In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity by David A. Norris (review)

Abstract

574 SEER, 85, 3, JULY 2OO7 theApollonian (i.e., rationality being the only road to happiness). Involved in founding a new culture, he is, like Peter theGreat inPeterburg, willing to sacrifice himself and others for the future good. In Zamiatin's dystopian novel My, legality functions in a similar way, but here it is satirically exaggerated and fundamentally negative. The under ground is both political and psychological because the revolutionaries want to restore emotion and the imagination (the Dionysian) which have been abolished by a state founded entirely on rationality (theApollonian). Gerigk concludes that Sologub and Zamiatin represent a pessimistic model inwhich negatively perceived legality oppresses the individual and cannot be overthrown, whereas Gor'kii and Gladkov represent an optimistic view, in which present or future legality is identifiedwith 'just cause'. Gerigk sees Belyi as a tragic model, because the balance between underground and legality can be maintained only for a short time before a cultural cycle comes to an inevitable end. Gerigk's study is compiled from lectures to students of Russian and comparative literature.This results in an eloquent stylewhich makes reading a true pleasure, but the volume's sparse bibliography and lack of consider ation of critical literature is surprising in a publication of this significance. Still, thebook will be of great interestnot only to students but to the academic community at large. Department ofSlavonic Studies U. Lange Universityof Mainz Norris, David A. In the Wake ofthe BalkanMyth: QuestionsofIdentity and Modernity. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York, 1999. xiv + 192 pp. Notes. Maps. Plates. Bibliography. Index. ?58.00. The late nineteenth-century Serbian writer Laza Kostic once tried to explain the relationship between the culture of Serbia and those ofmajor Western European cultures using the scenario of a phone conversation, in which the speaker in Belgrade keeps repeating: 'Can you hear us? We do hear you, can you hear us?', with the other end of the line remaining silent. If you were to substitute 'Serbian' with 'Bulgarian' or 'Slovak', or any other Central or South East European culture, the image would still retain its value and accu rately express the frustrations of smaller European cultures at not being heard, or not being understood. David Norris begins In the Wake of the BalkanMyth: Questions ofIdentityandModernity by reminding his reader of Bakhtin's idea, expressed in hisNovy mir interview, of a dialogue between cultures, inwhich they open up to each other. By contrast, those small nations that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe had to struggle from their early days with an imbalance in the dialogue through which cultures come into being. The Balkan's entry into this symbolic dialogue has been hindered by what Norris calls the 'Balkan myth': the cluster of representations of the Balkans as a seat of primitivism,which isalternately looked upon positively ('noble savage') and negatively ('threatening barbarian'). Norris maintains that the source of the REVIEWS 575 Balkan myth lies in theWest, and its fears of a cultural Other. It reduces a culturally varied territory into a threatening unity which both justifies the colonialist ventures of theGreat Powers, and relieves them of responsibility for the origins of the FirstWorld War. Western images were established on an identity of the Balkan as Other and alien to themodern world. The West offered cultural recognition to that exotic world on the borders of theOrient, within the European family of cultures, but kept itas a separate space which was not and would never be fully integrated. The production of Balkan semantics isbased on a narrow range of persis tent images, reinvented as appropriate in each historical moment, and derived fromRomanticist aesthetics which privileged the national authenticity disco vered in folk epics. Norris shows how the Balkan myth resurfaces in critical periods in its Janus-like form ? either noble savage or primitive barbarian ? from thewritings of journalists such as Harry De Windt orJohn Reed at the beginning of the twentieth century, to those of Ian Traynor, the current Balkan correspondent of The Guardian. However, while other small and more colonized societies in a classical sense established a culture of resistance to the foreign voice, in Serbian culture the dominant motifs of the noble savage and primitive barbarian eventually came to dominate...