anger. That same half-century witnessed an unprecedented burst of economic growth and technical innovation. When steamships were dropping passengers off at Dereszewicze, citizens of Budapest were already riding the city's first underground metro line, which had opened in 1896. Cities, for the first time, were illuminated at night, something Eastern Europe took an unexpected lead in: Lviv was the first city to use modern kerosene lamps, and Timişoara, in present-day Romania, was the first city in Europe to be lilt by electricity.

Railways now crisscrossed the continent, reaching even Janina's home in the forgotten Lithuanian hamlet of Bieniakonie. Grain from Ukraine flooded the American market, while wood from the remotest forests of Lithuania could be shipped all the way to Liverpool and beyond. Buoyed by these new connections, landowners grew suddenly and unexpectedly rich. . . .

But however prosperous things might have seemed, spiritually there was a feeling of mounting crisis. Everywhere people put their trust in progress and scientific discovery, to the detriment of older faiths. In politics, nationalism still held sway -- indeed its influence had never been greater -- but in the arts, its primacy had begun to wane. The great national bards were still being celebrated, ut more as icons of struggle than as writers to be read. Young people especially craved something new.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land