Representations of Central and Eastern Europe in Travelogues of Romanian and Polish Public Figures

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Milica Bakić-Hayden’s concept of “nesting orientalisms” in a wider regional context, by showing some of its first manifestations, as employed one hundred years or so ago. The debut of this phenomenon is part of the nineteenth century trend of traveling to “Eastern Europe,” and of appropriating it as such, in the desire to compete with the previous century, especially with the latter’s attempt of designing the map according to the dichotomy: “enlightened-ignorant peoples.”
Consequently, the adoption of the concept of “Eastern Europe” by western public opinion triggered reactions from the part of the local élites expressed in the establishment of a corpus of texts, which reflect on the nearby geographical area. This effort represented in fact the third stage of the west-east dynamics that accompanied modernization in the region. The texts to be discussed in this article, apart from the century’s blind faith in progress, display the obsession of being “in between,” raising it to a sine qua non condition of the region; their authors often found themselves in difficulties in relation to dilemmas like professional/national identities, local/central loyalties, religious/secular views.