The invention gave the West its first model of underdevelopment. Western writers concocted and presented to others as fact false linkages that turned Russia, Poland, Hungary, and the lands emerging out of the steadily shrinking Ottoman Empire-countries with very great differences of wealth, culture, language, religion, and history-into a single new entity characterized by a degree of barbarism. The result of both was generally an attitude toward, and concept of, Eastern Europe that tied together very different countries and peoples through invented and generally unflattering similarities. The journeys, however, seldom opened the minds of the travelers and study failed to reveal more than prejudices. Both the countries and people on the eastern end of the European land mass were real and were worthy of visits and study. In point of fact, Eastern Europe was never a fictitious place. In emphasizing the false similarities, the philosophes judged the western part of Europe to be superior according to the then evolving notion of 'civilization.' The process of invention consisted not just of endowing real countries with mythic attributes, though much of that happened the greater work of invention lay in a 'synthetic association' of peoples that drew on both fact and fiction to produce 'a general rubric of eastern Europe.' Wolff describes Eastern Europe as a 'cultural construction. Even today, as the former Soviet satellites and Newly Independent States move toward the West and work to emulate aspects of Western capitalist development, the 'scratches on our mind' (to use a wonderful phrase that Harold Isaac applied to Westerners' views of China), stemming from an old tradition of East-West cultural separation, still subtly govern our perspectives. This, Wolff opines, was later updated to accommodate new circumstances and reinforced the West's decision to fight the Crimean War, the Germans' and Austrians' steady Drang nach Osten, the eastern campaigns of Nazi Germany, and the Iron Curtain of the Cold War. It was only in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that the philosophes and others interested in affirming the superiority of Western Europe created a sense of difference from, and prejudices toward, Eastern Europe.

East and west were suddenly defined by 'opposition and adjacency'.' A straight line connected Paris to Poltava. 'Just as a new center of the Enlightenment superseded the old centers of the Renaissance, the old lands of barbarism and backwardness in the north were. As late as the Renaissance, the division of Europe that dominated thought and thinkers was still that between the North and the South. The East-West distinction was, Wolff points out, new. 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 reinvention of a 'civilized' Western Europe that would suit-and be worthy of?-the aspirations and tastes of the Enlightenment.

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 self-interest and to scholars' and writers' self-promotion. 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. 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 concept of the underdeveloped East came into vogue just as travel to Eastern Europe was on the increase. 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. In a book based on an extraordinarily rich array of fascinating sources, including eighteenth-century 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. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment.

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