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Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map Of Civilization On The Mind Of The Enlightenment.

Larry Wolff. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. xiv + 419 pp. Maps, notes, and index. $45.00 (cloth),
ISBN 0-804-72314-1.
Reviewed by Thomas J. Hegarty, University of Tampa.
Published by HABSBURG (July, 1995)
In a book based on an extraordinarily rich
array of fascinating sources, including eighteenthcentury
Western European travelers’ accounts of
trips to Eastern Europe, maps and atlases drawn at
the time, and letters and literature of the
Enlightenment about Eastern Europe (ranging from
personal accounts, to philosophical treatments, to
pure fantasy), Larry Wolff has written a delightful,
erudite, and useful work of intellectual history in
which he sketches implications for later European
political and social history. He has traced how
Western Europeans came to view the continent of
Europe as sharply divided into a Western and
Eastern half, and to conceive of the latter as
backward and uncivilized.
The concept of the underdeveloped East
came into vogue just as travel to Eastern Europe
was on the increase. Though the line of
demarcation between East and West on the
continent might vary with the individual and his or
her grasp of geography or truth, wherever it fell in
the mind of the writer or traveler, a great chasm
opened and "Europe" ended. The boundary
between the Europes was, of course, changeable:
sometimes it was at the Don River, at other times
further east at the Volga, and at other times, it was
(as now) at the Urals.
Moreover, Wolff shows that the distinction
between East and West did not arise by chance, but
came about as the result of an intellectual agenda,
related both to Western European ideological selfinterest
and to scholars’ and writers’ selfpromotion.
The invention of an Eastern Europe
that was found to be seriously wanting had a great
deal to do with the emergence of the concept of
civilization and the...