Slavonic and East European Review, 1922–2022

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 1922–2022 Simon Dixon (bio) This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of this journal, launched in June 1922 as the Slavonic Review, renamed Slavonic (and East European) Review in 1928, and known since 1931, when the brackets were silently dropped, under its current title, commonly abbreviated to SEER. The centenary offers a natural opportunity to reflect on the journal's achievements and vicissitudes and to glance forward to challenges ahead.1 Except for the war years, 1941–44, when the numeration was maintained but SEER was published without British involvement in the United States, it has been edited in London at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES). A constituent part of King's College from 1915 until 1932, when it became an independent Senate Institute, SSEES struck some outsiders as one of the more inward-looking institutions in the British higher education system before its merger with University College London (UCL) in 1999.2 However, both the School and its cosmopolitan staff developed in counterpoint with the turbulent history of the region they studied and with changes in academic life in the world beyond. The same is true of the Review. Conceived as 'the joint product of British and American [End Page 1] Slavonic scholars, and of representative Slavs in every field of intellectual effort',3 the journal relied from the outset on the fluctuating international collaborations highlighted in this article. Since the journal's lifespan has so far fallen into two distinct parts, the article's final section focuses on the years after 1950, when SEER became an academic periodical among a growing galaxy of specialist competitors. But I begin in the aftermath of the peace settlements of 1919–20, when Slavonic studies gained unprecedented prominence in Europe and the United States, and when the Review first appeared as a hybrid combining scholarly articles with politically committed contributions inspired by the shared Liberal vision of its two principal founders, R. W. Seton-Watson* (1879–1951) and Sir Bernard Pares* (1867–1949). Scholarship and political activism, 1922–40 In presenting their new journal as a multi-disciplinary miscellany, studded with essays and documents on contemporary affairs, Pares and Seton-Watson ran against a swelling tide of academic professionalization originating in Germany. In their own subject — history — France's Revue historique (1876), the English Historical Review (1886) and the American Historical Review (1895) had all been established in the wake of the Prussian Historische Zeitschrift (1859) as bastions of a 'scientific' method designed to supplant the romantic effusions of 'men of letters'.4 Nevertheless, the transition was neither universal nor smooth.5 And it was especially uneven among historians who sympathized with the 'oppressed' nationalities of the Habsburg Empire and rejoiced in their new-found statehood after 1919. Barely a decade after collaborating with Seton-Watson in British intelligence, the émigré Polish Jew Lewis Namier* (1888–1960) published The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), a work whose very title signalled the author's determination to privilege what he called 'sociological' analysis over teleological narrative.6 By contrast, Seton-Watson and his Liberal friends remained faithful to a heroic vision of national emancipation, granted as a reward for moral courage. Warning against the spurious claims to objectivity of 'colourless' history that 'gave [End Page 2] no clue to the author's party allegiance or ulterior motive', Seton-Watson insisted in his 1928 Creighton Lecture that 'no historian who is worth his salt can altogether avoid taking sides in the tremendous controversies of Authority and Reason, of Tradition and Liberty, of unquestioning faith and sceptical inquiry'.7 Harold Temperley* (1879–1939) might have agreed. Though he launched the austerely professional Cambridge Historical Journal in 1923 and checked his contributors' references at the Public Record Office, Temperley never wholly suppressed the romantic streak that inspired his fascination with the Serbs, the Hungarians and the Slovaks. Having partly overcome his initial mistrust of academic interventions in affairs of state — 'Oh these Professors', he wailed to Seton-Watson in 1909, 'how they fail in politics' — Temperley went on to play a minor part in the peace settlement ten years later.8...