British Literature and the Balkans : Themes and Contexts [1 ed.] 9789042029880, 9789042029873

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British Literature and the Balkans

Studia Imagologica

Amsterdam Studies on Cultural Identity 16 Serie editors

Hugo Dyserinck Joep Leerssen

Imagology, the study of cross-national perceptions and images

as expressed in literary discourse, has for many decades been one of the more challenging and promising branches of Comparative Literature. In recent years, the shape both of literary studies and of international relations (in the political as well as the cultural sphere) has taken a turn which makes imagology more topical and urgent than before. Increasingly, the attitudes, stereotypes and prejudices which govern literary activity and international relations are perceived in their full importance; their nature as textual (frequently literary) constructs is more clearly apprehended; and the necessity for a textual and historical analysis of their typology, their discursive expression and dissemination, is being recognized by historians and literary scholars. The series Studia Imagologica, which will accommodate scholarly monographs in English, French or German, provides a forum for this literary-historical specialism.

British Literature and the Balkans Themes and Contexts

Andrew Hammond

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover Photo: “Mostar Bridge over the Neretva River, Bosnia-Hercegovina”, by Dr. Fritz Wentzel, courtesy of the Volkmar K. Wentzel Collection Cover Design: Erick de Jong The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2987-3 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2988-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents

Acknowledgements

3

Introduction

5

Chapter 1: Frontier Myths

19

Chapter 2: Typologies of the East

43

Chapter 3: Through Savage Europe

67

Chapter 4: Balkanism in Political Context

93

Chapter 5: An Inflexible Exile

119

Chapter 6: Women and War

145

Chapter 7: An Escape from Decadence

173

Chapter 8: Romantic Fiction

201

Chapter 9: The Red Threat

231

Chapter 10: Humanitarian Intervention

255

Bibliography

287

Index

313

Acknowledgements I am indebted to those colleagues who read various sections of the typescript in draft form, all of whom offered invaluable comments and advice. In alphabetical order, thanks are due to Susan Bassnett, Donald L. Dyer, Greg Kucich, Piotr Kuhiwczak, Richard Littlejohns, Sharon Ouditt, Martin Stannard, Michael St John, Burcu Sümer and Tim Youngs. I am particularly grateful to my father, Arthur Hammond, for so thoroughly proof-reading the final typescript, and I dedicate the book to him. The permission for reprinting material is gratefully acknowledged. An early draft of chapter 1 was published as ‘Frontier Myths: Travel Writing on Europe’s Eastern Border’ in Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini, eds, Myths of Europe (Rodopi Press, 2007), and is reproduced with the permission of the publisher. Small sections of chapter 3 were published as ‘Contemporary Gothic Fiction and the European Margins’ in Balkanistica, Vol. 22 (2009), and are reproduced with the permission of the journal. Early drafts of chapters 4 and 5 were published as ‘Balkanism in Political Context: From the Ottoman Empire to the EU’ in Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2006) and as ‘Memoirs of Conflict: British Women Travellers in the Balkans’ in Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2010), and are reproduced with the permission of Westminster Papers and Taylor and Francis respectively. Finally, sections of chapter 9 were published as ‘“The Red Threat”: Cold War Rhetoric and the British Novel’ in Andrew Hammond, ed., The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945-2003 (Ashgate, 2004), and are reproduced with the permission of the publisher.

Introduction The attribution of specific characteristics to national or regional communities has a long and potent history in European culture. Although the activity pre-dates the modern era, the designation of cultural identities was systematised in writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when distinct and definable essences were increasingly used to explain the behaviour of foreign nationalities. The process was consolidated by the spread of nationalism in the eighteenth century and, after the acceleration of European imperialism, by the rise of racialist theory in the nineteenth century.1 The first branch of scholarship to address this most virulent of cultural ideologies was Image Studies, or imagologie. This emerged in the French and Germany academies in the 1950s and developed through the work of Hugo Dyserinck and the Aachen Programme in the 1960s and 1970s. Imagology is a strand of comparative cultural study which views the assigned features of a nation or ethnicity not as empirically given but as a product of a representational practice.2 Moreover, national stereotypes and ethnotypes are not an attempt at vérité, a mimetic portrayal of reality, but of vraisemblance, an appearance of truth according to expectations derived from the prior knowledge of those amongst whom the stereotype is circulated. In this sense, whether the medium is a novel, poem, play, joke or anecdote, the speaker’s ‘plausibility by definition relies on pre-existing, extratextual beliefs and attitudes held by the audience’.3 In order to explore the process, imagology has pursued an interdisciplinary analysis of the historical emergence, development and reception of national stereotypes, constituting a formal study of ethnocentrism that predates the school of colonial discourse analysis centred on Edward Said, Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha. While imagology has studied national identity in a variety of source materials, the study of prose fiction has proved especially fertile. Although not as central to the formation and dissemination of identities as it once was, the novel’s broad circulation within a

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national territory helps to explain the ubiquity and durability of the properties that the nation associates with itself and with others. ‘Europe’s literary record is a long-standing and voluminous one’, critics point out, ‘and can be fruitfully searched [...] for longue-durée topics like the provenance and spread of attitudes and mentalities’.4 The wide-ranging engagement of novelists with the leitmotifs of nationhood – landscape, language, locution, history, physiognomy, psychology – offers an extensive insight into group identification. Of particular interest to imagologists is the novel’s projection of distinctive traits onto characters of specified national or ethnic origin (the Briton, say, or the Englishwoman), which evinces through the characters’ appearance, behavioural codes and thought patterns the predisposition of wider national and ethnic groups.5 In this sense, the characters of fiction are representative types, exemplary markers of, or metonyms for, the social collective. As distinct from the registers of history or political commentary, the novel also forms an emotional, imaginative mode of expression that is prone to distortion, exaggeration and caricature – as is national identity itself – and that yields insight into the remarkable mutual resemblance such caricature achieves between periods of literary production. Indeed, the creation of a stable national identification is dependant on a series of literary generations drawing upon, but simultaneously furthering, the idées reçues which compose the national or ethnic reputation. For this reason, imagology eschews the hermeneutic study of individual literary texts or oeuvres for a broader, intertextual analysis of national images in a literary culture, exploring antecedent and concurrent manifestations of those images and analysing their interdependence with extra-textual phenomena.6 In the work of Dyserinck and others, it also examines multinational trends in national mythmaking in order to assess the impact of cross-cultural exchange, collaboration and resistance.7 As this suggests, it is the politics, as much as the poetics, of stereotyping with which imagology is concerned. In the words of John Osborne and Michael Wintle, the study of ethnotypes aims to ‘destabilise the category distinctions on which they are predicated, and thereby excavate the power relations implicated in the prevailing iconographies’.8 The present study will pursue these aims in the context of British representation of the Balkans, a region commonly understood in British cultural production to comprise Romania, Bulgaria, Albania

Introduction

7

and the countries of the former Yugoslavia. These multifarious southeast European nations have had a central place in the British collective psyche from the nineteenth-century Eastern Crisis, when the region first engaged the public consciousness, to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Over the course of a hundred and fifty years, commentators have been formulating and distributing demonic, denigratory images of the region through poetry, fiction, drama, travel writing, cartography, book illustration, cartoons and photography, creating a network of interacting, mutually sustaining representations that have given rise to one of the most powerful myths in Western imaginative geography. It is perhaps travel literature that bears most responsibility for the images and evaluations in circulation. Although not as popular as the novel for imagological analysis, the travelogue is structured around a similar itinerary of characters, scenes, dialogue, pathetic fallacy and dramatic confrontation, along with the same encouragement, via its claims to autobiographical fact, of a ‘suspension of disbelief’. With its common merging of fact and fantasy, the average travelogue can also be usefully studied as an unreliable first-person narrative; as Neil Rennie reminds us, ‘travellers, like authors, have always had a reputation for making things up’.9 Furthermore, the genre provides perfect illustrative material for the will-to-power that has informed British discourse on non-western cultures through the ages. Drawing on the relationship between the viewer and the viewed in landscape painting, Mary Louise Pratt defines the travel writer as a ‘“seeing man” [...] whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess’ his surroundings, assuming that a foreign territory can be ‘deictically ordered with reference to his vantage point’ and reformulating its sights/sites as bounded, manageable knowledge beneficial to ‘Europe’s expansionist trajectory’.10 Although Pratt’s research concerns colonial discourse on Africa and South America, many critical commentaries have found the imperial gaze equally at work in written texts on parts of the Balkans. ‘Slavic cultures’, one commentary argues, ‘were amongst the earliest signifiers of the Other […] in European culture’s concept of itself and of its “uniqueness” and value’.11 It is certainly the case that travel writing has produced some of the most startling, memorable images of Balkan ‘otherness’, strengthening those images through endless repetition and inspiring their deployment in other forms of cultural production.

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British Literature and the Balkans

Over the following chapters, I shall be using the written pronouncements of travel writing, as well as fiction, journalism and political rhetoric, to explore the history of British balkanism. After its full emergence in the early Victorian period, when the nation’s interest in south-east Europe began to intensify, balkanist discourse developed through the nineteenth century as a broad corpus of populist and quasi-academic publications, the majority of which evoked the region as Britain’s most immediate civilisational other. The key motifs of this hegemonic form of balkanism are discord, backwardness, barbarism and obfuscation, a set of dichotomous, essentialist cultural judgements that echo those of classic racism. Although commonly associated with colonialism, Robert Miles argues, the exclusionary practices of racialist ideology ‘have taken as their subject not only the populations of, for example, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the Americas but also the populations of different parts of Europe’.12 For Slavoj Žižek, it is the Balkan peninsula that has so often borne the brunt of the West’s intraEuropean prejudices. Speaking of the mistrust, contempt and animosity projected onto its peoples over the last twenty years, Žižek is adamant that that ‘[m]uch of this projection is racist’: First, there is the old-fashioned, unabashed rejection of the Balkan Other (despotic, barbarian, Orthodox, Muslim, corrupt, Oriental) in favour of true values (Western, civilised, democratic, Christian). But there is also a ‘reflexive’, politically correct racism: the liberal, multiculturalist perception of the Balkans as a site of ethnic horrors and intolerance, of primitive, tribal, irrational passions, as opposed to the reasonableness of post-nation-state conflict resolution by negotiation and compromise.13

This is not to say that the western discourse on south-east Europe has been static or ahistorical. The acts of perceiving and textually re-constructing a geographical object are at all times susceptible to alterations in political and economic circumstances and to discrepancies in the ideological leanings of commentators, variables that can transform a discursive framework. Such transformation is achieved by a reinterpretation of established motifs, by a cancellation or relegation of motifs no longer deemed desirable or by a movement of previously minor motifs to a position of dominance. Yet it is also the case that no discursive transformation is ever permanent. While observing the remarkable tendency of national stereotypes to oscillate

Introduction

9

between extremes, Joep Leerssen argues that these stereotypes are not only ‘highly impervious to historical obsolescence or desuetude’, but also ‘remain subliminally present in the social discourse and can always be reactivated should the occasion arise’.14 As Leerseen goes on to explain, the field of available knowledge on a foreign entity, the so-called imageme, is typically restricted to a few core attributes which, although open to varying interpretation, place limits on the pronouncements that can be made. It may seem surprising, looking through contemporary writings on the Balkans, that for most of the twentieth century British commentary was complimentary, if not wildly effusive, about the region; it is less surprising when one realises that such appreciation is produced merely by inverting the four central motifs of hegemonic balkanism. In many twentiethcentury texts, ethnic discord was reconstituted as harmonious multiculturalism, material backwardness as pastoral simplicity, barbarism as noble savagery and obfuscation as a mixture of cultural depth and spiritual profundity. Each interpretation of the cultural object is dependent on its opposite and both are subject to the potential return of that opposite. At the same time, the positive and negative valorisations are similarly dependent on political circumstances, with periods in which countries ‘do not pose any threat [...] giving rise to exoticism or “xenophilia” and periods ‘of political or economic rivalry [...] usually described in negative terms, giving rise to xenophobia’.15 The core insights of imagology, in other words, go some way to explaining the mutations that have marked British balkanism. Over the last one hundred and fifty years, there have been three major phases in the history of the Balkan concept, divided by paradigmatic shifts resulting from moments of profound crisis in European politics. The first phase incorporates the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War, when an imperial, industrial, rapidly modernising Britain constructed the region in a manner barely distinguishable from colonial discourse. The Balkans were a depraved and underdeveloped backwater lacking all the prerequisites of modern society. In travelogues from the period, D.T. Ansted remarks upon village houses that resemble ‘mud heaps thrown indiscriminately on the ground’, W.F. Wingfield finds towns that ‘partake [...] of the character of a prolonged dunghill’ and J.M. Neale endures accommodation that is in ‘a state of filth, grease, vermin, and everything loathsome’.16 Concordant with the insights of imagology,

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British Literature and the Balkans

much of the travellers’ anger was directed at the ethno-psychological predisposition of indigenous peoples. These were at best ‘a slouching untidy lot’, and at worst a set of ‘bloodthirsty, thieving scoundrels’ or ‘savages [that] spare neither life nor possession’, with most travellers calling for their barbarous urges to be checked by ‘the military demands of [an] army of Occupation’.17 The vilification of the region reached a peak during the nationalist uprisings of the early twentieth century. In the words of British and American reporters, these ‘blade and bullet countries’ were in such ‘a state of anarchy’ that they resembled ‘the American border in the old days’, although admittedly offered a perfect opportunity ‘for romance, mystery and adventure’.18 The Balkan Wars of 1912-13, however, in which much of the peninsula gained independence, received a good deal of support from commentators, and by the First World War the British state was seeking military allies from amongst the self-governing nations. The wartime allegiance between Britain and Serbia inaugurated the next phase of conceptualisation, romantic in spirit, which achieved its heyday in writing of the 1920s and 1930s.19 Here, it is not uncommon to find men displaying ‘the savage beauty of their country’, women appearing ‘as graceful and voluptuous as [...] the goddess of love’ and the landscape forming an ‘endless, everlastingly delightful Arcadian symphony’, where ‘one could think of nothing but peace’ and where the performance of ancient customs offers one ‘a glimpse of eternity’.20 The strand of complimentary representation declined during the decades of Cold War and vanished in the early 1990s. The claims made by one Daily Telegraph correspondent in 1993, that the region forms a ‘backwater’ pervaded by ‘bigotry and bullheadedness’, where ‘tolerance [has] a poor pedigree’ and ‘people are inveterate liars’ given to ‘primitive tub-thumping’ and ‘savagery’, are now depressingly common.21 Within this third phase of representation, individual nations and ethnicities are again allotted little specificity. In Romania, the population is not only ‘gnarled, seam-faced, dirty, garlic-smelling’, but also ‘warped both morally and psychologically’ by a society in which ‘[t]ruth had become indistinguishable from untruth’ and ‘corruption was not a vice, it was a tradition’.22 The other Balkan nations are similarly conceived: Bulgaria is ‘a tundra of human intolerance’, Albania is marked by ‘poverty and despair, [...] untilled fields and dingy towns’, and the diverse cultures of the former Yugoslavia are homogenised as an ‘ancient history of violence, [...]

Introduction

11

fighting and killing’.23 The return to nineteenth-century discourse is exemplified by the constant comparisons that travel writers make between the Balkans and the former territories of the British Empire. For example, Giles Whittell claims ‘[t]he Balkans have a disarming whiff of Asia’, David Selbourne finds poverty similar to that of ‘rural central India’ and Lloyd Jones discerns human suffering that is ‘up there with the African Disaster areas’.24 One of the aims of this study is to analyse in depth this circular, non-progressive narrative of south-east European alterity. To this end, each of the three phases of balkanist discourse will be explored and the forms of power that the discourse facilitates, both for the individual commentator and for the wider homeland, will be elucidated. Of particular interest will be the resurgence of the tropes of discord, barbarism, backwardness and obfuscation in the immediate post-Cold War period. As David Kennedy has pointed out, the termination of 45 years of communist rule suggested an auspicious end to twentieth-century European history, an event that ‘placed 1989 in a series – with 1648, 1815, 1918 and 1945 – of moments at which dramatic changes’ in Europe presented an ‘opportunity for renewal’.25 Yet despite the temporary euphoria at the re-unification of the continent, it was not long before, as Kennedy continues, ‘[r]elations between East and West were increasingly described in chronological terms’ and before ‘Eastern Europe was routinely compared to underdeveloped societies of the third world’.26 The attempt to explain this discursive regression leads onto the primary aim of this study, which is to examine the specific cultural and political contexts in which the forms and transformations of balkanist discourse have taken place. On the one hand, there will be an emphasis on the cultural conditions in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including changing attitudes towards gender, modernity, expatriatism, humanitarianism and the decline of Empire. As a part of this, I shall also be looking at the generic styles – empiricism, gothicism, romanticism, modernism – which have shaped cultural production and representation over the last one hundred and fifty years. On the other hand, there will be an exploration of the wider geo-political currents which have had an impact on the discourse: amongst them, the evolving nature of Europe, the shift in continental borders, the ongoing re-creation of civilisational antitypes and the developments in political and economic relations between East and West.

12

British Literature and the Balkans

In the first four chapters, I shall be addressing these more general influences upon the styles and concerns of British crosscultural representation. To begin with, there will be discussion of the age-old anxieties regarding the nature and constitution of ‘Europe’ and the ‘European’, which is as germane today as it was in the fifth century BC, when Herodotus admitted that ‘the boundaries of Europe are quite unknown, and no man can say where they end’.27 The continent’s lack of clear geographical limits has led to the construction of conceptual borders around what is conceived as the proper site of European ‘civilisation’, particularly the imaginary frontier drawn between western and south-east Europe, which has had a profound effect on the perception of travellers passing across it. This discussion of borders and boundaries in British imaginative geography will be continued in chapter 2, which turns to the discursive relationship between balkanism and orientalism. As captured in Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius’s notion of ‘Euro-Orientalism’,28 the Balkans have been viewed as a peripheral zone at which Europe peters out into the Middle East, yet simultaneously as a stretch of European Christendom opposed to the Islamic world. The result of this ambivalence, I argue, is key points of divergence between the two cross-cultural discourses, with balkanism exhibiting its own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies as early as the nineteenth century. This engagement with discursive motifs is furthered in chapter 3 through a study of the enduring impact of gothic imagery on balkanist fiction and travel writing. Although only one amongst many such generic influences, the gothic has formed an especially beguiling framework for commentators baffled at how to encapsulate south-east European complexities, and has been an important medium through which the motifs of discord, savagery, backwardness and obfuscation are projected onto the region. Chapter 4 then turns to the forms of power facilitated by balkanist representation, with a focus on the two periods in which that power has been at its greatest. In the nineteenth century, denigratory balkanism legitimised British assistance for the Ottoman Empire against the threat of Russian expansion into south-east Europe; in the post-Cold War period, it has worked to endorse the wide-ranging control that the European Union has achieved over local economic structures and political frameworks. The contemporary era, in short, continues to view the peninsula as a borderland available for western intervention, reiterating the Victorian notion that the

Introduction

13

Europeaneity of certain countries is a given, while others need to be taught it. After introducing balkanism’s creation of cultural difference, the book goes on to examine in more depth its deployment of binary oppositions between home and abroad. In Dyserinck’s terms, the hetero-image of a foreign culture, nation, region or race is not attributed in isolation, but predicated on the specific auto-image of the collectivity responsible for the attribution.29 For Edward Said, echoing Dyserinck, cultures tend to ‘derive a sense of their identities negatively’, with each nation or ethnicity using an alien population ‘to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away’.30 In this sense, one’s collective self-image has no a priori identity but is merely the sum of its perceived differences to others. The deterministic national and regional classifications of balkanist discourse revolve around one of the most important forms of cultural polarity studied by imagologists: the dichotomy between the centre (approved as dynamic, progressive, modern) and the periphery (censured as static, backward, traditional). This is clearly expressed in the memoirs of male travellers and residents in south-east Europe, which is the subject of chapter 5. Rather than attempt genuine interaction with the host culture, British male expatriates have used a variety of tactics to preserve themselves in the faiths and practices of the homeland, thereby helping to consolidate the idealised model of male Englishness against which the depravity of the host culture is gauged. Chapter 6 then turns to the identifications found in women’s travel memoirs, with a specific focus on memoirs produced in wartime. During events such as the Eastern Crisis and the First World War, female travellers revealed a strained, ambiguous relationship to hegemonic ideology, frequently infringing cross-cultural and patriarchal discourses in their writing. As Barbara Korte has argued, however, alongside their authors’ desire to ‘escape from “normal” life’ lies the fact that ‘[w]omen’s travelogues share many characteristics with those of their male contemporaries’, most obviously the deployment of essentialist binary oppositions.31 One of the significant features of women’s travel writing is its involvement, during the First and Second World Wars, in the creation of more sympathetic modes of representation. Building on this, the final four chapters will analyse the complex shifts that have occurred

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British Literature and the Balkans

within balkanist discourse during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter 7 examines the romanticism current during the inter-war years, a powerful ‘utopian impulse’ which, emerging out of anxieties about western social transition, recreated the Balkan peninsula as an idealised realm of beauty, harmony, spirituality and stability from historical change.32 In chapter 8, I look at the more equivocal treatment of the Balkans in British romantic fiction. Influenced by the poetry of Lord Byron and the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, this developed a blend of primitivism and aestheticism similar to that of travel writing, although also revealed in such subgenres as the thriller and the royal romance an imperialistic approach to resolving south-east European crises. As these studies of balkanist fiction and travel writing touch upon, romanticism began to decline in the final decade of the Cold War as tensions mounted between eastern and western Europe. Accordingly, chapter 9 looks at the impact of Cold War manicheanism upon literary novels, in which traditional balkanism was augmented and updated by the more modern tropes and evaluations of anti-communist rhetoric. The decline of romanticism is also explored in chapter 10, which focuses upon the rise of humanitarian interventionism as a strategy of global policing in the post-Cold War era. As Tom J. Farer has mentioned, even before the attacks on the World Trade Centre, ‘articles, monographs, anthologies, conferences, and symposia on “Humanitarian Intervention” were proliferating even faster than weapons of mass destruction’.33 The conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo were two of the first occasions on which the international community declared humanitarian motives for intervention into the internal affairs of sovereign nations. By comparing the memoirs of British relief workers from the period with those of their counterparts in the nineteenth century, the chapter aims to clarify the continuum of powerknowledge that Nataša Kovačević terms the ‘Western imperialist desire to articulate, categorize, and ultimately “resolve the mess” in both the Balkans and Eastern Europe’.34 The events of the last twenty years suggest that the deconstruction of intra-European representation has become increasingly urgent. The re-emergence across the continent of nationalism, cultural prejudice and ethnic violence, often pursued under the guise of a ‘war on terror’ or a crackdown on immigration, demonstrates that ‘identity politics’ is back, along with a return to the

Introduction

15

notion of ethnic purity in European societies. Although the expression of racial prejudice may have become unacceptable for particular social groups, prejudice against non-traditional targets continues apace, particularly when that prejudice is rationalised as an alternative, more ‘politically correct’ form of cultural judgement (as an abhorrence of nationalism, say, or as a hostility towards the racist practices of other societies). As Marco Cinnirella puts it, ‘[s]tereotyping and prejudice may now lie under the surface, shrouded by a mist of denial and selfpresentational bias, yet both retain the potential to surface with devastating consequences’.35 Cinnirella wrote these words shortly before the backlash against the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when ‘stereotyping and prejudice’ emerged with a vengeance. Yet during the ten-year period between the West’s struggle against the ‘evil Empire’ and its current crusade against the ‘axis of evil’, public discourse in Britain was saturated with an overt, impassioned animosity towards the Balkans, viewing the peninsula as a set of ‘exotic, tribal cultures, which we might [...] take an anthropological interest in, but should always keep at a distance’.36 This book is an attempt to understand how British culture, in the interregnum between the globalised threats of international communism and international terrorism, retained south-east Europe as one of its most significant cultural others.

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British Literature and the Balkans

NOTES 1

See John G. Hayman, ‘Notions on National Characters in the Eighteenth Century’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1 (1971), pp. 1-17, and Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics, 2nd edn (1986; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 12-26. 2 As Menno Spiering emphasises, ‘national identity is no ontological category, but a form of cultural production’ (Spiering, Englishness: Foreigners and Images of National Identity in Postwar Literature (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992), p. 11). 3 Joep Leerssen, ‘Mimesis and Stereotype’, Yearbook of European Studies, Vol. 4 (1991), p. 173. 4 Joep Leerssen, ‘Imagology: History and Method’, in Manfred Beller and Leerseen, eds, Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), p. 26. 5 Hugo Dyserinck, ‘Komparatistische Imagologie jenseits von “Werkimmanenz” und “Werktranszendenz”’, Synthesis, Vol. 9 (1982), pp. 37-8. 6 See Spiering, Englishness, pp. 15-16. 7 See Dyserinck, Komparatistik. Eine Einführung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979) and Dyserinck, ‘Komparatistische Imagologie’, pp. 27-40. 8 Osborne and Wintle, ‘The Construction and Allocation of Identity through Images and Imagery: An Introduction’, in Michael Wintle, ed., Image into Identity: Constructing and Assigning Identity in a Culture of Modernity (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), p. 15. 9 Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas, new edn (1995; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 4. 10 Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 7, 205, 205. 11 Bill Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 157. Pratt also states ‘that many of the conventions and writing strategies’ addressed in her book ‘characterize travel writing about Europe as well’ (Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 10). 12 Miles, Racism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 39. 13 Žižek, ‘You May!’, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/print/ zize01_.html (accessed 19 September 2007). 14 Leerssen, ‘The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey’, Poetics Today, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer 2000), pp. 279, 278. 15 Joep Leerseen, ‘National Identity and National Stereotype’, http://cf.hum.uva.nl/ images/info/leers.html (accessed 23 June 2008). 16 Ansted, A Short Trip in Hungary and Transylvania in the Spring of 1862 (London: W.H. Allen and Co., 1862), p. 43; Wingfield, A Tour in Dalmatia, Albania, and Montenegro; With an Historical Sketch of the Republic of Ragusa, from the Earliest Times down to Its Final Fall (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), p. 192; Neale, Notes, Ecclesiological and Picturesque, on Dalmatia, Croatia, Istria, Styria, with a Visit to Montenegro (London: J.T. Hayes, 1861), p. 106. 17 E.A. Brayley Hodgetts, Round about Armenia: The Record of a Journey across the Balkans through Turkey, the Caucasus, and Persia in 1895 (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1896), p. 6; R.H.R., Rambles in Istria, Dalmatia and Montenegro

Introduction

17

(London: Hurst and Blackett, 1875), p. 248; A.A. Paton, Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic; Or, Contributions to the Modern History of Hungary and Transylvania, Dalmatia and Croatia, Servia and Bulgaria, 2 vols (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1861), I, 201; Robert Munro, Rambles and Studies in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia: With an Account of the Proceedings of the Congress of Archaeologists and Anthropologists Held in Sarajevo, August 1894 (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1895), p. 391. 18 John L.C. Booth, Trouble in the Balkans (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1905), p. 68; William Eleroy Curtis, The Turk and His Lost Provinces: Greece, Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1903), p. 29; Frederick Moore, The Balkan Trial [sic], new edn (1906; New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1971), p. 219; Arthur D. Howden Smith, Fighting the Turk in the Balkans: An American’s Adventures with the Macedonian Revolutionists (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), p. 11. 19 This was the period of high modernism when, in Simon Gikandi’s words, ‘almost every major modern writer, painter and theorist posited the exotic and the primitive as an alternative to the Western industrial culture many of them were revolting against’ (Gikandi, ‘Race and the Modernist Aesthetic’, in Tim Youngs, ed., Writing and Race (London and New York: Longman, 1997), p. 151). 20 Ronald Matthews, Sons of the Eagle: Wanderings in Albania (London: Methuen, 1937), p. 295; Frank G. Carpenter, The Alps, the Danube, and the Near East: Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Italy, Greece, Turkey (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1925), p. 254; Martin Conway, ‘Introduction’ to Agnes Edith Conway, A Ride through the Balkans: On Classic Ground with a Camera (London: Robert Scott, 1917), p. 16; Henry Baerlein, Travels without a Passport: Second Series (London: Frederick Muller, 1942), p. 162; Henrietta Leslie, Where East is West: Life in Bulgaria (London: Jarrolds, 1933), p. 81. Travel writers during the Cold War were less hyperbolic, but the fact that the region offered them ‘a last chance to see rural Europe as it was fifty years ago’ usually resulted in complimentary portraiture (Anton Gill, Berlin to Bucharest: Travels in Eastern Europe (London: Grafton Books, 1990), p. 191). 21 Alec Russell, Prejudice and Plum Brandy: Tales of a Balkan Stringer (London: Michael Joseph, 1993), pp. 198, 252, 141, 214, xvii, 122. 22 Guy Arnold, Down the Danube: From the Black Forest to the Black Sea (London: Cassell, 1989), p. 166; Helena Drysdale, Looking for George: Love and Death in Romania, new edn (1995; London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1996), p. 231; Rory Maclean, Stalin’s Nose: Across the Face of Europe, new edn (1992; London: Flamingo, 1993), pp. 182, 173. 23 Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, new edn (1995; London: Vintage, 1996), p. 115; T.J. Winnifrith, Shattered Eagles, Balkan Fragments (London: Duckworth, 1995), p. 56; Natascha Scott-Stokes, The Amber Trail: A Journey of Discovery by Bicycle, from the Baltic Sea to the Aegean, new edn (1993; London: Phoenix, 1994), p. 148. 24 Whittell, Lambada Country: A Ride across Eastern Europe (London: Chapmans, 1992), p. 137; Selbourne, Death of the Dark Hero: Eastern Europe, 1987-90 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), p. 177; Jones, Biografi: An Albanian Quest (London: André Deutsch, 1993), p. 26.

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Kennedy, The Dark Side of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 172. 26 Ibid., p. 174. 27 Herodotus, quoted in Perry Anderson, ‘The Europe to Come’, in Peter Gowan and Anderson, eds, The Question of Europe (London and New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 139-40. 28 Murawska-Muthesius, ‘On Small Nations and Bullied Children: Mr Punch Draws Eastern Europe’, Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (2006), p. 282. 29 See Dyserinck, ‘La dimension imagologique du comparatisme littéraire. Ses origines franco-allemandes et son actualité intercontinental’, II Jornadas nacionales de literatura comparaa, Vol. 1 (1997), pp. 83-106, and Dyserinck, ‘Von Ethnopsychologie zu Ethnoimagologie. Über Entwicklung und mögliche Endbestimmung eines Schwerpunkts des ehemaligen Aachener Komparatistikprogramms’, Neohelicon, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2002), pp. 57-74. 30 Said, Orientalism, new edn (1978; London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 54-5. 31 Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. by Catherine Matthias, new edn (1996; Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2003), p. 126. 32 Bernard Schweizer, Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p. 6. 33 Farer, ‘Humanitarian Intervention before and after 9/11: Legality and Legitimacy’, in J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane, eds, Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 53. 34 Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 157. 35 Cinnirella, ‘Ethnic and National Stereotype: A Social Identity Perspective’, in C.C. Barfoot, ed., Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), p. 51. 36 Renata Salecl, ‘The Ideology of the Mother Nation in the Yugoslav Conflict’, in Michael D. Kennedy, ed., Envisioning Eastern Europe: Postcommunist Cultural Studies (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 88.

Chapter 1: Frontier Myths There is no more telling moment in A.W. Kinglake’s Eothen (1844), that classic of nineteenth-century travel writing, than that of his arrival at River Save in northern Serbia. Facing what was then an imperial borderline, Kinglake contemplates his position between Semlin, the last town of Austria-Hungary, and Belgrade, the westernmost tip of the Ottoman Empire into which he is about to journey. Behind him, Kinglake recalls ‘the scenes and the sounds of familiar life’, the bustling, commercial activity of a Christendom where ‘the unveiled faces of women still shone in the light of day.’1 Before him, beyond the quarantine buildings, he sees only the walls of an Ottoman fortress, ‘austere’, ‘darkly impending’ and set in a deserted, plagueridden landscape.2 The symbolism of the passage is clear: from life and sunlight, Kinglake feels himself passing into darkness and death, a crude binarism that underscores the imputedly primitive and chaotic scenes that he goes on to sketch through his tour of eastern Europe, Turkey and Syria, scenes he summarises as ‘the splendour and havoc of the East.’3 This ethnocentric treatment of the eastern journey is typical of travel writing, and there have been few travellers from the days of the Ottoman expansion to those of the European Union who have not constructed a sort of civilisational division across the continent. The idea that there exists some radically other Europe in the east, and that this otherness begins at a set of topographical coordinates locatable on the map, is one of the most enduring myths in Europe’s imaginative geography. There is no doubt that geopolitical borders have always been thrilling locations for the western traveller. Even taking the most limited definition of the phenomena, that of terrestrial lines drawn between contiguous nation-states,4 borders invariably form moments of drama along a journey and of heightened significance within a travel narrative, even though their exact significance can vary considerably. On the one hand, the border constitutes a perceived

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threat to the travelling selfhood and an indicator of the form and magnitude of the challenges that lie ahead. As illustrated by Kinglake’s reflections at the Save, the borderline is a boundary of cultural identity, demarcating the outer limits of the self and the commencement of an alterity that is experienced as sudden shock. In what Pablo Vila calls the ‘move from one classification system to another,’5 the crossing of the borderline is not the first sighting of a cultural other that only properly emerges within the territory before one, but is already the site of absolute otherness, the pure presence of exoticism and barbarity. The threat of the other is increased by the authority that these institutionalised zones wield over travellers. It is no small irony that the frontier appurtenances that mark the outer limits of state power also mark ‘states at the extremity of their power’.6 The militarised arrangement of ramps, barriers, flags, fences, guards and security towers – Kinglake’s fortresses and lazarettos – intensifies the technologised violence and surveillance by which the state maintains fear and helplessness in a population. It is upon recognising such violence that one recalls the historical sources of the geopolitical border. As commentators have pointed out, these icons of state control are not the product of international co-operation but of international conflict, of a military and cultural ‘exclusion, exploitation and coercion’ that is subject to ‘collective, if selective, amnesia’.7 Who knows, but that the weight of these past conflicts, the weight of history pressed into place, is somehow sensed by the traveller, increasing the anxiety that attends the crossing. The frontier at these moments becomes a space in which the travelling self is profoundly tested and at which the self-knowledge that is sought from travel begins to accrue. Of course the border need not be a sign of adversity. Opposed to the sense of restriction is the idea of the border as a medium for escape, a place where the western traveller, unaware of the merging of cultures that occurs along frontiers, perceives only the end of the home culture and the consequent vanishing of domestic constraints. Here, the excitement of border crossing, that quickening of the senses generated by a different coinage, language, uniform, is felt to precede some transformation of one’s selfhood. Thomas Schippers has argued, cogently, that the contours of a national frontier resemble a ‘second skin’,8 so fundamental are they to the individual’s sense of identity and cultural belonging. If this is the case, then the frontier crossing

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21

can herald the shedding of that identity and the experimentation with faiths and practices which are restricted or unavailable in the homeland. On a straightforward level, critics have gone on to associate physical journeying with various forms of desire. Dennis Porter, for example, contends that frontiers ‘are perceived […] as exciting places’ and as outlets for ‘transgressive impulses,’9 the territorial borderline forming a kind of rent in the social fabric through which one discerns thrilling possibilities for the self. More elaborately, Arnold van Gennep talks of the ‘magico-religious aspect of crossing frontiers’, the idea that the crossing marks a threshold experience. In The Rites of Passage (1908), he analyses the social rituals of pre-modern life, including the rites attending such transitional moments as birth, marriage, death and the move from the material to the spiritual in religious ceremony. For van Gennep, so strongly is the sacred connected to the crossing of proscribed boundaries that travel also appears in the nature of a rite, with the ancient ‘ritualization of experience help[ing to] explain the traveler’s sense of awe’ upon encountering the ‘passage from […] one cultural zone to another’.10 This interpretation of the border crossing as a mythic space, as a strange religious instant, links to work in anthropology and postcolonialism, which views the border as an interface where hegemonic identities break down and where hybridity, and its insights, can develop.11 With national borders producing such extreme responses, it is only to be expected that Europe’s eastern frontier, whose mythic, discursive nature this chapter will explore, has been imagined with even greater force. One is dealing here not merely with a territorial marker between nation-states but with a perceived demarcation between civilisations, a fact that increases its significance and intensifies the shock (or delight) of passing through. Ever since the eighteenth century, when the conception of Europe shifted from a north-south to an east-west alignment,12 the western regions have been troubled by the proximity to the east of starkly divergent cultures, ideologies and religions. Indeed, looking eastward, the West has been distressingly aware of being part of an Eurasia extending all the way to China, of being in fact a subcontinent lacking any geophysical perimeter from the larger landmass.13 As a result, the West has drawn up and policed strict boundaries around what it views as the site of European culture, setting these boundaries as near to home as possible

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and often excluding parts of what is indubitably European territory. ‘The famous “Orientalism” that has long separated Europe from the East’, Jonas Frykman remarks, has also ‘separated a part of Europe as a distinct alien species.’14 This eastern border works as a rigid confirmation of western European identity, subconsciously creating a loyalty to the home cultures via the very closeness of the constructed other. But where western Europe places this border has, crucially, changed over time. Rather than a contour that is established and known, Europe’s eastern edge has been mutable and contingent, a shifting border of the mind that holds within it something of the rumoured breakdown and mystery that lies beyond. This uncertainty about spatial limits, of course, augments anxiety about identity and produces the need to continually redefine the continent. Over the following pages, I shall be using British travel writing to analyse how the nation has been (re)constructing Europe’s eastern border since the Enlightenment, and to gauge the resonance that this ‘alienated borderland’15 has had for western Europe’s sense of itself. In the eighteenth century, the most immediate threat along the eastern border was the Ottoman Empire, that vast, heterogeneous power that had been encroaching on Christian Europe since the Middle Ages. Although its heyday was the mid-sixteenth century, when the Empire stretched to Vienna, the Ottomans had continued to present for the West a formidable military enmity and powerful source of otherness. This was certainly the case when Mary Wortley Montagu travelled through central and eastern Europe in 1717. Married to the recently appointed British Ambassador to the Porte, Montagu had undertaken with her husband the gruelling overland trek to Constantinople, a journey which, as described in her letters, entailed discomfort, inconvenience and, after Vienna, a measure of physical danger. At the time, Austria was at war with the Ottomans and, having secured victory at the battle of Peterwardein, had pushed the Sultan’s troops back to Belgrade and begun preparations for further attack. For Montagu, the journey into Hungary means traversing the sites of recent conflict whose ‘terrors’ – the Viennese inform her – include the possibilities of kidnapping, renewed fighting and a ‘cold so violent many have been killed by it.’16 The reports prove exaggerated, yet there are still hazards to be faced in the border regions, which are racked by poverty, overrun with wild animals and, around the site of Peterwardein, scarred by battle. As she writes,

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23

The marks of that glorious bloody day are yet recent, the field being strewed with the skulls and carcases of unburied men, horses and camels. I could not look without horror on such numbers of mangled human bodies, and reflect on the injustice of war that makes murder not only necessary but meritorious. Nothing seems to me a plainer proof of the irrationality of mankind, whatever fine claims we pretend to reason, than the rage with which they contest for a small spot of ground, when such vast parts of fruitful earth lie quite uninhabited. (p. 51)

This is the classic frontier zone, a swathe of contested territory between rival empires which contains in miniature all the imputed evils of the enemy: injustice, disorder, barbarism and death.17 It should be no surprise that Montagu, a woman of the Enlightenment, should take such borderlands as an occasion for an enlightened disquisition on human nature. The civilisational frontier marks a breakdown of the rationality, civic order and morality championed by the philosophes, and the commencement of a tyranny starkly opposed to what Montagu considers the freedoms of Britain, a country ‘blessed with an easy government under a king who makes his own happiness consist in the liberty of his people’.18 Her portrait of the frontier is furthered by events at the borderline itself, then at Betsko, a village midway between Peterwardein and Belgrade. When Montagu and her husband are passed from the Austrian troops, that have escorted them from Vienna, to the Ottoman janissaries across the lines, the two contingents, bristling with hostility, leave her ‘fearing some quarrel might arise’ (p. 52). Here was a small taste of imperial and religious rivalry, and of the frisson of danger that Europe’s eastern border represented. Although the Ottoman Empire would remain a potent enemy, by the turn of the nineteenth century a different imperial rival had come to preoccupy the western powers. Russia had long aimed at expansion into those regions that the Ottomans were beginning to vacate, gaining vast stretches of the Crimea and Circassia in the late eighteenth century and hoping to advance into south-east Europe, Constantinople and the Straits. In the words of one traveller, Russia represented an ‘intruder’, a ‘barbarity’, a militaristic empire intent on ‘extending its ramifications […] in every conceivable direction.’19 Europe’s eastern periphery was losing none of its resonance for western travellers. In the case of John Gadsby, a lecturer in Biblical and Oriental Studies who travelled to Sebastopol after the Crimean

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War, there was evidence of Russian expansionism all along the Danube and into what is now southern Romania. Along these northern frontiers of Ottoman influence, he encounters not only poverty and pestilence, but also militarisation, remnants of recent fighting and signs of imminent Russian advance. At Galatz, for example, he frets about Russia getting ‘her withering paws upon [the town]’ and at Sulina, at the mouth of the Danube, he believes that Russia’s aim is ‘to close the river altogether against foreigners.’20 Gadsby’s ire reaches a peak when his ship reaches Odessa and he is subject to the indignity of the Russian border control. It should be remembered that, in general, continental travel in the 1850s was not the bureaucratic ordeal it would later become, with no customs as such and no need for a passport, a document only fully introduced after the First World War. So Gadsby’s response to the border formalities in Russia, the only territory apart from the Ottoman Empire to require such officialese, is understandable. With unconcealed exasperation, he recalls being placed amid stockades, having his personal details recorded in a passport office, being obliged to wait in ‘a narrow lobby’ for an hour and then having his reading matter confiscated at customs. Upon recalling that he was finally placed in detention for three hours, he exclaims, I have heard it said that no stranger ever sets foot in Russia whose first thought is not how he shall get away again. Whether this be true universally or not, I can only say it was so in my case. No sooner had I landed, and cast my eye about me, surrounded as I was by fences, gates, and bars, and carefully eyed by white-capped soldiers, than I looked towards the steamer, and wished I had never left it. (p. 27)

On the one hand, what Gadsby experiences is merely the onset of modernity. With its onerous mix of bureaucracy and soldiery, and its restriction of individual mobility (its ‘fences, gates, and bars’), the border is illustrative of that expanding infrastructure by which European nations were coming to control their populations. On the other hand, the border is a metonym for the very specific brutality that the author imputes to the Russians. Quite apart from its irrationality and idolatry, Russia is so beset by oppression, torture and spying that it resembles ‘“one vast prison”’ where ‘sixty millions of human beings [are] transformed into living treadmills’ (p. 58). It is texts like these that demonstrate how Britain’s imperial adversaries could be even

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25

greater sources of otherness than the colonies. Gadsby himself bemoans, ‘O ye Arabs and Ethiopians; ye Niggers and South American slave-holders! Go to Russia. You may there yet learn a lesson or two in barbarism!’ (p. 27). As with so many British travellers, it is during the border crossing, when the state has the traveller under absolute control, that his fear of such ‘barbarism’ is greatest. The same anxiety was felt by Gadsby’s contemporaries, whose journeys in other parts of the peninsula were frequently unsettled by imperial, political or cultural frontiers. As an interesting example, there were many who found the short trip from the imperial heartland of the Ottoman Empire, situated in Constantinople, to the imperial borderlands of the southern Balkans, a source of apprehension and torment. Not untypically, Arthur Moore summed up Bulgaria and Macedonia as ‘a slough of savage anarchy’, the inhabitants sunk in ‘fierce and foolish chauvinism’ and in the pursuit of national ambitions ‘by killing women and children, by burning in oil, by mutilation, and by torture’.21 Lady Fanny Blunt’s lengthy residency in the area, which spanned the reign of Queen Victoria, adds detail to Moore’s sketch. The daughter of a British Consul in Constantinople and the wife of a Consul-General in the Near Eastern service, Blunt spent much of her life being transported between the capital and the provincial towns of Bitola, Skopje and Sofia. Throughout her memoir, she considers Constantinople ‘a pleasant and interesting post’, taking particular delight in the ‘beautiful suburb’ in which she was born, with its fine houses, clean streets, flourishing gardens and the constant attendance of persons of ‘exalted rank and position’, including European ambassadors and members of the British royal family.22 In contrast, Bulgaria and Macedonia are ‘semi-barbarous countries’ where ‘terrible outrages’ occur, ‘where war and massacres come unexpectedly’ and where limited ‘social resources’ make her ‘low and depressed’ (pp. 89, 70, 176, 55, 62). Blunt’s view of the Bulgarians is representative: while ‘possess[ing] certain good qualities’, they are given to ‘cruelty and intolerance’ and bear the ‘racial defects of wide nose, and eyes set wide apart’, the author consequently doubting that the indigenous population can ‘shake off the innate barbarism of its nature’ (pp. 88, 88, 114, 87). The imperial dichotomy between centre and periphery is extended when Blunt recalls her first journey to the Balkans, a departure from the ‘terrestrial paradise’ of Constantinople

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which she ‘did not relish’ (pp. 76, 54). Her fears are confirmed by the ‘antiquated cast-off paddle-wheel steamer’ on which she embarks for Thessalonika: The voyage was neither comfortable nor pleasant, but worse was to come. On the third day we reached Salonika, where we landed in a small boat on the sandy beach as there was no harbour or landingstage. Dozens of shoddy looking Jewish boatman surrounded our steamer, fighting, swearing, and screaming amongst themselves for the first customers. I though we should never see the end of the fray, until there arrived a clean, good boat, occupied by a handsome, brightlooking, young Englishman who scattered the boatmen right and left and […] got us ashore with our baggage […]. (p. 54)

Again, conditions at a border are used to introduce the deficiency and danger which a traveller will go on to find in the hinterland. The passage also reminds one that international frontiers, so often places where state control is intensified, can also suggest the loosening of that control and the perceived onset of criminality and disorder. For Blunt, the only congenial aspect of her arrival in the Balkans is the imperialistic policing of the ‘young Englishman’ (the author’s future husband). While her memoir finally withholds support for Ottoman governance, it is highly critical of Tzarist ambitions in south-east Europe, as were the majority of Victorian travellers. Whether due to Russia’s ‘attempt to obtain undue influence’ or to ‘the Christian subjects of the Sultan call[ing] out for the Protectorate of Russia’, there was a concerted fear of the region being ‘drawn more and more into the meshes of the Russian net’.23 The standard Russophobia is displayed by E.A. Brayley Hodgetts, who journeyed through the Near and Middle East in 1895 to report on the Armenian massacres for the Daily Graphic. No proponent of Balkan culture (Bulgaria is ‘a peasant state’ and its capital ‘a sort of Slough of Despond’), Hodgetts views its standard of life as preferable to his ‘experiences on […] the Turkish frontier’, where he sees a French co-traveller caught at customs with a camera and escorted off, leaving the author wondering ‘[w]hether he was cruelly tortured in a dark dungeon, or sewn up in a sack and thrown into the Bosphorus’.24 These troubled border conjectures are vindicated by the apparent degeneracy that Hodgetts finds in the Ottoman capital, although at no time does he suggest that the Porte’s administration is the region’s worst option. ‘Bulgaria will

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either become a Russian province’, he opines, ‘or will have to fight for her existence’, and the fact is ‘that Russia holds all the trumps.’25 By the early twentieth century, it was not only foreign empires that were threatening Europe’s eastern border. Although nationalism had swept through the region, finally dismantling the Ottoman Empire, the emergent states quickly assumed in the western imagination the mantle of their former rulers and – though free of Russian regulation – were themselves constructed as the West’s binary opposite. This was intensified during the Balkan Wars of 191213 when, just as the peninsula was gaining independence, the term ‘Balkan’ became a by-word for tribalism and bloodshed. In the words of one female traveller, the inhabitants all seem to display a ‘racial ferocity’ and a determination ‘to evict members of an alien race’, a divisiveness that, historically, ‘enabled the Turk to penetrate Europe’.26 This perceived unruliness so often began at the border. For Roy Trevor and co-travellers in 1909, entering Bosnia is like passing from ‘civilised Europe’ into a zone that ‘is not Europe, no matter what the map says’.27 The Bosnian landscape is evoked by Trevor as a ‘dreamland’, populated by such ‘strange folk’ and ‘strange, enchanting’ scenes that his group fears that their transportation will ‘dissolve’, leaving them ‘fated to spend the remainder of our lives in this world apart.’28 In 1915, the American traveller John Reed feels the passage into Serbia to be no less mythical. Finding the country impoverished in contrast to Greece, with the villages ‘unkempt’, the fruit tress ‘neglected’, the crops ‘rotting’ and the people ‘old’, ‘ragged’ and ravaged by typhus, the phrase that springs to Reed’s mind is ‘country of the dead’, these peripheral lands resembling nothing so much as the shadowy boundary between life and death.29 Time and again, the Balkans are imagined as something unreal, something that opposes the solid materiality of the West and that threatens to decompose the western body. Indeed, after 1914, and the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo, the region became viewed, by some, as the spark that could ignite all Europe. Yet this notion of the eastern border as the antithesis of the homeland was not necessarily a negative one. As mentioned, the western traveller has often delighted in reaching what is deemed to be the frontier of civilisation and in crossing into a perceptibly different culture. This kind of contrary journeying was prevalent after the First World War when, following the upheavals of the conflict and the

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subsequent settlements, a number of new national formations were created and some 3,000 miles of new border were established across Europe. From this reordering of the continent came a reordering of the way the continent was conceived, especially the redefined countries in the east. The divergence from past interpretative frameworks is exemplified by Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), which describes the author’s journeying through the newly created kingdom of Yugoslavia in the late 1930s, and which does so with all the stylistic innovation and philosophical engagement of inter-war modernism. West’s sense of contemporary Europe is of a multiple, contingent reality in which old certainties no longer apply and old empirical forms of interpretation no longer suffice. That the frontier could be used as a metonym for modern complexity is shown in her portrait of Rieka, a seaport in present-day Croatia that the western powers had clumsily divided up between Italy and Yugoslavia. The town, West laments, has the quality of a dream, a bad headachy dream. Its original character is rotund and sunburnt and solid, like any pompous southern port, but it has been hacked by treaties into a surrealist form. On a ground plan laid out plainly by sensible architects for sensible people, there is imposed another, quite imbecile, which drives high walls across streets and thereby sets contiguous houses half an hour apart by detour and formality. And at places where no frontiers should possibly be, in the middle of a square, or on a bridge linking the parts of a quay, men in uniform step forward and demand passports, minatory as figures projected into sleep by an uneasy conscience.30

The passage is a fine example of border psychosis (as one might term it), that unpleasant blend of guilt, impotence and misery that afflicts the individual at the moment of passage. Moreover, the border symbolises for West the alienation of modern communities, fractured and brutalised by twentieth-century power politics, a portrait that condemns western geostrategic policy while foregrounding the artificial nature of territorial borderlines and, by extension, the constructed nature of both nation-states and the continent that contains them. Nevertheless, after her experiences in Rieka, West proceeds to find great virtue in one particular nation, her adored Yugoslavia. As I detail in chapter 6, she paints a picture of a wild, romantic kingdom, where natural beauty is preserved and where people maintain a gentle and cultured nobility. In a time of political upheaval, when fascism

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was spreading across Europe, Yugoslavia is also a locale of harmony, order and revelation, a country ‘which writes obscure things plain, which furnishes symbols for what the intellect has not yet formulated’ (p. 914). Such valorisation is already present at West’s entrance into Yugoslavia at the Austrian-Slovenian crossing. It is with relief that she sights the border officials, these ‘handsome young soldiers’, who with their ‘olive uniforms’ and ‘soft’ questions stand in contrast to the ugliness and self-destructiveness infecting western populations in 1937: ‘I was’, she enthuses, ‘among people I could understand’ (pp. 33, 38). The Second World War, a conflict that Rebecca West dreaded, would again produce flux within Europe and a further redrawing of Europe’s eastern boundary. In the wake of wartime settlements, Soviet Russia – as it had become after 1917 – extended its sphere of influence into much of Europe east of the Alps and the Elbe, achieving under communism the kind of expansion it had desired under Tzardom. Of all the communist countries, Russia formed the significant other of the post-war West, entering the western psyche as an enigmatic, threatening mixture of state brutality, ideological alterity and economic austerity. Yet there were equally powerful markers of otherness scattered through the Eastern Bloc: the East German Stasi, Ceauçescu’s Romania, Hoxha’s Albania and most obviously the Berlin Wall, ‘one of the wonders of the modern world’31 and one of the westernmost points of Soviet encroachment. Here was the consummate slice of border architecture. Constructed in 1961 to stem the flow of refugees escaping to west Berlin, the wall was a simple construction of plain concrete panels, backed up with observation towers, arc lamps, trenches, dog runs and tripwires, the whole bathed at night in a sinister yellow light. Adam Nicolson’s emotive response to the spectacle, in Frontiers (1985), is typical. Pondering this ‘highly visible’ articulation of state power, and ‘[t]he shock’ of its ‘concrete actuality’, Nicolson views the wall as a kind of political sublime, an awesome presence that induces the same ‘delicious terror’ that the Romantics felt before nature.32 Nowhere else was the psychological shock of the East-West divide so palpable or its symbolic function so evident. Nicolson’s response climaxes when he mounts the scaffolding erected on the western rim as an observation point and looks into what was known as the ‘death strip’, that stretch of land

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between the outer, western wall and its inner, eastern equivalent. Here, he discovers a curious ‘blank space’, an interstitial zone where the one law is the Law of the Excluded Middle. There are no mines in the strip, but fences that ring bells and illuminate the area when touched, dogs on runs, Spanish horsemen, an anti-vehicle trench and the towers with outward-leaning windows, the ultimate monuments of traffic control. But, for all these objects, the real character of the strip is emptiness. The Wall itself hides this gap in urbanity. It is easy, perhaps, to accept the Wall as part of the urban division of things […], but this blank passage, electric with threat, does not belong in any landscape outside the fictional. It is a hovering non-space, a negative made apparent only by the positives it separates, a hiccough in the continuity of the real world. (p. 120)

The landscape of the border becomes, in Nicolson’s hands, an extended metaphor for the GDR as a whole. Despite his sense that the wall is ‘fictional’ (the westerner has always struggled to credit the reality of the east), the apparatus of power that governs this ‘landscape of distrust’ (p. 120), the intimidation and violence of the border regime, represents the wider processes of state socialism, or indeed the processes of any modern technological state. But it also represents something more psychological. When gazing into the dark heart of carceral society, Nicolson feels himself to be staring into the heart of nothingness, an ‘emptiness’ or ‘non-space’ amid the materiality of things which stimulates in the observer the desire for death. As he goes on to disclose, the strip affects him with ‘a sort of vertigo […], an irrational desire for its vacuum glamour, inviting one to try it out for the hell of it’.33 Presented at the border with the potent binarism of power and possibility, of oppression and freedom, the individual becomes touched by an urge towards negation. Although the Cold War shifted the continent’s eastern border well into central Europe, associating the latter with representational patterns which had chiefly been evolved for lands further east, there remained in the minds of travellers conceptual boundaries that existed within, and internally fragmented, the Soviet Bloc. The most obvious ‘curtain-within-a-curtain’34 was drawn around the peripheries of Albania. The common prognosis of Yugoslavia, for example, being ‘“a Communist country with primitive ideas of hygiene”’ is hardly equal to travellers’ fears about penetrating Enver Hoxha’s ‘hard-line Communist state’, that ‘deep-red land of Marxist mystery’.35 During

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the ten years that separated Christopher Portway’s package tour of Albania in the early 1970s and that of Eric Newby in the early 1980s, no aesthetic improvement had been made along its national confines. On their overland journeys from southern Montenegro they both find the road petering out into a dust track, the landscape becoming increasingly depopulated and the solitary Yugoslav customs house presided over by a ‘soldier with a machine-pistol’, their tour groups being temporarily stranded in no-man’s land ‘like survivors of some disaster’.36 Newby’s summation, that this was ‘an eerie place, as almost all places close to frontiers seem to be’, hardly differs from that of Portway a decade earlier: ‘Everywhere is hushed and still, as are all landscapes divided by an ugly border.’37 An identical response was triggered by the border crossing into Romania. John Higgins, who took several car journeys through eastern Europe in 1968 and 1969, enters the country from Hungary and immediately feels ‘as though civilisation has been left behind’, with the first Romanian town seeming ‘a hundred miles and several frontiers away’ from the last town in Hungary.38 When describing other sections of the Romanian border Higgins deploys a range of ‘Wild West’ imagery: Orşova, across the Danube from Yugoslavia, is ‘a ghost town’, a place so ‘eerie’ that he claims to have fled ‘before the Comanches rode in’, and Sighetu-Marmaţiei, near the Russian frontier, is full of men with ‘guns slung over their sheepskins’ and of cafés that ‘had swing doors of the variety found in the bars of Westerns’.39 A more emotive entrance into Romania is described in Dave Rimmer’s Once upon a Time in the East (1992), recalling his expatriate life in West Germany during the final decade of the Cold War. In the autumn of 1989, realising that the Berlin Wall will soon be a thing of the past, Rimmer sets out with a group of friends for a nostalgic tour of the Eastern Bloc, its highlight being an excursion into Ceauşescu’s Romania. Despite travelling across Hungary with an air of levity (carrying ‘several sets of joke shop Dracula teeth’),40 the group feels increasingly apprehensive as the frontier approaches: Romania. The word rang like an ominous chord. Ever since the jokes had started back in West Berlin, a sense of fear and foreboding had been building. Every time our spirits rose too high, it seemed that some small thing would remind us of where we were heading and – Romania! – like a nasty little arpeggio on a movie soundtrack, warning that the killer is at the door. (p. 241)

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The mock-horror of the passage turns to genuine shock when ‘the overgrown waste-ground of [the] border’ is passed and Rimmer witnesses a land so far ‘beyond civilisation’ that he claims to have ‘passed from the known universe into some semi-mythical badlands’ (p. 243). The mixture of ‘huge smoking chemical works’ and ‘brutishlooking peasants’ in villages with ‘no lights anywhere’ is described as ‘medieval serfdom married to everything terrible about the twentieth century’ (pp. 255, 245, 245, 244). The threat this poses to the British party emerges when crowds of impoverished Romanians begin hounding them for Western goods, ‘begging […], pushing and shoving’ and causing ‘real fright’ (pp. 260, 251). With experiences like this, it is inevitable that travellers’ departures from the Balkans can be as ecstatic as their arrivals are gruesome. After Georgina Harding undergoes a series of hardships on a Romanian cycling tour in 1989 – ‘[t]he people and the images crowded in on me and I felt a creeping […] anger, fear, guilt, and the urge to escape’41 – she curtails her trip and hastily flees the country. Although the crossing into Bulgaria already ‘seemed […] a liberation’, a sudden arrival in ‘a rational place’, the true deliverance only comes when Harding leaves the peninsula for a modern, capitalist Turkey, where she expresses ‘relief’ at re-entering ‘a world that I knew’.42 These travel accounts of the iniquities of state communism naturally enhanced the West’s collective image during the Cold War. Constructed in cultural production and political rhetoric as barbarous, tyrannical and morally bankrupt, the Eastern Bloc formed both the central gauge of western ‘democracy’ and, via the western propagandist’s emphasis on communist austerity, an important motor for ‘free-world’ consumerism. Expanding upon Nicolson’s motif of ‘blank space’, images of eastern European shortages, queues and consumer poverty – ‘the great Eastern European nada’43 – formed a telling backdrop for the ferocious accumulation pursued by western populations during an era of late capitalism. Significantly, the selfcongratulatory image that the West had developed for itself was crystallised in organisations like the European Community, which institutionalised the western definition of Europe as a wealthy, democratic and civilised zone that excluded the East. In our post-1989 era, amongst the many Cold War legacies are not only the maintenance of old methods of conceptualising eastern Europe, but also the enshrining of that discourse in the supranational bodies that

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regulate and define the continent. Despite the political upheavals of 1989-91 (another period in which territorial boundaries in Europe underwent transformation44), regions like the Balkans and Russia are still perceived as locales of social breakdown and consumer poverty diametrically opposed to the unity and progressiveness of the European Union, as the EC has become. The West that used eastern Europe as a negative point of reference for three hundred years has not been suddenly inclined to change. That the terrestrial borderline between the EU and eastern Europe could remain a symbol for eastern alterity is demonstrated in the majority of contemporary travelogues. After 1989, the general consensus has been that, while ‘[f]rontiers were coming down all over Europe’, in the Balkans ‘the very opposite was happening’.45 Along the outer limits of Romania, for example, the end of the Cold War produced a reputed hardening, rather than a lessening, of national partition. After a river crossing from Bulgaria, Jeremy James senses a sudden change in atmosphere: ‘you can tell the difference the minute you hit land on the far side’, he claims, where ‘you start thinking about getting robbed and fleeced’.46 While James offers no evidence to support the allegation, Dervla Murphy becomes a rare victim of theft when she arrives in Romania after a train journey from Hungary. In ‘an ill-lit rural station’, a crowd of Romanian customs and police officers ‘with hard unsmiling faces’ haul the veteran traveller from her compartment for a spurious visa check, during which another member of this ‘border mafia’ steals her baggage.47 Such experiences, however, hardly compare to what travellers have undergone at the borders surrounding and dividing the former Yugoslavia, which have proved an affront to all five senses. ‘There was a sound which said […] you are now entering Bosnia’, Martin Bell wrote in 1995: ‘the machine-gun and mortar fire in any one of the seventeen different war zones’.48 In 1999, when driving through Macedonia to Kosovo, Simon Winchester hears ‘a huge collective murmur that rolled from somewhere up close ahead’ (composed of ‘cries’, ‘sobbing’ and ‘the electric wailing of […] children’) long before he manages to see one of the border refugee camps created by Milošević’s ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.49 Winchester was not alone in lamenting the human divisions reified by south-east Europe’s internal frontiers, but was unusual in declaring these divisions geographically determined: with its ‘isolated valleys […], eternally defensible hilltops, and seemingly

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bottomless canyons’, the Balkan peninsula is a ‘geological fracture zone that became a template for the fractured behaviour of those who […] live upon it’.50 One of the most notorious travelogues to emerge from the new paradigm is Robert Carver’s The Accursed Mountains (1999), which details a tour of Albania in 1996. The author’s projection onto the region of brutality and deficiency begins in the opening pages, where he recounts the drive to the Albanian border at Psarades, in the hills of northern Greece. The area is compared to ‘a war zone’, with the roads full of checkpoints manned by Special Forces and the countryside teeming with Greek and Albanian army patrols (‘both having a reputation for shooting first and asking questions afterwards’51). The symbolism climaxes at the crossing itself, described as two unkempt shacks along a road ‘pocked and cratered as if it had been recently shelled by mortar fire’ (p. 17). Like Kinglake and Reed before him, Carver compounds the sense of foreboding with images of death: this is ‘a landscape emptied of life’, dotted with ‘old and dilapidated’ houses and ‘untenanted’ fields, and surrounded by ‘barren’ mountains (pp. 5, 5, 5, 15). The motif of deficiency remains central to Carver’s representation of the world across the border, as do the motifs of savagery and discord. His Albania is a country of unrelieved darkness: the economy is in tatters, the institutions of state are riddled with corruption and the male population is immersed in widespread murder and rape. Significantly, Carver’s mythic borderland is often evoked via frontier imagery drawn from the cinematic western. This is particularly so in Bajram Curri, ‘the Dodge City of northern Albania’, as Carver terms it, a lawless gun-toting settlement that is suffused with ‘[t]he atmosphere of imminent violence’ and plagued by ‘gunfights, dynamite and blood feuds’ (p. 249). True to the binarism of such films, Carver compares himself and his local American missionary contact in Bajram Curri to the good guys in this ‘Wild West’, to ‘Marshals confronted with the task of cleaning up a bad-ass, black-hat cowtown’ (pp. 254, 249). For Carver, only one feature distinguishes Europe’s borderlands from America’s western frontier. The former is not a place of opportunity and expansion, but of such depravity that any attempt to extend ‘civilisation’ there would be futile. The point emerges most clearly when Carver discovers a Wimbledon tennis match being transmitted on the missionary’s satellite television. The

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contrast between the chaos of the Albanian hills and this vision of order and prosperity leads him to revelation: No wonder there was such a slow, vast march of desperate people from the Third World to Europe and North America! If you lived in Bajram Curri and could see this on TV every night, of course you would just get up and walk towards it, if you possibly could […]. As W.B. Yeats so clairvoyantly prophesied, the slow beast, whose time had come, was slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, this not Communism, or Fascism or fundamentalism – but simply a mass of poor, desperate people from ruined countries; nightly we were watching the beast’s universal dreams and hearing its anthems and siren songs on our TV sets, this beast which would in time overwhelm us and destroy us in its desire to become like us. (p. 259)

Importantly, the ‘Europe’ mentioned in the second line excludes Albania, which is relegated to the ‘Third World’. This is reemphasised throughout the text by constant parallels between Albania and territorial entities – ‘Haiti […] of the 1950s’, ‘the north-west frontier of Hindustan of 1887’ (pp. 327, 193) – that are geographically and temporally distanced from the late-twentieth-century West. Like many contemporary travel writers, Carver prefers to view the Balkans as part of another continent, banishing it even from the continental peripheries, than to acknowledge that its postcolonial crises are European and, indeed, are central to the meaning of present-day Europe. When he goes so far as to construct eastern European immigration as an apocalyptic force, destructive of civilisation, one returns to the invasion imagery found in Montagu’s writings from the early eighteenth century, when the East represented imminent danger and when bloodshed lined the frontier. After some three hundred years, travel writers are still locating division within Europe, and still arguing that the absolute maintenance of division is vital for western security. If a border is, to conclude, a ‘reminder […] of the past’,52 a remnant of historical injustice and conflict, then there is no better illustration in kind than Europe’s eastern frontier. This boundary of western European identity, the product of Christian, Enlightenment and twentieth-century ideologies, is as institutionalised in the days of the European Union as ever it was, remaining the imagined breach through which impurity (chaos, crime, poverty) enters the western body. Indeed, such imaginings reveal one of the European Union’s

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major paradoxes. The EU, we are told, is grounded in the transnationalist ideals of free trade and socio-ecomonic integration, in a breaking down of state sovereignty and the desacralisation of national borders in order to create a freeflow of capital, information, goods, services and labour. Yet this so-called ‘Europe without frontiers’ is grounded in the same kind of exclusion as Christian Europe before the eighteenth century or ‘democratic Europe’ during the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the EU instantly reerected, via a tightening of its external borders and a demonisation of eastern immigrants, a new totalitarian boundary along the exact geographical line of the ‘iron curtain’, with ‘the presence of police, customs and even armed officers [merely] changed from one side to the other’.53 One wonders, in fact, about the extent to which this ‘fortress Europe’, an entity that repeats the nation-state’s belief that exclusion is central to identity and sovereignty, actually required the demonisation of eastern Europe for its creation. Commentators have pointed out how difficult it has been to inspire in western European populations a loyalty to the EU, a loyalty that would be integral to any collective European identity.54 Yet the continual construction in the media of a barbarous East, with its wars, mafias and waves of impoverished asylum seekers, may well prove effective for cohering and endorsing the affluent, technological, highly-policed community of states that stands in the West. The contemporary notion of ‘Europe’, in short, is being created not by contrast to outside entities, as is usual with nation-states, but by contrast to an other within. So it is that Neil Walker, pondering on how ‘[i]t is easier to say what Europe is not, rather than what it is’, concludes that one of its defining features is that ‘it is not Eastern Europe’.55 It may be true that the West is finally dismantling Cold War boundaries, most obviously in the full accommodation of east-central Europe in the EU. Even this integrative move, however, is predicated on these nations’ willingness to absorb western economic, political and legislative models, an assumption rooted in the centuries-old construction of the West as norm and the East as deviant. This institutional bias is also seen in the extraordinary trials that south-east Europe has undergone in order to gain acceptance into the EU’s ‘family’ of European nations, as I discuss in chapter 4. Yet what argument can be placed against this kind of cultural dominance? In order to avoid justifying the West’s expansionism, and its treatment of

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eastern Europe as an aberration in need of reform, it seems to me necessary to acknowledge worth within eastern cultures, and to emphasise those many cultural attributes which not only could be preserved there, but which also western Europe could learn from. In other words, if it is true that ‘[t]he two halves of Europe are exiled from each other’,56 as one Cold War traveller claimed, we should discern what the West has been exiled from after 1945 and what it has missed out on in its very different experience of the twentieth century. Integral to this interpretative shift is the refusal to universalise western culture. For unity to be truly achieved in Europe, to quote Anthony Coulson, ‘we must learn to recognise […] the strangeness of our own identities and cultures as much as the otherness of the strangers we meet.’57

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NOTES 1

Kinglake, Eothen, new edn (1844; London: John Lehmann, 1948), p. 23. Ibid., p. 23. 3 Ibid., p. 23. As an example of how common these remarks were, James Creagh arrives at the same frontier in the 1870s and, finding ‘Christendom is on the right, and Eslamiah on the left’, detects in the latter ‘weariness and disease’, ‘epidemics of pestilential fever’ and men who ‘differed in nothing from the Mahommedans of India’ (Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah: A Journey through Hungary, Slavonia, Servia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia, and Montenegro, to the North of Albania, in the Summer of 1875, 2 vols (London: Samuel Tinsley, 1875-6), I, 328, 324, 324, 327). 4 There is some ambiguity surrounding the terms ‘border’, ‘boundary’ and ‘frontier’. I shall be using definitions close to those commonly found in anthropology: that is, ‘border’ (and ‘borderline’) as the line between nations, and ‘frontier’ (and ‘boundary’) as the regions stretching away from either side of this line: see Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, ‘An Anthropology of Frontiers’, in Donnan and Wilson, eds, Border Approaches: Anthropological Perspectives on Frontiers (Lanham and London: University Press of America, 1994), pp. 7-8. For a discussion of the slipperiness of these terms in the social sciences, see also Anthony P. Cohen, ‘Boundaries and Boundary-Consciousness: Politicizing Cultural Identity’, in Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe (London and Washington: Pinter, 1998), pp. 25-6. 5 Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 21. 6 Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), p. 13. The border is ‘where power starts and finishes at once, where power is crudest, most absolute and then most abandoned’ (David Avalos with John C. Welchman, ‘Response to the Philosophical Brothel’, in Welchman, ed., Rethinking Borders (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 189). 7 Liam O’Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson, ‘Frontiers of Sovereignty in the New Europe’, in O’Dowd and Wilson, eds, Borders, Nations and States: Frontiers of Sovereignty in the New Europe (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), p. 8. 8 Schippers, ‘The Border as a Cultural Idea in Europe’, in Peter NiedermÜller and Bjarne Stoklund, eds, Europe: Cultural Construction and Reality (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001), p. 29. Daniel Cordle calls this the ‘metaphysical […] crossing that is to do with a transition in states of being’ (Cordle, ‘States of Being not Being in States: Metaphysical Border Crossings in the Work in Milan Kundera’, in Sharon Ouditt, ed., Displaced Persons: Conditions of Exile in European Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 129). 9 Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 9. 10 Gennep quoted and discussed in Rockwell Gray, ‘Travel’, in Michael Kowalewski, ed., Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 40. 2

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11 In postcolonial criticism, for example, Rena Potok locates a ‘space between borders’ which, once inhabited physically or imaginatively, collapses the ‘poles of linguistic and nationalistic opposition’, and produces ‘cultural hybridity’ (Potok, ‘Borders, Exiles, Minor Literatures: The Case of Palestinian-Israeli Writing’, in Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton, eds, Borders, Exiles, Diasporas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 292). As an example from the anthropological study of border peoples, Thomas Wilson contends ‘that international borders and border zones are liminal spaces (i.e., interstitial and transitional conditions of culture and community) between the […] unpolluted “conditions” of nation and state’ (Wilson, ‘Symbolic Dimensions to the Irish Border’, in Donnan and Wilson, eds, Border Approaches, p. 104). 12 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilisation on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 4-5. 13 See J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Deconstructing Europe’, in Gowan and Anderson, eds, Question of Europe, p. 306. 14 Frykman, ‘Belonging in Europe: Modern Identities in Minds and Places’, in Niedermüller and Stoklund, eds, Europe, p. 14. John Foster Fraser, in the early twentieth century, termed this the experience of ‘stepp[ing] out of Europe into Asia’ (Foster Fraser, Pictures from the Balkans, new edn (1906; London and New York: Cassell and Co., 1912), p. 18). 15 Oscar Martinez’s phrase for borders that prevent transnational interchange (Martinez, ‘The Dynamics of Border Interaction: New Approaches to Border Analysis’, in Clive H. Schofield, ed., Global Boundaries (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 2). 16 Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters, new edn (1763; London: Virago, 1994), pp. 43-4. 17 Michel Foucher reminds us that the term ‘frontier’ is etymologically linked to ‘frontline’ and is consequently indicative of the way that the limits of a state are connected to territorial appropriation or defence (Foucher, ‘The Geopolitics of European Frontiers’, in Anderson and Bort, eds, Frontiers of Europe, p. 235). 18 Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, p. 57. It should be said that Montagu went on to find much to admire in Constantinople, including a way of life that was in some senses a release from the confines of British society. 19 J.W. Ozanne, Three Years in Roumania (London: Chapman and Hall, 1878), pp. 224, 213, 224. 20 Gadsby, A Trip to Sebastopol, Out and Home, by Way of Vienna, the Danube, Odessa, Constantinople, and Athens. Together with Some Account of Russia and the Russians, Their Manners and Customs, Particulars and Incidents of the War, Anecdotes, Etc., 2nd edn (1858; London: Gadsby, 1858), pp. 25, 26. 21 Arthur Moore, The Orient Express (London: Constable and Co., 1914), pp. 279-80. 22 Blunt, My Reminiscences (London: John Murray, 1918), pp. 84, 1, 28. 23 Reginald Wyon and Gerald Prance, The Land of the Black Mountain: The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro, new edn (1903; London: Methuen, 1905), p. 14; Patrick O’Brien, Journal of a Residence in the Danubian Principalities, In the Autumn and Winter of 1853 (London: Richard Bentley, 1854), p. 103; Ardern G. Hulme-Beaman, Twenty Years in the Near East (London: Methuen, 1898), p. 182. For S.G.B. St Clair and Charles Brophy, Russia’s policy of ‘aggression leading to

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territorial aggrandisement’ is best addressed by propping up the Ottoman Empire, the authors convinced ‘that the country […] would, if left to a genuine Turkish administration untrammelled by foreign influence, become one of the most flourishing and powerful in the world’ (St Clair and Brophy, A Residence in Bulgaria; Or, Notes on the Resources and Administration of Turkey: The Condition and Character, Manners, Customs, and Language of the Christian and Mussulman Populations, With Reference to the Eastern Question (London: John Murray, 1869), pp. 405, vii). 24 Hodgetts, Round about Armenia, pp. 5, 5, 11, 12. 25 Ibid., pp. 10-11. 26 Edith Durham, The Struggle for Scutari (London: Edward Arnold, 1914), pp. viii, viii, 4. 27 Trevor, My Balkan Tour: An Account of some Journeyings and Adventures in the Near East together with a Descriptive and Historical Account of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dalmatia, Croatia and the Kingdom of Montenegro (London: John Lane The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane, 1911), pp. xxix, 31-2. 28 Ibid., pp. xxix, xi, 37, 37. 29 Reed, War in Eastern Europe: Travels through the Balkans in 1915, new edn (1916; London: Phoenix, 1994), pp. 7-8. There is a similar hint of the otherworld in Joyce Cary’s account of his time as a Red Cross volunteer in the First Balkan War. Looking out from the Montenegrin line to Ottoman-held positions, he writes: ‘it might have been the last forward station of humanity on the rim of the earth – wild men in sheepskin gazing from their crannies in the rocks, a little faint fire hidden here and there […], a cold hard wind, as steadily moving as a river, a sky of clouds below, shewing little triangles of the microscopic world between, and another close above’ (Cary, Memoir of the Bobotes, new edn (1960; London: Readers Union, 1965), pp. 59-60). 30 West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia, new edn (1942; Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993), p. 123. I have been assisted in the following discussion of West’s work by Paul Fussell’s comments on the text and the period in Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 31-6. 31 Anthony Bailey, Along the Edge of the Forest: An Iron Curtain Journey (London and Boston: Faber, 1983), p. 96. 32 Nicolson, Frontiers: From the Arctic Circle to the Aegean (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), pp. 123, 117-18. 33 Ibid., p. 120. Nicolson becomes increasingly wary of border controls as he travels eastward across the Balkans: ‘Nothing is more frightening […] than an arbitrary and petulant authority which is unhedged by regulation or seriousness […]. Each frontier was like the dentist’s: familiarity with the threat served to heighten, not diminish, it. Each crossing was another ritual humiliation’ (ibid, p. 208). John Gunther nicely symbolises the self-dissolution that can occur at border when he mentions that whenever Eastern Bloc border officials take down the names of himself and his travelling companion ‘they were horribly misspelled and garbled’ (Gunther, Behind Europe’s Curtain (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), p. 29). 34 Gardiner, Curtain Calls: Travels in Albania, Romania and Bulgaria (London: Duckworth, 1976), p. 9.

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35 Christopher Dilke, The Road to Dalmatia (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1962), pp. 12-13; Philip Ward, Albania: A Travel Guide (Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1985), p. 1; Gardiner, Curtain Calls, p. 9. 36 Portway, Double Circuit (London: Robert Hale, 1974), p. 22; Newby, On the Shores of the Mediterranean, new edn (1984; London: Pan Books, 1985), p. 111. 37 Newby, Shores of the Mediterranean, p. 110; Portway, Double Circuit, p. 22. 38 Higgins, Travels in the Balkans (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972), pp. 7, 104. 39 Ibid., pp. 22, 16, 16, 113, 113. 40 Rimmer, Once upon a Time in the East (London: Fourth Estate, 1992), p. 233. 41 Harding, In Another Europe: A Journey to Romania, new edn (1990; London: Sceptre, 1991), p. 87. 42 Ibid., pp. 153, 153, 157, 155. After similar experiences in Romania, the traumatised Jason Goodwin also feels relief at exiting the country: ‘If I felt better now it was because we were on our way to Giorghiu; to the Danube; to Bulgaria. We were getting out of Romania’ (Goodwin, On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul, new edn (1993; London: Vintage, 1994), p. 253). 43 Eva Hoffman, Exit into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe (London: Heinemann, 1993), p. 252. 44 Michel Foucher notes that some 8,000 miles of new borderline were created in the early 1990s: Foucher, ‘Geopolitics of European Frontiers’, p. 235. 45 Simon Winchester, The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans (London: Viking, 1999), pp. 24-5. 46 James, Vagabond (London: Pelham Books, 1991), p. 66. 47 Murphy, Transylvania and Beyond, new edn (1992; London: Arrow Books, 1993), pp. 4, 4, 6. 48 Bell, In Harm’s Way: Reflections of a War Zone Thug (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995), p. 33. 49 Winchester, Fracture Zone, pp. 17-18. 50 Ibid., pp. 60-1. See also the comments made by the American travel writer and political commentator, Robert D. Kaplan, in Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, new edn (1993; London and Basingstoke: Papermac, 1994), p. 51. 51 Carver, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania, new edn (1998; London: Flamingo, 1999), pp. 5, 12. 52 O’Dowd and Wilson, ‘Frontiers of Sovereignty’, p. 1. 53 Schippers, ‘Border as a Cultural Idea’, p. 27. See also K.M. Fierke and Antje Wiener, ‘Constructing Institutional Interests: EU and NATO Enlargement’, in Thomas Christiansen, et al., eds, The Social Construction of Europe (London: Sage, 2001), p. 130. 54 See Frykman, ‘Belonging in Europe’, p. 15, and Neil Walker, ‘The New Frontiers of European Policing’, in Anderson and Bort, eds, Frontiers of Europe, p. 173. 55 Walker, ‘New Frontiers’, p. 173. 56 Lesley Chamberlain, In the Communist Mirror: Journeys in Eastern Europe (London and Boston: Faber, 1990), p. 28. 57 Coulson, ‘Introduction’, to Coulson, ed., Exiles and Migrants: Crossing Thresholds in European Culture and Society (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1997), p. 18.

Chapter 2: Typologies of the East For the study of western imaginative geography, it is difficult to overestimate the influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a work that did much to create the critical school of colonial discourse analysis. It was here that Said first demystified ‘Anglo-FrenchAmerican’1 representations of the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, viewing their binaristic constructs not as empirically grounded but as an institutionalised, cumulative tradition of textual statements which have channelled and controlled western knowledge of the Orient from the eighteenth century onwards. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s conjunction of knowledge and power, Said also considered such representation a performative discourse which advances imperial supremacy in the region. It was in reference to Foucault, for example, that Said summarised orientalism ‘as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,’ lamenting how ‘European or Western knowledge about the Orient [is] synonymous with European domination’.2 Naturally, the thirty years since the publication of Orientalism have seen challenges to Said’s original thesis. Feminism, Marxism, deconstruction and psychoanalytic criticism have questioned his line of inquiry, revealing orientalism to be less fixed and monolithic than Said suggested.3 Yet the work’s status remains unimpaired. Orientalism continues not only to inform analyses of western views of the Middle East, with few studies not using Said as a starting point of discussion, but also to inform scholarship on western representations of other parts of the world. The influence of Said’s work on these other fields is particularly apparent in the criticism that addresses western representation of the Balkans. Emerging from the discourse studies that dominated the last two decades of the twentieth century, such criticism was at its most productive during the Balkan crises of the 1990s, when south-east Europe became, via a plethora of travel accounts, films, memoirs and media articles, one of the West’s most significant others. While being

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inspired by Said’s work, however, early research in the field was also hampered by many of its premises. Despite their frequent acuteness, critics initially allotted little specificity to the interpretative framework that structured the Balkans, and, largely due to the region’s position in the East and its history of control by the Ottoman Empire, viewed that framework as merely a branch of orientalism. In John Allcock’s seminal ‘Constructing the Balkans’ (1991), ‘differences’ are admitted, yet the focus remains on how Said’s writings ‘ring very true with respect to the process by which [south-east Europe] and its peoples have come to be constructed’, Allcock summarising the examination of ‘the image of the Balkans as a sub-theme to Said’s study.’4 A similar assertion appears in the work of Milica Bakić-Hayden. In two important articles from the early 1990s, Bakić-Hayden accepts that ‘it is important to recognize the specific rhetoric’ on the Balkans, only to go on to argue that such rhetoric forms a ‘“variation on the orientalist theme”’ and that orientalist imagery is often ‘highly reminiscent of […] depictions of eastern Europe’.5 Bakić-Hayden’s shift in the final phrase to the wider geographical category is an acknowledgement of the work of Larry Wolff, whose Inventing Eastern Europe (1994) also appeared during the decade. Once again, despite some suggestion of specificity, Wolff’s study views ‘the invention of Eastern Europe as an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization.’6 The influence of the Saidian model was, in fact, so pervasive that the conflation of orientalism and the western discourse on the Balkans was continuing in the late 1990s. David Norris’s In the Wake of the Balkan Myth (1999) claims that the latter ‘overlaps’ with ‘Said’s formulations concerning Orientalism’, and Wendy Bracewell and Alex DraceFrancis despecify the western image of the Balkans by terming its academic analysis an ‘Orientalist approach.’7 It was not that discursive specificity was unrecognised in such work, but rather that the specific traits projected onto south-east Europe were so under-explored that they became eclipsed by a sense of congruence between the two rhetorical traditions. It would certainly be wrong to suggest that no such congruence exists. Even the briefest survey of western perceptions of the Balkans and of the Orient will discover motifs, images, registers and evaluations which appear to have floated free of historical and geographical context. This is true, most obviously, of the tone in which commentators have described the Balkans, berating this ‘cut-throat part of Europe’ with a moral outrage

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which matches that of comparable criticisms of the Middle East.8 At the same time, the denigratory essentialisation of the Balkans has been pursued via tropes – of mystery, degeneracy, savagery, immorality, chaos – that are found in orientalism and that have recurred persistently in post-Enlightenment writings on both regions. Furthermore, the two strains of discourse have been structured according to exactly the same binarist logic, with south-east Europe proving as effective an antitype for the enlightened, progressive, imperial West as the Islamic East. Indeed, many of Said’s depictions of orientalist binarism could as easily stand for the dichotomies between western and south-east Europe (or indeed between the West and any foreign other). When cultural production divides the world, as Said phrased it, ‘into “us” (Westerners) and “they” (Orientals)’, and constructs the former as ‘rational, virtuous, mature, “normal”’ and the latter as ‘irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, “different”’, one has the basic ontological template for the ‘absolute’ division of Europe itself, not only that separating Europe and the Middle East.9 There is nothing surprising about these similarities between representational forms. The ethnocentric motifs that gained ground in nineteenthcentury discourse were ubiquitous in presence and indiscriminate in usage, pervading western European culture and being deployed on a wide range of non-European territories. Yet should this imply that no specificity occurred at all? One would assume that, as a cross-cultural discourse interacts with the particularities of a region, it would gain a measure of uniqueness and, over time, begin to assume some of the features of a distinctive tradition. This has indeed been the case with the Balkans, and it was not long before late twentieth-century critics began to explore the idiosyncrasies of western representation of the peninsula. The breakthrough was made by two studies written in the latter half of the 1990s, the first and most important being Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997).10 Addressing the earlier scholarship, Todorova states that the western view of south-east Europe should not be ‘circumscribed in the category of orientalism’ and that, rather than view the former as ‘merely a subspecies’ of the latter, the emphasis should be on the delineation of ‘a seemingly identical, but actually only similar phenomenon’.11 It was to this end that Todorova introduced the term ‘balkanism’, a crucial step-forward for the field. Drawing the term from linguistics, where it refers to attributes of local

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languages, she used ‘balkanism’ as a shorthand for the range of discursive practices, political projects and representational motifs in writings on south-east Europe. These motifs, although not explored in depth, were particularly important to her thesis. If one takes Said’s definition of a cross-cultural discourse, as the ‘vocabulary’, ‘representative figures’ and ‘tropes’ deployed when describing a region or culture other than one’s own,12 then for Todorova the depiction of the Balkans has been composed of specific linguistic material and specific traditions of imagery and emphasis. It was this divergence that led her to conclude that ‘[b]alkanism evolved to a great extent independently from orientalism and, in certain aspects, against or despite it.’13 Todorova’s insights were soon augmented by K.E. Fleming’s ‘Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography’ (2000). Stated boldly, the article’s focus was on the limited ‘utility of a Saidian approach to the Balkans’, contending that critics would be more usefully employed in ‘testing (and perhaps ultimately rejecting) Said’s model’.14 The proof for Fleming was less the form which balkanism has taken than the conditions in which it has been produced. Significantly, she argued that south-east Europe has received less weighty and sustained treatment than the Orient, with the West’s interest in the region beginning relatively late and lacking the authority of the orientalist canon. In contrast to the erudite, specialised academic infrastructure awarded the Middle East, for example, balkanism has largely been pursued in the populist genres of ‘adventure fiction and travelogue’,15 often produced by non-experts during periods of crisis. Fleming’s emphasis on the conditions of production, when wedded to Todorova’s emphasis on representational tropes, proved beyond doubt that a distinct field of study had emerged. Using travel writing as a source material, this chapter intends to further their analysis of balkanism by expanding upon one area of study: Todorova’s exploration of discursive imagery. While accepting points of interdependence with orientalism, I shall posit some general areas of variance as balkanist discourse developed during the long nineteenth century, especially from the 1840s to the outbreak of the First World War. As part of this, the chapter will question a number of claims that Todorova has made. In particular, her assertion that, in contrast to writings on the Orient, travellers have rarely ‘romanticiz[ed] the Balkans’16 will be challenged, and the case made that the style of romanticisation to be found in Balkan travelogues is

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central to the distinctiveness that the discourse has achieved. In contrast to Todorova’s work, I shall also be making the Foucauldian issue of power-knowledge central to my argument, as it is elsewhere in this book. It seems curious that for a field so grounded in Saidian analysis the political interests governing representation are rarely analysed in studies of balkanism, despite the fact that a full understanding of the forms and transformations of any cross-cultural discourse is dependent on exactly such analysis. For this theme, my timeframe is admittedly a limiting factor. Both balkanism and orientalism have been complex and mutable discourses, heterogeneous in structure and shifting over time in a manner under-emphasised by Todorova and Said; in focusing solely on balkanism’s formative period, I can only aim to sketch out the broad disparities between the two conceptual structures during the heyday of empire, aware that their historical transformation requires a much longer study. One of the most important disparities, to begin with, involves the respective positions and functions allotted to the Orient and the Balkans in western imaginative geography. On the one hand, the Orient has always been viewed as an absolute point of otherness that exists outside the framework of Europe, threatening the continent from without. As Said argues, the Orient is ‘culturally, intellectually, spiritually outside Europe and European civilization’, an ‘outsider’ ‘with its own national, cultural, and epistemological boundaries’ that ‘lurk[s] alongside Europe [as] a constant danger’.17 The role it plays, in other words, is that of the clear and powerful opposite, one grounded in a wholesale ‘difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)’,18 and with whom altercation would produce catastrophe. The role of the Balkans, however, is quite distinct. In the western imagination, the region is less a secure marker of alterity than an unstable and unsettling presence loosed from clear identity, an obscure boundary along the European peripheries where – as noted in chapter 1 – categories, oppositions and essentialised groupings are cast into confusion. In the ontological division between East and West, David Norris writes, the Balkans are ‘the ambivalent lands between’, a frontier ‘not belonging fully to either world.’19 This is the part of Europe where Orient and Occident merge, and where various ethnicities have infiltrated European space while simultaneously refusing many of the West’s models of social development and cultural organisation. Therefore,

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contrary to the Orient’s role as a contiguous or exterior other, the Balkans have become the other within, a liminal self that undermines continental unity and stability by more subtle erosion. On one level, the region’s ambiguous position has caused bewilderment for Western commentators, as illustrated by the usage of the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘European’ in their writings. In James Creagh’s Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah (1875), for example, there is no doubt that the Balkans are European territory, the author regarding them as a portion of ‘the continent of Europe’, yet he often manages to find ‘nothing European’ about Balkan culture.20 Similarly, Henry Barkley’s Bulgaria before the War (1877) considers the region geographically European, designating Bulgaria a ‘part of Europe’, but then denies it ‘European’ identity by reserving the epithet solely for the actions, products and judgements of those from the West.21 On a deeper level, this act of stumbling upon an alien culture within Europe itself, of unearthing a wildly distorted variant of European actuality, has been the cause of considerable alarm. A good example is a border crossing found in Jan and Cora Gordon’s Two Vagabonds in the Balkans (1925), when the two writers arrive by train at Brod station, the first stop in the new kingdom of Yugoslavia. Their description of the sudden dismay that the region causes them crystallises the major tropes of the previous one hundred years of balkanist discourse: When you have been thrust out of the train at midnight into the blackest gloom, on to what you must believe to be a station platform from the behaviour of your fellow passengers rather than from any visual deduction, since no gleam of lamp relieves the darkness […]; when you have in panic bewilderment taken a dozen steps into the darkness – vaguely hoping that information of some sort will be discoverable in any other spot than the one where you are at the moment – only to be tripped up, floundering down into a squad of now expostulating and quite perceptibly odorous soldiery […]; when you have accosted a dozen dim forms to find each one a new variant of exasperated and egoistic passenger; when you have tried French, German, Serb, and blasphemy without getting answer good or bad from anybody, you may be pardoned if you judge that you have arrived somewhere near to the edge of civilization, or at least of civilization as we would understand it. Yet Brod station is technically well within European soil lying west of the longitude of Budapest and north of the latitude of Genoa or Bordeaux.22

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The passage’s mood of restrained exasperation (of ‘panic bewilderment’) was the customary response to the loss of familiarity occasioned by Balkan travel. In this most westerly extremity of the peninsula, the markers of European modernity are already petering out, giving way to a symbolic antithesis of enlightened ‘civilization’: to chaos, backwardness and all-pervading darkness. But the station is in Europe, as we are informed by the topographical insistence of the final line and by the existence of what is, after all, a recognisably European landscape. Indeed, as the narrator surveys the oddities around – stations with no platforms, soldiers with no manners, passengers with no language – the experience is not so much of a civilisational other, but of viewing the self in a kind of distorted mirror. And it is in this process of self-derangement that the real pertinence of the region lies. In western imaginative geography, the Balkans represent a Europe disfigured by the presence of the ‘nonEuropean’, serving to illustrate the ease with which the self can be subverted. Whereas orientalism establishes fixed boundaries and categories, and helps western Europe to gauge its superiority in the world, the Balkans remind the West of the instability of those boundaries and of the need to constantly maintain cultural hierarchies within the continent. Linked to this hierarchical approach to European geography, a second feature that distinguishes the two discourses is the absence in balkanism of the ‘paradigm of antiquity’23 informing images of the Middle East. Orientalism has traditionally constructed its object as an archaic and venerable civilisation, discovering in the East a linguistic, religious and architectural greatness that hints at momentous revelations for the western observer. This is what Ella Shohat, commenting on western filmic representation, terms the orientalist ‘iconography of papyruses, sphinxes, and mummies’.24 Before the eighteenth century, this reputation for greatness was assisted by the might of the Ottoman Empire, whose power and opulence had drawn from the West both trepidation and begrudging respect. As Maxime Rodinson writes, ‘Europeans saw the Muslim East as a land of wealth and prosperity: an advanced civilization of grand monuments and sumptuous courts of unimagined splendor.’25 With the Ottoman decline during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the greatness of the East was viewed as so historically distant, and as so irrecoverable, that it also became disparaged as a decadent culture, a

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realm of luxury, idleness and desuetude. It was partly in opposition to this bygone grandeur that a very different image of the Balkans developed. Apart from an intermittent interest in the ruins of Empire littering the peninsula, travel writing found little to recommend for the linguist, historian or archaeologist. South-east Europe was, as one traveller in Romania during the 1870s put it, a place of social and economic ‘wretchedness’ untouched by ‘the refinements of Western civilisation’.26 The fact that the indigenous peoples enjoyed significant cultural achievements, or that much of the region was currently enduring imperial oppression, was roundly ignored. For an illustration of the two disparate versions of the East it is useful to return to Kinglake’s celebrated account of his journey from the Balkans to Syria in the 1830s, which shows the way that contrasting representational strands can coexist within a single text. Kinglake’s image of the Orient, on the one hand, is based upon the remnants of past glories to be found in the Ottoman territories, remnants which lead him, a representative of one imperial power, to pay homage to the characteristics and successes of another. He is particularly effusive about ‘Turks of the proud old school’, who have the ‘kind, gentle manner’ and the ‘fierce, careless bearing of their once victorious race.’27 Yet Kinglake’s awareness of the dwindling power of the Porte produces an air of belatedness in the text, the author constantly returning to the ‘waning power’ and ‘fading splendour’ of ‘this dead empire’, whose ‘desolate’ civilisation is built on ‘crumbling soil’ and filled with ‘the rubbish of centuries’ (pp. 44, 44, 44, 26, 26, 26). Such descriptions culminate in a contrast between a decaying Constantinople and ‘queenly London’, which by this stage in the nineteenth century had become ‘the centre of the greatest and strongest amongst all earthy dominions’ (p. 44). For the Balkans, on the other hand, the lack of imperial culture produces not only an absence of positive comment but also the sense that the region has nothing worth commenting on at all. The point is crystallised when the Englishman’s entourage makes its way through central Serbia. There are a few descriptions of forests and hamlets, and then, entering a stretch of country that reminds the author of the landscaped estate of some English lord, Kinglake descants on the contrast between travel in Britain and travel through this Ottoman province: There are few countries less infested by ‘lions’ than the provinces on this part of your route: you are not called upon to ‘drop a tear’ over

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the tomb of ‘the once brilliant’ anybody, or to pay your ‘tribute of respect’ to anything dead or alive; there are no Servian or Bulgarian littérateurs with whom it would be positively disgraceful not to form an acquaintance; you have no staring, no praising to get through. The only public building of any interest that lies on the road is of modern date, but is said to be a good specimen of oriental architecture; it is of a pyramidical shape, and is made up of thirty thousand skulls contributed by the rebellious Servians in the early part (I believe) of this century […]. I am ashamed to say that, in the darkness of the early morning, we unknowingly went by the neighbourhood of this triumph of art, and so basely got off from admiring ‘the simple grandeur of the architect’s conception’ and ‘the exquisite beauty of the fretwork.’ (p. 38)

The passage is partly a satire on the modes and expectations of travel writing, which by the 1830s had established such a panoply of convention, especially regarding the seeing of sights, that the genre itself became a target of irony. More importantly, however, Kinglake uses the section to bluntly itemise south-east Europe’s primitive attributes. The motif is initiated by the play on the term ‘lion’, signifying backwardness through its allusion both to the jungle and to the jungle’s very opposite: the great personage or family, with its heraldry and armorial bearings. From this point on, the Balkans are defined solely by lack, the author remarking on the absence of the aristocratic hosts, public figures, high culture, history and architecture that define his homeland. Indeed, when an object of interest is finally located – that of the Ottoman-built Tower of Skulls near Niš – it is a structure whose formal barbarity ironically subverts the architectural ideals (of ‘grandeur’ and ‘exquisite beauty’) that Kinglake propounds, accentuating the opposition between Britain and this ‘semi-savage’ region. The fact that the only cultural signifier along the route is built by the Ottomans further marks out indigenous culture as a deficiency opposed to imperial plenitude (though Ottoman culture is also a matter of indifference to the author). It would be wrong to conclude, as Todorova does, that the Balkans were unanimously dismissed in the nineteenth century as drab and uninteresting (as what she terms ‘unimaginative concreteness’28); but even those travellers who found picturesque beauty in the region’s folk customs and landscape depreciated it against western attainment. The next point of divergence between balkanism and orientalism concerns the respective gendering of the two regions: specifically, a propensity to feminise Middle Eastern landscape and

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culture that one rarely finds in balkanism. Feminisation was, it should be said, a characteristic of colonial discourse on many of its subject territories, not one unique to orientalism. David Spurr, in The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), remarks on the widespread process of ‘assign[ing] to subject nations those qualities conventionally assigned to the female body’ and details some of its common tropes (including ‘mistress’, ‘virgin land’, a body to be ‘penetrated’ and ‘controlled’).29 Nevertheless, the West’s feminisation of non-western spheres was heightened in many writings on the Orient. In each sphere of regional portraiture (history, landscape, character, metaphor) the Orient was formed in such a way as to set off the vigour and manliness of the imperial West and to emphasise the potentialities of western power. So it is that Said, in an article from 1985, views western discourse on the East ‘as a praxis of the same sort as male gender dominance, or patriarchy, in metropolitan societies’, with the region being ‘routinely described as feminine, its riches as fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem, and the despotic – but curiously attractive – ruler.’30 In the final phrase, Said makes important reference to the fact that feminisation could also mean a demasculinisation of the oriental male, a figure who was often constructed as passive, sensual, decadent, and exposed to what Dennis Porter calls the ‘homoerotic tradition’ in British writing.31 Considering how common the feminisation of non-western regions had been during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its wide-ranging absence from the Balkan travelogue is a feature to be noted. South-east Europe was persistently viewed as a male space, with its sporadic conflict, its rugged terrain, its lack of enervating luxury and its resolutely patriarchal social structures gaining it a reputation for noble savagery. Todorova’s point about how rarely the ‘“maleness” of the Balkans received a positive account’ is difficult to support.32 Positive accounts are particularly prevalent in British writings on Albania, a region that one Victorian writer termed a ‘stern’ and ‘savage land’ populated by a ‘proud, self-respecting, gentlemanly race’.33 Edith Durham’s High Albania (1909) expands on the form this masculinisation took. Durham’s life was not untypical for a middle-class Edwardian woman, having spent much of her early adulthood in domestic drudgery and having been prevented from travel until well into her thirties. It is no surprise, then, that her journeys into the patriarchal culture of northern Albania, where she

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achieves considerable social and political status, are viewed as a liberation. Accompanied only by a guide and muleteer, and in defiance of Ottoman regulation, Durham sets off on a series of mountain treks that offers the constant thrills of peril and mayhem. She is happy to consort almost solely with Albanian men, who, with their ‘lean supple figures’, their ‘“swagger”’, their ‘splendid silvermounted weapons’, their ‘tight-fitting chakshir’, into which they ‘thrust great silver ramrods’, and their ‘noble traits’ of ‘courage’ and ‘hospitality’, are commended as the epitome of vigorous malehood.34 The landscape through which she journeys is equally heroic, an ideal breeding-ground for these dignified ‘warriors’ (p. 146). Awestruck, she describes the northern ‘fastnesses’ as a ‘wilderness of barren rock’, where the sun ‘beats […] with cruel force’ and where ‘an elemental struggle for existence [occurs], carried out in relentless obedience to Nature’s law’ (pp. 4, 19, 294). Such wildness also characterises domestic space in Albania, as exemplified by a mountain home along the Albania-Montenegrin border in which she quarters. Its interior, she exclaims, ‘was magnificent’: It was nothing more than a huge, rudely-built stone cattle-shed – vast, cavernous – lighted only by a pile of blazing logs. Great curtains of cobweb hung from the smoke-blacked rafters above. The walls and the posts that bore the roof glittered with cartridge-belts and brandnew Mausers, the weapons of the four-and-twenty tribesmen gathered to meet us. The ground was thickly strewn with heaps of newly-cut bracken. An Homeric meal was served on many sofras. The twentyfour men-at-arms, brave, with heavy silver chains and silver-mounted revolvers, couched like panthers in the ruddy glare, was (sic) a sight to remember. Two serving-men held flaming torches aloft, by the light of which we tore and worried the seethed lamb. The roof rang with laughter, song, and the tamboora. (pp. 145-6)

These ‘panther-like’ Albanians, characterised by their possession of weaponry (a major source of light, as well as plenitude, in the passage), are constructed firmly in the primitivist mould, an effect added to by Durham’s evocation of domestic austerity. Composed of stone, logs and bracken, the room is a forbidding, ascetic space, a far cry from the bourgeois western interiors that Durham had fled and transgressive of the western boundaries between interior and exterior in the way it draws in, and thus partakes in, the wider Albanian landscape. Adjectives such as ‘rudely-built’, ‘cavernous’ and ‘smoke-

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blacked’ are no longer balkanist pejoratives, but the epithets of a manly environment which the passage’s archaic tone and foregrounding of foreign words serve to exoticise. It is her absorption into this ‘Homeric’ male world that one senses Durham’s journeying is all about. The writer’s use of the first-person plural in the phrase ‘we tore and worried’ indicates her acceptance by the patriarchal community, one that is highlighted by a later reference to how the women of the household eat apart. Opposed to what Kinglake called the ‘tamed’ milieu of England,35 the Balkans are a recreational terrain in which even female travellers can achieve masculinist adventure. The specific gendering of south-east Europe is linked to another distinguishing feature of balkanism, which is the lack of sexual allure that the region had for British visitors. As recent feminist criticism has shown, one of the major attributes of orientalist discourse is the persistent eroticisation of its object, with scholars like Rana Kabbani, Reina Lewis and Ella Shohat locating and deconstructing orientalism’s fantasies of veils, eunuchs, dancing girls, princesses, odalisques and harems. As Kabbani put it, ‘the East was a place of lascivious sensuality’, its inhabitants ‘decadent languishers in rich harems’ who are ‘slothful, preoccupied with sex’, ‘irrepressively lecherous, [and] devilish as well.’36 Such imagery clearly opposed the Victorian ideals surrounding womanhood and domesticity, establishing the East as a kind of id to the West’s ego. Naturally, in this imagined world, all the repressed desires of western malehood could find legitimised expression; in the texts of Richard Burton, Edward William Lane and Wilfred Blunt, amongst others, the East facilitated discussion of sexuality and desire that was restricted in polite discourse, but which here could be openly pursued under the sober guise of ethnological study. The process would be repeated in twentieth-century popular culture, with cinema, for example, able to use the East as a vehicle for ‘quasi-pornographic’ imaginings of ‘bare skin’ and ‘carnal delights’ ‘without risking censorship’.37 Things could not have been more different in the Balkans. Here was a dearth of the lavish seraglios that dominated the East’s sexual topography, and little of the leisure and wealth that formed the source of Oriental glamour. When local harems were entered by western travellers they were often those of provincial town families, suffused with desolation and penury, and lacking the ‘boundless pleasure and perennial lasciviousness’38 of the East. Indeed, throughout this remote

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outpost of Empire, indigenous society was deemed a lowly, inferior affair by middle- and upper-class Britons, who found the range of social possibilities narrow. Adventuring in the Balkans, in other words, was limited to geographical exploration, with sexual attraction, flirtation or conquest very much proscribed.39 It was perhaps as a result of this that male travel writers went out of their way to emphasise that no impropriety with Balkan women had taken place, denouncing their lack of beauty and suggesting, on occasion, that their appearance was so offensive as to violate physical norms. An example appears in Percy Henderson’s A British Officer in the Balkans (1909), detailing a journey through the western parts of what would later become Yugoslavia. An ex-major of the Indian Army, Henderson declares himself used to the sight of veiled women, yet has ‘never got over the curiosity […] as to what might be behind the veil.’40 An opportunity to solve the mystery arises at Mostar, where some of his company are invited into the harem of a local official. Even before the unveiling takes place, however, the appearance of the women’s costumes produces repulsion. ‘Figure to yourself’, he pronounces, a long, very thick dark blue greatcoat […] furnished with an enormous collar standing up nearly a foot in height. This garment is thrown over the wearer, whom it envelops, head and all; the hook fastened, not over the throat, but just below the nose, leaving the high stiff collar to project forwards, above and beyond the forehead, a huge beak. […] The cloak is hooked closely all the way down, with the sleeves pinned back and flapping loosely, rather like embryo wings. Huge black or bright yellow, clumsy, untanned boots complete the costume. The effect produced by these silent, muffled figures, waddling along in ones and twos and sometimes rows, is that of monster extinct birds – a cross between a toucan and a penguin, say; or they might be strayed inhabitants of some unknown planet, or weird creations of Mr. Wells’s fertile brain – anything rather than human beings. (p. 71)

In balkanist discourse, even the Balkan female is defeminised. Associated with greatcoats and clumsy boots, and described as ‘enormous’, ‘high’ and ‘huge’, her monstrous physique and dress present a clear antithesis to the delicate standards of Edwardian womanhood. In contrast to Durham’s Balkan males, with their ‘panther’-like grace, and in contrast to Henderson’s Bosnian men, who are ‘good-looking fellows’ (p. 115), the women’s reputed unattractiveness is associated with a grotesque interbreeding (‘between a toucan and a penguin’) that at best implies absurdity, at

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worst a transgression of moral codes. The author’s emphasis on abnormality, particularly in the comparisons to aliens and ‘weird creations’, dehumanises the women to such an extent that the passage finally withholds the sympathy that it may otherwise have shown them. Far from offering a critique of male power (which the reference to a ‘silent, muffled’ condition could imply), Henderson distances himself from the women’s plight, especially during his later description of their unveiling, a description which is itself a fantasy of male control.41 This reveals the women’s faces to be ‘pallid, seedylooking, beaded with perspiration’, marred by ‘the most shocking teeth’ and – as if such direct contrast was necessary – lacking ‘the large, liquid, almond-shaped eyes of the East’ (pp. 71-2). Misled by tales of a libidinous East, travellers in the region were invariably disappointed.42 This did not mean, of course, that the region was devoid of the exotic or that social realities were ‘prosaic’, as Todorova claims.43 It was just that the romance of Balkan travel was rarely connected to amorous pursuits. The power that Henderson’s gaze achieves over the veiled women (the power of the seer over the seen) introduces another area in which western discourse on the Balkans gains distinctiveness. Although understudied by many analysts of balkanism, the desire for personal or national power is fundamental to the formation of any cross-cultural knowledge, with representational patterns such as balkanism and orientalism accommodating tangible forms of political and economic ambition. As mentioned, Said never doubted the ‘closeness between politics and Orientalism’ or the fact that ‘Orientalism can be put to political use’, his research locating ‘[a]n unbroken arc of knowledge and power [that] connects the European or Western statesman and the Western Orientalists’.44 The most obvious manifestation in kind was the ascendancy that the British and French Empires achieved across the Middle East and North Africa in the nineteenth century, a time when the motifs of discord, immorality and violence were confidently deployed in travel writing to justify western interventionism. Although the same level of justification could occur even when imperial activity was not directly mentioned, denigratory representation was typically accompanied by ardent calls for territorial appropriation. There is something inevitable, for example, in the way Kinglake’s vilification of the Middle East leads to the claims that ‘the Englishman […] will plant a firm foot on the banks of the Nile’ and

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that the indigenous populations looked forward to greeting ‘some nation, France or England, […] as the arriving sovereign’ of their region.45 Alongside this vindication of expansionism, a second function of colonial discourse is to entrench the mores and ideologies of the homeland, as Said also examined. The construction of such a barbarous other as the Orient has long been used as a gauge for the sanctity and progressiveness of the home culture: the greater the sense of iniquity that surrounds the other, the greater the opportunity for idealising the self. The two functions of representation have also informed western engagement with the Balkans. On the one hand, the region’s position within Europe has been as useful as the Orient’s contiguity to Europe for gauging the West’s collective self-image. In the above passage from Jan and Cora Gordon, for example, the backwardness, chaos and obfuscation projected onto Yugoslavia help to establish the two writers – and their home culture – as rational, enlightened and progressive. During periods of upheaval in south-east Europe, the representational motifs of violence and conflict have produced a broad sense of a peaceful, harmonious West by evoking the terrifying proximity of its radical opposite. At the same time, such extravagant representation serves distinctly territorial ambitions. These might not have amounted to the overt colonialism that the West pursued elsewhere, but were still concrete, far-reaching imperial interventions and were assisted by the circulation of denigratory images as surely as the political goals further East. As I shall be discussing this in more depth in chapter 4, there are just two main strands of interventionism in the Balkans to be mentioned here. On the one hand, there is the extensive economic penetration that western financiers achieved during the late nineteenth century when, as L.S. Stavrianos has described, government loans and infrastructural development resulted in financial dependency for the emerging states and in the West’s increasing control of local economies.46 On the other hand, there is the powerful influence that the West gained over the region’s political structures. Fearing Russian ambitions in the Balkans and Constantinople, and fearing the loss of British land routes to India should Russian expansionism occur, Britain offered military and financial assistance to the failing Ottoman Empire, propping up the Porte with little regard to the needs and wishes of the indigenous populations. Indeed, so determined were many in the West to see

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Russian ambition foiled that when the ‘sick man of Europe’ finally proved terminal this kind of colonialism-by-proxy was voiced in British writings on Austria, commentators championing the Austrian occupancy of significant swathes of territory. Such support could be as prominent as Kinglake’s call for western domination in the Middle East. In Through Savage Europe (1907), for example, Harry de Windt mentions what he considers Austria’s comprehensive improvements in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and goes on, We in England can form no conception of the marvellous transformation effected here by Austria […], nor even faintly realise the almost magical rapidity with which the recently barbaric provinces of Herzegovina and Bosnia have been converted into growing centres of commerce and civilisation. While travelling from Ragusa to the Servian frontier, I met, in every town or village, with some fresh and wonderful proof that the Austrians (generally regarded as a stay-athome nation) are really the finest (and quickest) colonisers in the world. For not only do they excel in the administration of state affairs under novel and complicated conditions, but also in that close attention to details which affects even the personal comfort of travellers.47

The passage’s sincerity of tone and appeal to empirical evidence build a persuasive argument for Austrian occupation (despite de Windt’s claim to objectivity being subverted by the vested interests he reveals in the closing line). For concealing the ruinous impact of this rule on indigenous populations, denigratory representation (seen here in the phrase ‘barbaric provinces’) was highly effective. Accusations of discord, backwardness and savagery not only made a case for ‘Great Power colonialism in Europe’,48 as Norris has argued, but also redirected the explanation for conquest from the ambitions of the imperial power to the supposed indiscipline and inertia of the indigenes themselves, a displacement that also occurred in writings on the Ottoman-held Balkans. If orientalist texts can be considered an ‘invigorating counterpoint to the economic and political machinery [...] of imperialism’,49 then balkanist texts need to be explored in similar terms, however much their complicity with power differs. As with other subject territories, the Middle East and the Balkans were deemed to constitute a threat to the West whenever they appeared to reject western authority. This is clearly evident in orientalist discourse, whose tropes of fanaticism, tyranny and

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unpredictable savagery have remained virtually unchanged over the centuries. As Said comments, the Orient has been ‘a lasting trauma’ for both the British traveller and the wider homeland, signifying ‘terror, devastation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians’.50 With regard to balkanism, there were long periods during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which the peninsula appeared to travellers more ridiculous than dangerous, its comic backwardness, hapless peasants, Ruritanian monarchs and ‘exceedingly funny sight[s]’51 treated with amused tolerance rather than with the gravitas awarded to Middle Eastern phenomena. One traveller of the 1840s, J.J. Best, claims that the British tendency to view the Balkans as a kind of low comedy is so established that even the indigenes had got to hear about it. ‘“You write a great deal about all you see,”’ Best is told by one local interlocutor, ‘“and every thing is to laugh at; and when you get home, and find yourself in a bad humour, you read over all you have written to get into a good humour again.”’52 Occasionally, however, when the region was in the process of revolt against imperial rule, absurdity and comic inconsequentiality gave way to a far more fearsome evaluation, one suggestive of imminent danger to the western traveller and western civilisation.53 It is when contemplating the specific threats which the West discerned in south-east Europe that a further distinction emerges between balkanism and orientalism. Examining the texts written during the long nineteenth century, it seems to me that the kind of danger that the Balkans posed diverges significantly from that of the Orient, and revolves around a final, distinct set of discursive tropes. The threat of the Middle East has always lain in its reputation for tyranny and imperial conquest, a reputation captured in the notion of ‘Oriental despotism’.54 Marked out as a civilisation bent on collision with Christendom, the Arab world has gained in the western imagination a certain bulk, regularity and singularity of purpose, forming a unified cultural adversary. The western image of the Balkans, conversely, has been characterised by chaos and fragmentation, an image that is best displayed in the neologisms to balkanise, balkanised and balkanisation, which signify the process of dividing a unified entity into radically smaller and mutually hostile units. As the terms suggest, this was not just a different regional reputation, pitting heterogeneity against singleness, but a set of attributes hostile to the totalising ambitions of imperial authority. The

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political opposition between fragmentation and despotism is underlined by the fact that these neologisms were emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the constituent nations of south-east Europe fought against Ottoman rule to achieve their independence. What one saw here was a literal breaking-up of political blocs as a venerable imperial power began to weaken and to cede territorial control to indigenous populations. For Britain, whose global prestige lay in the maintenance of empire, fragmentation was a process to be feared as much as imperial rivalry, especially in a Europe where the balance of power between imperial nations was growing increasingly precarious. Consequently, the Balkan struggle against tyranny (which foreshadowed the later anti-colonial successes in Africa and Asia) was viewed not as a libertarian triumph, but as a descent into barbarism and tribalism. With its position lying so close to the imperial centre, it is no surprise that the region developed into such a poignant symbol of colonial insubordination. The fear of the Balkans’ ability to unsettle fixed orders became so profound, in fact, that anxiety soon transposed itself from the geopolitical realm to those of semantics, race and religion. As the passage from the Gordons goes some way to exemplify, this was a region that upset all norms, essences, boundaries and conventions, breaking down cultural and linguistic categories and consequently challenging the systems of power that underlie those categories. For example, Henry Tozer comments exasperatedly on an Albania whose ethnicities are torn by ‘“rival tendencies”’, whose dominant ethnicity is plagued by internecine conflict (the vendetta being ‘universally rife’) and whose toponymical designations are an endless ‘source of confusion’.55 A similar frustration is expressed in the work of Henry Barkley, a British civil engineer who, along with an elder brother, spent some twelve years engaged in railway construction in what was then eastern Bulgaria. For Barkley, this province of the Ottoman Empire comprises a ‘heterogeneous mass’ of ‘races’ who all seem to ‘backbite, slander, and intrigue’, making the country so chaotic that ‘“[a]fter living in Turkey (sic) ten months a man thinks that he knows the people thoroughly. After living there for ten years he begins to find out that he knows nothing”’.56 The confusion of ethnicities is felt particularly strongly at those moments when Barkley enters or leaves the region, which he does on the steamer down the Danube. On one trip from central Europe, for example, he is forced to retreat to his

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private cabin away from ‘the dirty, garlic-smelling, unwashed crowd of Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics, to say nothing of Greeks, Wallachs, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, and Bulgars, all jabbering, eating, drinking, smoking, spitting, swearing’.57 On one journey home, a similar episode occurs when Barkley, his brother and some British co-travellers are seated civilly for breakfast, only to find themselves beset by east Europeans. As he writes, I found myself placed next to a gentleman-like-looking man, who introduced himself as a Mr. Steele, and with whom we soon made great friends. There was also a newly-married English couple at our end of the long table, who proved most amusing and agreeable travelling companions. Besides these, there was the usual ruck of Jews, Wallacks, Greeks and Russians, talking eighteen to the dozen with both tongues and hands, and at the same time performing the most marvellous juggling tricks with their knives, which they thrust so far down their throats that one looked at the backs of their necks to see if the point had come through. In and out they went like lightening, and yet when our party broke up at the end of three days no one had been killed […].58

The breakfast table becomes an emblem of the distribution of power and prestige within Europe. Predictably, the British take a central place at the feast, and are awarded the qualities of wit, friendship and refinement, as well as of individuality (as seen in the designation ‘Mr Steele’). At the fringes of the table, individuality yields to a ‘ruck’ of subordinate ethnicities, given over to violent, chaotic practices and more intent on placing knives into the body than food. Their tricks may well be ‘marvellous’, an exotic feature of European space, but they are finally a menace to continental security, so much so that Barkley’s concluding line fails to offset the impression that death could easily result from the eastern European presence. It is with this deviance in mind that, in their engineering work, the Barkleys keep a strong rein on the indigenous population: with a native workforce composed of some ‘thirty-two different languages and dialects’, the two brothers choose to ‘maintain [their] authority’ ‘with a stout whip’,59 a typically imperialistic response to the unruly, fractious populations of south-east Europe. In charting such representational patterns, I do not wish to suggest that the motifs of chaos and fragmentation are absent from orientalism, but simply that they have

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been more fundamental to balkanist discourse, where they respond to very specific geo-political realities and economic ambitions. To conclude, it should be reiterated that the deplorable stereotypes that governed western conceptualisation of the Balkans in the nineteenth century remain today. One only has to look at the West’s response to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, or at the wave of racism that has greeted eastern European asylum seekers over the last few years, to discern the persistence of a prejudice that has debilitated the region for centuries. Indeed, Said’s Orientalism has much to teach students and critics of balkanism about the tenacity of discursive structures and about the diligence necessary to combat them. His work is also illustrative of the potential of oppositional scholarship. Although Orientalism was not the only text in the 1970s to attack western ethnocentrism, it brought the analysis of cultural prejudice a permanent, even central, place in the humanities, and has done more than any other publication to challenge the ongoing vilification of the Islamic world. For Balkan Studies, there is much here to hearten those who seek a similar demystification of balkanism. For the latter project to be successful, however, any usage of the Saidian approach to orientalism needs to be pursued with care. While an understanding of the links between the two conceptual structures is needed, the emphasis should now be on furthering knowledge of the specificities of balkanism and of its intricate relationship to both the changing realities of the peninsula and the vicissitudes of western diplomacy. If this is achieved, then the study of this particular area of intraEuropean representation may not only expand within Slavic and East European Studies, but could also gain attention in the wider realms of literary and cultural studies.

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NOTES 1

Said, Orientalism, p. 17. Ibid., pp. 3, 197. Insisting that ‘[o]ne ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies’, he also describes the discourse as a very definite ‘sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient’ (ibid., p. 6). 3 See, for example, Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains (1991), Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys (1991), James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Ali Behdad’s Belated Travelers (1994). A study which includes analysis of more positive strains of Western representation (which Said omits) is Maxime Rodinson’s Europe and the Mystique of Islam (1988). For an excellent overview of the major critiques of Said’s work see Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 74-84. 4 Allcock, ‘Constructing the Balkans’, in Allcock and Antonia Young, eds, Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in the Balkans (Bradford: Bradford University Press, 1991), pp. 178, 178, 179. 5 Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Winter 1995), pp. 320, 320, 321. The phrase ‘variations on the orientalist theme’ refers to Bakić-Hayden’s earlier article in the Slavic Review, cowritten with Robert Hayden: ‘Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans”: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics’, Slavic Review, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 1-15. 6 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, p. 7. 7 See Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 12-13; Bracewell and DraceFrancis, ‘South-Eastern Europe: History, Concepts, Boundaries’, Balkanologie, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1999), p. 60. 8 Fraser, Pictures from the Balkans, p. 205. 9 Said, Orientalism, pp. 45, 40, 40, 300. 10 The book was preceded in many of its major points by Todorova’s earlier article, ‘The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention’, Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 453-82. 11 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 8, 8, 11. 12 Said, Orientalism, p. 71. 13 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 20. 14 Fleming, ‘Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography’, American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 4 (October 2000), p. 1220. 15 Ibid., p. 1225. 16 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 15. 17 Said, Orientalism, pp. 71, 70, 40, 59. 18 Ibid., p. 43. As David Blanks and Michael Frassetto write on the pre-modern period, orientalism ‘created an image of the Saracen, Moor, or Turk that was wholly alien and wholly evil. In both popular and learned literature Muslims were portrayed as cowardly, duplicitous, lustful, self-indulgent pagans who worshipped idols and a trinity of false gods. […] The creation of such blatantly false stereotypes enabled Western Christians to define themselves […] as brave, virtuous believers in the one true God’ (Blanks and Frassetto, ‘Introduction’ to Blanks and Frassetto, eds, Western 2

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Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 3). 19 Norris, Wake of the Balkan Myth, p. 5. Liminality has been addressed by a number of critics: see Fleming, ‘Orientalism’, p. 1231, and particularly Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, pp. 15-19. 20 Creagh, Over the Borders, I, 3, 85. 21 Barkley, Bulgaria before the War: During Seven Years’ Experience of European Turkey and Its Inhabitants (London: John Murray, 1877), p. 3. For example, in one scene he distinguishes between commodities useful for ‘natives’ and those useful to ‘an European’, and later comments on how ‘Europeans’ may be surprised to observe how ‘a Turk or Bulgarian’ consumes melons (ibid., pp. 6, 176). 22 Gordon and Gordon, Two Vagabonds in the Balkans (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1925), pp. 1-2. 23 Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2001), p. 202. 24 Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema’, in Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, eds, Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1997), p. 26. 25 Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, trans. Roger Veinus (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988), pp. 37-8. 26 Florence K. Berger, A Winter in the City of Pleasure; Or, Life on the Lower Danube (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1877), pp. 45, 118. 27 Kinglake, Eothen, pp. 25, 27, 25. 28 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 14. 29 Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 170-2. Shohat also refers to ‘[t]he inclination to project the non-Occident as feminine’ (Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire’, p. 23). 30 Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, p. 212. Critics have lamented the general lack of psychoanalytic or feminist approaches in Said’s Orientalism: see Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 17-18, and Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 25-6. 31 Porter, ‘Orientalism and Its Problems’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 158. 32 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 14. 33 H.A. Brown, A Winter in Albania (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh, 1888), pp. 152, 66. 34 Durham, High Albania, new edn (1909; London: Virago, 1985), pp. 50, 49, 49, 49, 49, 307, 308, 308. 35 Kinglake, Eothen, p. 112. 36 Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient, new edn (1986; London: Pandora, 1994), pp. 6, 17, 6, 52. The veiled woman and the harem have been particularly prevalent symbols: see Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire’, pp. 32-3,

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Lewis, Gendering Orientalism, pp. 111-13, and Said, Orientalism, pp. 167, 190, 2078. 37 Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire’, pp. 24, 47, 23, 47. 38 Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Cork: Cork University Press/Duke University Press, 1994), p. 68. 39 Amongst the very few exceptions to this rule is Alfred Wright’s Adventures in Servia (1884), which includes a flirtation between the author and a native woman. 40 Henderson, A British Officer in the Balkans: The Account of a Journey through Dalmatia, Montenegro, Turkey in Austria, Magyarland, Bosnia and Hercegovina (London: Seeley and Co., 1909), p. 103. 41 Behdad talks of the orientalist’s ‘epistemophilic desire to expose what he finds hidden, a desire that […] is coupled with an erotic urge to see the imaginary nakedness behind the veil’ (Behdad, Belated Travelers, p. 22). 42 There are few who have not repeated the complaint of one female traveller that the beauty of the ‘veiled women’ failed to ‘come up to what I had been led to expect’ (Maude M. Holbach, Dalmatia: The Land where East Meets West, 3rd edn (1907; London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane, 1910), p. 163). 43 See Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, pp. 14-15. 44 Said, Orientalism, pp. 96, 104. As he says in Covering Islam: ‘it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that all discourse on Islam has an interest in some authority or power’ (Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. xvii). 45 Kinglake, Eothen, pp. 190, 213. 46 See Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), pp. 413-19. 47 de Windt, Through Savage Europe: Being the Narrative of a Journey throughout the Balkan States and European Russia, new edn (1907; London and Glasgow: Collins, c.1908), pp. 84-5. The passage is typical of the period: see also Henderson, British Officer in the Balkans, pp, 83, 85, 216, and Robert Dunkin [‘Snaffle’], In the Land of the Bora: Or, Camp Life and Sport in Dalmatia and the Herzegovina 1894-56 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co.: 1897), pp. 192-5. 48 Norris, Wake of the Balkan Myth, p. 11. 49 Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, in Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson and Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 72. 50 Said, Orientalism, p. 59. In a later book, Said summed up the Western image of Islam with the phrase ‘turmoil and terrorism’ (Said, Covering Islam, p. 31). 51 E.F. Knight, Albania: A Narrative of Recent Travel (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1880), p. 77. 52 Best, Excursions in Albania; Comprising a Description of the Wild Boar, Deer, and Woodcock Shooting in the Country; and a Journey from Thence to Thessalonica and Constantinople, and up the Danube to Pest (London: W.H. Allen, 1842), p. 120. An example is Edward Lear’s memoir of a painting tour through Macedonia and Albania in the mid-nineteenth century. Here, his love of the uncanny and surreal appears to have been continually nurtured by local ‘absurdity’, which would send him into

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‘convulsions of laughter’ (Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania, new edn (1851; London: Century, 1988), p. 55). 53 Comedy and threat are the two poles between which representation shifted, comedy giving way to threat during times of insubordination to empire. In the sense that they were one of the first regions to break away from the imperial formations of the nineteenth century, the Balkans’ notoriety is understandable. It is this presumption that minority cultures should fit in with Great Power plans that informed the second major period of balkanist denigration, the 1990s, when parts of the region once again resisted western European instruction. 54 Said, Orientalism, p. 4. 55 Tozer, Researches in the Highlands of Turkey; Including Visits to Mounts Ida, Athos, Olympus, and Pelion, to the Mirdite Albanians, and Other Remote Tribes. With Notes on the Ballads, Tales, and Classical Superstitions of the Modern Greeks, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1869), I, 395, 220, 232-3. 56 Barkley, Between the Danube and Black Sea: Or Five Years in Bulgaria (London: John Murray, 1876), p. 174; Barkley, Bulgaria before the War, pp. xiii, xiii-xiv. 57 Barkley, Bulgaria before the War, p. 222. 58 Barkley, Danube and Black Sea, p. 303. 59 Ibid., pp. 174, 102, 104.

Chapter 3: Through Savage Europe Alongside its motifs, evaluations and political collusions, the discourse of balkanism has been shaped by a number of dominant styles of writing. These have been integral to the emergence of the major representational tropes, as well as to the establishment of primary forms of register, narrative structure and autobiographical portraiture. For example, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the styles and concerns of Romanticism were making their mark on regional commentaries and, as studied in chapter 8, would continue to do so well into the twentieth century. During the Victorian period, balkanism became imbued with the scientific naturalism – the rationalism and plain statement – that was developing in canonical prose fiction. In the 1920s and 1930s, many of the styles of written and visual modernism – impressionism, cubism, delayed decoding, interior monologue – would make a mark on the discourse, in the same way as the scepticism and self-reflexivity of postmodernist literature would in the 1980s and 1990s. Compounding this ‘complexity of cultural and political motives, modes, means and ways,’1 in Ludmilla Kostova’s phrase, is the way in which these styles often emerge and combine in a single text. As travel writers have occasionally admitted, the fact that south-east Europe is constructed via textual styles originating in literature is a further indication of how this is less an actual geographical territory than a ‘true Balkans of the imagination’, a literary contrivance to be sourced in commentators’ own ‘wonder and dreams’.2 To illustrate the impact of generic traditions on cross-cultural representation, this chapter will analyse the gothic strand of denigratory balkanism, an aesthetic template which has proved particularly durable. Since its emergence as a literary form in the late eighteenth century,3 this popular and highly visual genre has been plundered by British novelists and travel writers in search of images, symbols and motifs with which to depict the perceived monstrosity of

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a variety of [post-]colonial regions. In the hands of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, gothic fiction developed as a contrary impulse to realism, depicting not everyday life and character, but a fantastic underworld of primitive appetites and nightmarish events. Its milieu was the shadow-side of civilisation: a quasimedieval realm of ruined castles, convents, churchyards, vaults and dungeons, set amongst forests and remote mountains, and peopled by an outlandish array of tyrants, bandits, patriarchs, corrupt priests and degenerate aristocrats. The atmosphere of terror was heightened by supernatural occurrences, involving demons, ghosts, vampires and werewolves, and evoking a godless universe governed by occult and primal forces. The sensationalism of the genre brought it immediate commercial success, being popular with both the common reader and the intellectual, including such self-confessed addicts as Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. Yet behind the surface thrills of the stories were complex symbolic frameworks through which a variety of issues that were largely excluded from public discourse could be discussed. As with the thematics of much Romantic literature, from which the genre had emerged, gothicism was concerned with mental breakdown, spiritual dissolution, forbidden desire, tyranny in personal and public life and the transgression of moral and sexual boundaries. Its testing of certainties, and its sense that deviance was a source of attraction as well as repulsion, has led many critics to view it as ‘not merely revolutionary but anarchistic in its sympathies.’4 At a time when ‘enlightenment and humanist values’ were gaining gradual hegemony over western European culture, the gothic was more interested in the ‘perceived threats to these values’, revealing a ‘fascination with transgression and [an] anxiety over cultural limits and boundaries’.5 Although gothicism was most associated with the novel, its transference to travel literature was a natural, even inevitable move in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, this highly subjective romance form, with its ‘strange minglings of history and fantasy’,6 stood against the strict scientific empiricism that travellers, explorers and adventurers were starting to bring to the process of charting the world for imperial enterprise. Yet travel writing never managed to shake off its love of anomalies, wonders and marvels that had been inherited from medieval and Renaissance voyagers and that originated in the same ancient myth and legend that

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had inspired gothic fiction. Moreover, gothicism’s awareness of cultural boundaries, and its approach to the grotesque and deviant forms of alterity to be found beyond those boundaries,7 also made it a perfect tool for that most important task of the enlightened traveller: belabouring foreign cultures. When displaced abroad, in other words, gothicism was less a revolutionary critique of enlightenment ideology than a medium for hegemonic discourses of racial and cultural supremacism, forming a ready-made framework for representing the peripheral cultures which western Europe had marked out for territorial appropriation and for establishing a confident binarism between the imperial self and colonial other. Although the point is best illustrated by travel writings on the Orient, where gothic novelists had often set their medievalist tales of despotism and sexual corruption, travellers to the Balkans were just as likely to resort to gothic imagery, with their depiction of lands ‘infested by vampires’8 being only the most obvious borrowing in kind. Starting in the Romantic age, which had been characterised by its ‘difficult journeys in search of those regions of romance where civilisation had not so far intruded,’9 south-east Europe formed the nearest manifestation of the primitivism that British culture was projecting onto colonised territories throughout the world. It was here that enlightened Europe was supposed to end and a disturbing world of barbarism, mystery and archaic superstition deemed to begin. An early example of the Balkan gothic, as it might be called, came from the politician and social reformer, John Cam Hobhouse, whose record of a journey in 1809 through the western reaches of the Ottoman Empire with his friend Lord Byron (another addict of gothic fiction) found plenty to admire in the region’s uncompromising landscape and political tyranny. One of the high points of their tour was a visit to the court of Ali Paşa, a local vizier who had managed to raise an army against the Sultan and establish an independent fiefdom in central and southern Albania. Situated above a secluded ravine, the citadel presents ‘a sight’ that one might have ‘beheld some hundred years ago in the castle-yard of a great Feudal Lord’, with its ‘martial’ atmosphere, soldiers with ‘wildness in their manner’ and a harem of some ‘three hundred women.’10 Although Ali’s rather harmless appearance belies his reputation, Hobhouse cannot conceal his delight at meeting this ‘barbarous monster’, with his ‘ferocious and sanguinary disposition’ and his tendency to encourage loyalty

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amongst his subjects through ‘beheading, […] impaling and roasting’.11 Subsequent travellers in Albania continued Hobhouse’s style of regional portraiture. Edward Lear, on a painting tour in 1848, praises the country’s ‘savage […] rock and chasm’, the ‘savage, yet classic, picturesqueness’ of the inhabitants and the graphic ruins of the towns, which offer a ‘picture of desolation’ that is ‘perfectly exquisite’.12 H.A. Brown, trekking in Albania during the 1880s, is likewise carried away by the feral beauty of the northern highlands. In these ‘diabolical mountains’, he writes, ‘[t]he wind howled like a wild beast’ and, ‘through drifting clouds of snow’, the rugged peaks ‘looked like gigantic monsters dancing round some unholy cauldron and the air seemed full of fantastic shapes wheeling and tumbling in riotous merriment.’13 For many Victorians, clearly, the act of arriving so far off the beaten track was a powerful stimulus to the imagination. There were certainly few places left in Europe where one could find such real and imagined wonders as warriors ‘roasting […] children’ and drinking the enemy’s blood (Montenegro), inhabitants ‘giv[ing] vent to low wails, like dogs baying at the moon’ (Serbia) or ‘phantomlike robbers’ appearing before one as ‘a mass of smoking, steaming horsemen, with pistols ready in their hands’ (Bulgaria).14 The gothic was also appearing in travel writings on Romania, where emphasis was commonly placed on the local folklore. J.W. Ozanne, who lived in Bucharest during the early 1870s, says of the Romanian peasantry that ‘[t]heir superstitions are innumerable’, comprised of ‘curious legends’ that are ‘handed down in tradition from father to son through countless generations.’15 Florence Berger discovers in legend and song ‘the genius of the Roumanian people’, and compares their wealth of ghosts, spirits and pagan gods to the ‘mythology of the ancient world.’16 In the minds of travellers, the survival of such a widespread, vibrant body of traditional belief was a natural consequence of the region’s backwardness and isolation. Charles Boner, for example, finds much that is picturesque in Transylvania, but also the signs of a ‘perfectly savage life’, including ‘dense woods’, ‘wild untamed’ gypsies, wolves that ‘attack […] not only cattle but men’, villages in which ‘civilised life had been entirely wanting’ and overgrown, unfenced graveyards, so different to British churchyards, where ‘our dead repose protected and tended with evident care’.17 In this backwater superstitions could breed: cattle speaking after dark on New Year’s Day, mysterious lights hovering

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over buried gold and the fear of spinning or baking bread on Thursdays are amongst the many that the author records. The amateur ethnography of nineteenth-century travel writers like Boner, Berger and Ozanne culminated in the work of Emily Gerard, a Scottish novelist who, after marrying an Austrian cavalry officer, lived for several years in Transylvania. For Gerard, ‘this mountain rampart’ is the inevitable home of ‘supernatural beings and monsters’: There are innumerable caverns, whose mysterious depths seem made to harbour whole legions of evil spirits: forest glades fit only for fairy folk on moonlight nights, solitary lakes which instinctively call up visions of water sprites; golden treasures lying hidden in mountain chasms, all of which have gradually insinuated themselves into the minds of the oldest inhabitants, the Roumanians […].18

One of the notable beliefs is in vampires, known for sucking the blood of innocents and for requiring either staking or beheading (with garlic stuffed in the mouth). For Gerard, however, it is less the belief in ‘demons, pixies, witches, and hobgoblins, driven from the rest of Europe by the wand of science’,19 that distinguishes Transylvania, than the concomitant practices. In particular, St. George’s Day is ‘kept by occult meetings taking place at night in lonely caverns or within ruined walls’ and seems to capture ‘[t]he spirit of evil’ that she senses at the heart of local culture.20 Although Gerard remains vague as to what this ‘evil’ might be, Berger fills in the details. Not only are the peasants slothful and ignorant, she asserts, but the boyars are entirely given to cruelty, mendacity, materialism and sexual debauchery, with infidelity being so common that Berger terms Bucharest a ‘Babylon of the Apocalypse, the Woman clothed in scarlet, with the shameful legend burning on her forehead.’21 This projection of the macabre and the malignant onto Romanian society was soon to inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the most famous balkanist text of the period and one that has remained in print ever since. Along with Stoker’s genius for ‘visually descriptive prose’,22 it is his graphic account of south-east European alterity that has produced the novel’s enduring relevance to British culture. Dracula’s cultural context is both the late Victorian anxiety about the breakdown of sexual, racial, regional and class boundaries, and the widespread concern about Britain’s loss of prestige abroad.23 Although the 1890s, its decade of publication, are often positioned

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within the heyday of British Empire, the threats to the nation’s trade from new commercial rivals and the increasing discontent amongst subject populations had been raising the spectre of imperial decline, as well as the fear that British colonial expansion threatened the nation with racial contamination. There was nothing strange about Stoker’s decision to personify those threats as a mobile, independent, aggressive, predatory east European (rather than as an African, say, or an Indian). While Britain was managing to retain control of its African and Asian colonies, the Balkans had become a seething mass of nationalist uprisings and wars, draining the public purses, the economic life-blood, of the Austrian and Ottoman administrations and prefiguring the way that Britain’s own colonial possessions would be lost. As Stoker was aware, the consequent opprobrium and culturalist racism which the peninsula received in British cultural production was most powerfully expressed in travel writing.24 Amongst the many travelogues and histories he read as part of his research for Dracula were William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), Andrew Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians (1878), Boner’s Transylvania (1865) and sections of Gerard’s The Land beyond the Forest (1888).25 Stoker’s research is apparent in his deployment, during the first section of the novel, of the stock images, registers, evaluations and narrative structures of travel literature.26 When Jonathan Harker, a solicitor’s clerk, is sent to Count Dracula’s Transylvanian castle to arrange the latter’s purchase of a London estate, his diary account of the train journey eastwards through Budapest, where he claims to be ‘leaving the West and entering the […] traditions of Turkish rule’,27 involves the standard demonisation of eastern Europe. From this point on, his impressions of Transylvania, ‘one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe’, are composed of a predictable pattern of gothic signifiers: wolves, citadels, forests, ravines and towering mountains, as well as ‘barbarian’ inhabitants that resemble an ‘Oriental band of brigands’ (pp. 1, 3). The distaste that Harker, ‘an English Churchman’, feels towards the region’s pre-modern faiths and practices – which include St George’s Day ceremonies and lights hovering over buried gold – leads him to lament that ‘every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians’.28 The lack of enlightened civilisation is most dramatically seen in the hostilities existing between local peoples.

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This ‘“whirlpool of European races”’ has witnessed such a constant round of invasion, conquest and conflict that, as Dracula tells Harker, ‘“there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders”’ (pp. 28, 21). Significantly, Stoker pre-empts any suggestion that political struggle might be a consequence of external intervention by setting the narrative in a specifically post-colonial timeframe, implying that the region’s crises actually stem from the absence of imperial restraint. Speaking of Dracula’s power and longevity, Dr Van Helsing, one of Harker’s associates in England, is quite precise when he states that it is ‘[in] the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar’ that this Romanian aristocrat and warrior has begun to flourish (p. 239). Nevertheless, Dracula is evoked as the product, if not the culmination, of the barbarism characterising local history. The deficiencies of ‘this cursed land’ (p. 53) – the ethnic hatreds, the competition for space, the spilt blood – are so ingrained in the Count that they appear as a set of facial characteristics. His ‘peculiarly arched nostrils’, ‘peculiarly sharp white teeth’, ‘extremely pointed’ ears ‘at the tops’, ‘very massive’ eyebrows, lips of ‘remarkable ruddiness’ and face of ‘extraordinary pallor’, not to mention hands with ‘hairs in the centre of the palms’ (pp. 17-18), immediately brand him as civilisation’s monstrous, animalistic other. Even when this notorious shape-shifter (who can switch from human to non-human, dead to ‘un-dead’) is not solid and fleshly, he is perceptible to observers as a shadow, a mist, a red cloud. The startlingly visual nature of Dracula’s evil was influenced by the nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences of physiognomy and phrenology, which viewed blemishes or malformations of the body as the external signs of inner degeneracy; it is the outer display of Dracula’s pathology, for example, that allows Van Helsing to label him ‘“predestinate to crime”’ (p. 341). The descriptions of the vampire, when characters get ‘a good view of him’ (p. 172), offer the most genuine moments of horror in the novel. In one scene in the castle, Harker finds him lying in a coffin-like box, sated with the blood of his victims: the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set

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Contained in this image of gross appropriation is a further clue to the crimes of which Dracula stands accused. On the one hand, he personifies the primitive energies that Victorian society aimed to repress: the unconscious drives and animal urges which, when unleashed, become disruptive of social and psychological stability.29 On the other hand, and more ominously, this vision of a plump and satisfied vampire symbolises the kind of immigrant that Dracula is about to become. Once established at his London residency, he commences on a rapacious round of consumption and accumulation, not only plundering the bodies of his female victims, but also hoarding money and properties, as illustrated in a scene in which Harker swings a knife at him and ‘a bundle of bank-notes and a stream of gold’ drop from his coat (p. 306). It is in this ability to imitate Victorian bourgeois mores that the true horror of the Count lies. With his elegant clothes, charming manners, language skills, rationality and learning (gleaned from his vast library of books, newspapers and magazines ‘all relating to England and English life and customs and manners’), Dracula’s ambition is to pass unnoticed in the London streets, to be exactly ‘“like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pause in his speaking if he hears my words, to say ‘Ha, ha! a stranger!’”’ (pp. 19, 20). This insight into the racism of British public life already indicates a close understanding of the culture he has set out to conquer. As Dracula proceeds to locate partners, accumulate capital, buy up property, become a neighbour, the boundaries between self and other begin to erode, threatening the purity of the nation.30 Stoker’s cautionary tale about eastern European immigration exemplifies what Stephen Arata terms the ‘narrative of reverse colonisation’ and what Patrick Brantlinger labels the ‘imperial gothic’, those late Victorian sub-genres concerned with the rise of primitivism and occultism and with civilisation’s atavistic capacity for barbarism.31 In Dracula, most specifically, there is a focus on the detrimental effects that primitive sexual appetite might have on Victorian family life. While typifying the imperial gothic’s call for a continual policing of the psychological and physical selfhood, the theme is centred around an eroticisation of south-east European

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culture unusual in balkanist writings. The Count’s ‘reverse colonisation’ is enacted through his enslavement and exploitation of women (such as Lucy Westenra, whom he transforms from ‘sweetness and purity’ into a predatory temptress with a ‘wanton smile’), and his corruption of innocent children, as seen in the spate of kidnappings on Hampstead Heath, the young victims all being ‘slightly torn or wounded in the throat’ (pp. 217, 211, 177). Such images of racial and sexual contamination are encapsulated in Harker’s vision of Britain as a vampire colony in which Dracula, a parasite on the social body, will ‘for centuries […] satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless.’32 It is the ejection of the unwanted immigrant and the consequent reconstruction of social boundaries that Harker’s team sets out to achieve. Composed of a lawyer, a doctor and a psychologist, amongst others, the team combines enlightenment science and muscular Christianity, and displays an exemplary level of morality, manliness, rationality, selfrestraint and honest toil.33 The only problem is that the monstrosity which they have projected onto the eastern European other, and which they attempt to purge from the nation, is equally a part of their own natures. The point is made during an early scene in which Harker, while shaving, feels Dracula’s hand on his shoulder and, when looking in the mirror to greet his client, sees nothing ‘except myself’ (p. 25). This mirroring effect recurs in the later battle between the British characters and the evil Count, when it is actually the British who commit much of the evil: desecrating corpses, breaking into houses, feeling ‘a wicked, burning desire’ for female vampires and resorting to traditional, pagan practices.34 Collapsing the normal colonial binaries (civilisation/savagery, culture/nature, coloniser/colonised), the novel suggests that Dracula’s presence in imperial Britain triggers, rather than causes, the vices of a convention-bound bourgeoisie. Stoker’s solution to the vice, however, is far less radical. When one combines Harker’s regret that he ‘was helping to transfer [Dracula] to London’ with Van Helsing’s insight that vampires ‘“may not enter […] unless there be someone of the household who bid him to come”’, one finds the moral of the tale: don’t invite immigrants into Britain (pp. 51, 240). Published during the heyday of denigratory balkanism, Dracula consolidated the strand of gothicism that had been building during the nineteenth century and passed it down to twentieth-century audiences

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through an endless series of reprints, re-writes and film adaptations. Stoker’s novel was also kept alive by a new generation of travel writers who, during the 1920s and 1930s, drew upon its legends, characterisations and nightmarish landscapes for their portraits of south-east Europe. In Romania, travellers were entranced by the ‘wild mountain scenery’, the ‘massive towers’ and ‘crooked streets’ of the medieval towns, and the ‘slim, turreted, and tall’ castles, built above gaping ravines and riddled with underground pits that were ‘filled with spikes […] where captured robbers were thrown and later devoured by the castle dogs.’35 One traveller considers Transylvania ‘a magic country’ full of ‘mighty mountain ranges […], countless caverns and boiling torrents’, ‘of ghostly, ravaging Turks’, ‘savage monsters’ and ‘vampire-haunted dungeons.’36 And Romania was not the only recipient of Stoker’s legacy. One traveller in Bulgaria describes a mountain range as ‘cathedralesque and Gothic’, while another likens Montenegro’s ‘primitive’ brand of nationalism to ‘a wolf’ that ‘howls for blood’ and enjoys ‘mutilating the dead foe’.37 For Ruth Alexander, the ‘bleached volcanic rocks, gorges [and] precipices’ of the Montenegrin karst are like ‘a dream, a nightmare,’ a landscape so ‘monstrous’ and ‘hysterically sterile’ that it is ‘as if a mad giant had tossed the ashes of a burnt universe through his stupendous fingers and laughed to see the grotesque shapes they took.’38 Elsewhere in Yugoslavia, Alexander finds ‘wild and unkempt inhabitants’, including troglodytes and men who live in paper houses, and claims that vampires ‘are to be found everywhere’.39 For Lovett Fielding Edwards, Yugoslavia is a land of ‘mystery and imagination’, full of ‘rugged desolation’, ‘deserted gardens’ and ‘cit[ies] of the dead’, the country suffused with the ‘malevolent haunting beauty of a Poe tale.’40 In this unearthly realm, Edwards not only claims that a ‘belief in werewolves […] is still strong amongst the peasants’,41 but also contrives to see one for himself. Walking with his wife in the main street of Dubrovnik, he suddenly spies a man who must evidently have escaped from some asylum or from the keeping of his friends and relatives. At all events he came running towards us down the centre of the street on all fours, barking and howling like a wolf and trying to snap at the bystanders. For our part we stood aside and the unfortunate man was stopped and led away by a gendarme. Probably he was well known. We asked a poor woman who he was: ‘That one?’ she said, ‘He is a werewolf’ […]. At night, we were told,

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he changed his shape and attacked men and animals as a veritable wolf.42

To actually witness the monstrosity for which the Balkans were famed, rather than merely receiving reports of that monstrosity, was unusual in the period but far from unique. Philip Thornton, socialising in a Sarajevan coffee-house, is thrilled to be introduced to a man with a tail. He has heard rumours of an Albanian clan in Kosovo who ‘were noted for having produced tailed men’, but meeting one ‘seemed too fantastic’, until he touches the lower part of the man’s back and, with ‘horror and astonishment’, feels ‘a hard bony thing that grew from the base of the spine’.43 It should be said that Thornton’s ‘horror’ is not typical of the period. While the gothic played a part in inter-war balkanism, the dominant style of representation had shifted from denigration to a quaint pastoralism from which deviance and immorality were usually eradicated. As an illustration, the lasciviousness that was so central to Stoker’s Transylvania was largely absent from the inter-war paradigm. Alex Drace-Francis’s notion that ‘sexual invitingness’ is a key feature of the British perception of Romania, and ‘that sex plays a significant role in British-Romanian relations’, is overstated.44 In Walter Starkie’s record of a sojourn in Romania, the sensuality of Roma women – with their ‘naked breasts’, ‘bare legs’ and ‘panther-like […] movements’45 – certainly breaks the taboos surrounding female sexuality, causing this university professor both excitement and alarm. On one occasion, he spends a night with a gypsy family, sleeping on the floor of their one-room hut with eight family members, only to find a female family-member making advances on him. Caught between the anger of ‘a woman scorned’ and ‘the peril of her husband’,46 Starkie promptly flees the hut and makes off down the road. During the Nazi occupation of Bucharest in the 1940s, Goldie Horowitz, a naturalised American journalist, is similarly fascinated by the reputed debauchery of Romanian women. These are clearly ‘Western women’, she writes, but have ‘[v]oluptuous bodies’ and ‘large-eyed faces’ that evoke ‘the flavour of the harem’, and waste no time in making German officers ‘go to bed with them before they had a chance to check up on their Aryan grandmothers.’47 During the Cold War, the mood of sexual menace continued in novels such as Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy (1960-65), in which the protagonist’s husband is lured away by a female student, and in travelogues such as Peter O’Connor’s

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Walking Good (1971). The latter’s seduction by a gypsy woman in Bucharest is a curious mixture of the threatening (‘a huge, wide woman stood over the kitchen table chopping meat with an enormous cleaver’) and the innocent (‘my head on the mountain of her breast lullabied by the slow, steady stroke of her heart’).48 Nevertheless, sexual transgression or defilement was rare in travel writings on both Romania and the wider region, where innocent flirtation appears to have been a more suitable pursuit for the picturesque mode. It was only after the dramatic events of 1989 that gothicism fully re-emerged in British discourse on the Balkans. In the West, the initial response to continental reunification was unbounded delight at the opening up of new freedoms and opportunities. Yet as the borders came down and westward migration began, delight passed to fear for social stability, a fear compounded by the crises that soon ravaged south-east Europe. It was not long before a resurgence of nineteenthcentury prejudice occurred, including what Tomislav Longinović calls a ‘reawakening of the gothic view of the Balkans’.49 Romania, for example, became a ‘country […] frozen in time’, where the ‘entire population was slightly mad’, ‘warped both morally and psychologically’ by their predilection for ‘violence’, ‘moral depravity’, ‘dense mysticism’, ‘theatricality and ghoulishness’.50 Sophie Thurnham, who spent some time as an aid worker in Romania, characteristically portrays it as a medieval-style autocracy governed by a vicious nomenklatura. Seeking an explanation for Ceauşescu’s ‘crimes against humanity and freedom’, as well as for the brutal conditions in the orphanages, where ‘peasant women [use] canes to keep their charges locked up within the wall of a decrepit old building’, she finds it in the country’s long history of ‘bloodthirsty tyrants’, most obviously Vlad Ţepeş, the historical Dracula.51 For the majority of commentators, this continuum of evil threatened to ‘infect the rest of Europe’, as one British Army commander in Bosnia put it.52 Misha Glenny’s misgivings about ‘the dark ghosts’ of Yugoslavian history are expanded upon by David Selbourne, who, in 1990, foresees the ‘gaunt ghosts of the world-before-Versailles, freed from their graves by perestroika and economic chaos, […] setting out once more to stalk the Balkans’, a phenomenon that in the past had ‘consequences which engulfed Europe.’53 The same imagery is found in Ed Vulliamy’s eyewitness accounts of refugee convoys in Bosnia, one of which is described as a ‘long-drawn-out nightmare’, the

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refugees crossing the moonlit landscape ‘like silent ghosts’ or ‘like a silent army of departed spirits’.54 Yet it was when imagined heading towards the West that Balkan migration was most terrifying, with many travel writers repeating Stoker’s dread of east Europeans flocking unchecked across a borderless continent. In Bosnia, Simon Winchester not only finds that ‘[e]veryone who is young and full of hope wants to leave’, but also discovers ‘men who could sell you an Australian passport and smuggle you across the frontiers’.55 In Albania, similarly, Bill Hamilton and Bhasker Solanki believe ‘that thousands of young people have vowed to get out of Albania at all costs’ and ‘that the immigration pressure from the former Communist States of the East […] might very easily explode’.56 While the sense of imminent contagion is a significant feature of contemporary travel writing, it has emerged most elaborately in fiction, as exemplified by Bel Mooney’s Lost Footsteps (1993). Set largely in Romania, the narrative follows the fortunes of Ana Popescu, a Romanian translator and graduate of English Literature whose struggle to bring up a young boy as a single mother under the Ceauşescu regime encourages her to arrange for the child to be smuggled out to Germany, where greater freedom is available. Although Stoker’s Romania is updated to a modern landscape, his motifs of a primitive, monstrous eastern Europe persist. Bucharest is a vandalised, potholed, decaying city, its population marked by ‘hatred, ignorance’ and ‘ancient enmities’ and subject to the violence and sexual harassment of the Securitate.57 When Mooney depicts the city as sunk ‘in darkness, a dense, palpable blackness relieved by no lights’, she evokes a spiritual, as much as a physical, malaise, reinforced by her description of Romania as ‘a dark, impossible hellhole’ (pp. 7, 22). The image is reiterated when Ana recalls a Moldavian monastery that she visited with her parents in childhood. Situated in the recognisable peasant landscape of Harker’s journal (‘groups of families in Moldavian costume, men in their cream tunics and leggings, women in embroidered blouses’), the monastery boasts several ancient frescoes, one of which, entitled The Last Judgement, is a graphic portrayal of the Devil (‘the hideous form of Dracul’) preparing ‘to devour the pale, thin, sinning souls’ (pp. 23, 25). Ana’s father draws a powerful analogy between the fresco and contemporary Romania, with Ceauşescu cast as the aforementioned ‘Dracul’ and the suffering population as the ‘sinning souls’ (‘“there we are, all of us!”’

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(p. 25)). The notion of a country in thrall to an evil tyrant goes on to dominate the text.58 For example, the presidential palace that Ceauşescu constructs in Bucharest, like Dracula’s castle, towers over its surroundings, the cranes like ‘skeletal monsters threatening the city’; furthermore, whenever the dictator emerges he does so in a cavalcade of ‘black limousines’, sweeping through the streets with an atmosphere of ‘deadness unfold[ing] behind them’ (pp. 64, 219). For Ana, the dictator is ‘the butcher, the beast’ whose presence indicates ‘that Hell is here, all around us’ (pp. 43, 210). Just as Stoker’s vampires ‘batten on the helpless’ so Ceauşescu ‘take[s] our children’s souls from us’ and infects the population ‘with an evil which blew up at them from the gutters, entering their lungs, their blood stream’ (pp. 71, 73). When Ana attempts to flee the country in search of her boy and is caught, imprisoned and raped by the military, she describes herself as being ‘cast down to Dracul and torn to pieces by his acolytes’ (p. 210). She goes so far as to claim that the evil pervading the country has entered her own soul: ‘“if you unveiled the mirror suddenly, […] instead of your own reflection […], there’d be some terrible monster, like the devils painted on churches”’ (pp. 120-1). In the binaristic framework of the novel, this infernal eastern Europe is contrasted to an idealised, even paradisical West. A staunch anglophile, Ana keeps her hopes alive by listening to the British World Service, by perusing English literature and by practising the English language (‘by the most simple […] repetitions of the language she loved it was possible, just possible, to keep madness at bay’ (p. 15)). Gaining a translation job at the British Embassy, she feels herself to have arrived amongst ‘normal people’ and considers the British Council Library ‘a small haven of civilization’ (pp. 56, 39). Inevitably, after the revolution of 1989, which saw the Ceauşescus overthrown and the frontiers temporarily opened, Ana wastes no time in following her child to the West. The border crossing into Western Germany is evoked as a journey from ‘darkness to light, […] like passing through the gates of heaven, into perfect bliss’ (p. 306). As she follows clues of the child’s whereabouts through Germany, Switzerland and France, Ana is overjoyed to find that ‘the ideals of equality and justice [...] did exist somewhere – in the West, in the world where all was well, in the utopia people craved enough to die in the attempt to reach’.59 Yet although the novel is sympathetic towards political refugeeism in the communist era, its awareness of the

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attractiveness of the West in the new borderless Europe leads to an anxiety about westward migrancy. Her protagonist comes into contact with ‘refugees from Somalia, Iran, Ethiopia, Iraq, Eritrea, Sudan, East Germany, Lebanon, Turkey, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka’, who have been drawn by the promise of ‘liberty, or [by] all the miraculous accoutrements they knew to be the divine right of those in the West, from blue jeans to hi-fi equipment’ (pp. 162, 133). Amongst French and German nationals, the belief that ‘“[t]here is no room, there are no jobs, no houses”’ for eastern European immigrants, and that ‘“even more people want to leave those countries”’, produces a wave of rightwing intolerance: ‘Communism is dead, people said; now it is the responsibility of those people to rebuild their own economies, not flood across borders to threaten ours’ (pp. 186, 325, 473). It is an attitude that Mooney appears to endorse, particularly when she chooses to renegotiate her protagonist’s dream to live in the West. After Ana has tracked down her boy in France, she applies for asylum in the country, only to find her application blocked by the French authorities. Obliged to think more deeply about her position, Ana starts to understand why so many westerners ‘applauded when the Berlin wall came down, yet agreed with their governments now that walls were necessary’, realising that, with her homeland being ‘transformed by freedom’, it is ‘her duty to help create a new Romania’ (pp. 480-1). The ending of the novel, which sees Ana ‘crossing that border’ back into the East (p. 482), recreates continental stability by symbolically re-erecting the boundaries between eastern and western populations. Although Lost Footsteps acknowledges that eastern Europe has moved on from its communist past, other British authors were sceptical that any genuine change had taken place after 1989, preferring to position the region in a history of depravity. Alan Brownjohn’s The Long Shadows (1997), which tells the story of a biographer researching a book in Ceauşescu-era Romania, finds the country dark, enigmatic and conspiratorial, a place where cultural and political intrigues persistently endanger the British visitor. Even after the Ceauşescus’ execution, the biographer believes that ‘the revolution had not dispersed the paranoia’ and that society remains ‘uncertain and explosive’, with any notion that ‘people [had] banished the darkness of Eastern Europe’ appearing premature.60 Jonathan Aycliffe’s semi-epistolary The Lost (1996) is a direct rewrite of

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Dracula, drawing on Stoker’s landscape of wolf-ridden forests and sinister castles that shelter the ‘un-dead’ and evoking Romania as ‘a gloomy and cheerless place’ inhabited by ‘a very great evil’.61 Sally Trench’s Fran’s War (1999) finds an identical situation in Yugoslavia, which is sunk in such ‘tribal prejudices’ and ‘ancient blood feuds’ that it is as though some innate malevolence resides within the land.62 In novels by Pat Barker and Louis de Bernières, the major characters consider the former Yugoslavia to be a place in which ‘freedomfighter, terrorist, murderer’ are words with one meaning, and in which the population is ‘possessed and tormented by history’, a condition which ‘takes the logic and humanity out of their souls’.63 This last image was given more extended treatment in Julian Barnes’s The Porcupine (1992). The novella describes the trial of a former eastern European dictator, Stoyo Petkanov, loosely modelled on Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov, whom the post-communist population refer to as ‘the monster who terrified us’ and who ‘“corrupted even the words that came out of our mouths”’.64 Like Stoker’s Count, Petkanov is both physically menacing (having a ‘skull set low on the shoulder’, a ‘sharp, questing nose’ and hands with ‘black hair down to the middle knuckle’) and spiritually corrupt, described as ‘“a tyrant, a murderer […], a moral pervert”’ (pp. 30, 30, 14, 122). At the trial, the Prosecutor General, Peter Solinsky, is apparently a representative of the new eastern Europe, one who has forsworn the ideologies of communism and who, while determined to convict Petkanov, desires an open and transparent legislature, which he views as the final evidence of democratic transition. The difficulty of pinning any crime on the former dictator, however, and the fact ‘that anything other than a verdict of guilty was unacceptable to higher authority’ (p. 58), turn the proceedings into show trial, particularly when Petkanov is finally charged on suspect evidence. As Petkanov himself realises, the point of the trial is merely to ‘nail down the vampire’ and to ‘thrust a stake through his heart’ before ‘he learns to fly again’ (p. 17). The ending of the novella, when this self-confessed ‘“monster”’ proclaims a determination, vampire-like, to ‘“haunt”’, ‘“contaminate”’ and even ‘“sexually corrupt”’ the new democratic administration (pp. 135-6), suggests that the shortcomings of Petkanov’s regime are unlikely to end. The vision of a congenitally deficient eastern Europe is central to Malcolm Bradbury’s Doctor Criminale (1992), perhaps British

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fiction’s most extended meditation on the consequences of East-West re-unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Francis Jay, a literature graduate and journalist, is asked to conduct research into the life of Dr Bazlo Criminale, an internationally celebrated philosopher born in a small town in the Balkans. This apparently straightforward brief is quickly undermined as the mysterious and elusive Criminale leads Jay on a picaresque journey around both western and eastern Europe, uncovering on the way a continent whose borders, institutions, regulations and demographic patterns are in a state of flux. These were the years in which ‘an era had come to an end’, when the ‘the statues fell and the busts tumbled, of Lenin, Stalin, Ceausescu (sic) and Hoxha’, and when ‘the world seemed curiously indeterminate, no longer as stable and sure as it had been’.65 These sweeping changes include a shift in the very concept of Europe, with even the bureaucrats who govern the continent struggling to ‘find out where its edges started and stopped’ (p. 4). For Bradbury, speaking in 1993, Doctor Criminale is ‘an attempt to deal with the notion of a world when some fundamental change has occurred’, as well as to discover ‘the language that describes what has happened to us, not just to ourselves, but to our historical condition’.66 For the style in which south-east Europe is represented in his text, however, not much has changed at all. At the start of Jay’s research, he feels only admiration for his subject. Criminale’s international reputation rests on innumerable academic studies and philosophical tracts, not to mention novels, plays and travel books, an output of such magnitude that Jay wonders whether Criminale is ‘the only true philosopher left in a postphilosophical culture, the man who has singlehandedly reinvigorated philosophy’ (p. 26). His status is so great that no academic conference, political summit or diplomatic reception appears complete without him, having become an associate of presidents and global leaders, ‘Greek shipowners and Nobel prizewinners […], Buddhist thinkers and leading tennis stars’ (p. 29). As Jay’s research progresses, however, he starts to feel that Criminale must be ‘flawed, tainted in some fashion’ (p. 93). The mystery that surrounds his date of birth and nationality is compounded, rather than resolved, by the discovery that he hails from the ‘obscure’ Bulgarian town of Veliko Turnovo, which Criminale himself describes as ‘“[a] place you have never heard of, […] a place to leave if you wished to live a significant life”’ (p. 235).

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His south-east European origins transform Criminale into a worrying, transgressive presence, a figure from the geographical margins who – through gaining expertise in western philosophy and literature – successfully infiltrates the culture and political life of the West, but who remains resolutely apart from it. This is emphasised when Jay gets his first glimpse of Criminale at an Italian literature conference. With his ‘big bulky body’ and hair ‘bouffanted in the style of Romanian dictators’, his ‘commanding presence’ and air of ‘apocalyptic gloom’, Criminale is both sinister and ludicrous, an impression heightened by a coarseness that his veneer of Western sophistication fails to conceal (‘his arms were fat, his body rather squat, and a tuft of wiry chest hair stuck out over the knot of his Hermés tie’ (pp. 29, 227, 170, 240, 131)). The emerging links to Stoker’s Dracula are confirmed by the great philosopher turning out to be a ‘hairy satyr’, a ‘“pillager of women”’ with a ‘complex sex-life’ and a predilection for ‘erotic line drawings’ (pp. 174, 33, 178, 114). Subsequent to this, Jay begins to discern his own similarities to the Englishman that Dracula opposed. At Budapest train station, contemplating the ‘Transylvanian mystery’ that lies to the east, Jay realises that ‘[i]t was probably from here that Bram Stoker’s innocent Jonathan Harker started, when he chose to take his unfortunate summer holiday in the land of Vlad the Impaler, in the book whose hundredth anniversary was due’ (p. 99). The real revelation of Jay’s investigation, however, concerns the criminal activities in which his quarry is involved. During the Cold War, when Criminale travelled in the West but kept one foot in the ‘“old Marxist world”’ of the East (remaining ‘“friends with Brezhnev and mates with Honecker”’), he made considerable gain from being ‘“useful to both sides”’ (p. 34). This entailed passing back information gleaned in his many meetings with western diplomats and heads of state to the Hungarian secret service, as well as making ‘“certain arrangements”’ with communist states that worked to their mutual financial benefit (p. 208). In return for his books being transported to the West, Criminale would deposit in Swiss banks both party funds (a reserve used for blackmailing western officials, purchasing military technology and paying off agents) and the individual fortunes accumulated by the Eastern Bloc nomenklature. ‘“The Cold War”’, as one character puts it, ‘“was filled with these funny games”’ (p. 35). As his name suggests, Criminale has not changed his ways after 1989. A

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European Community investigator informs Jay that the academic conferences in which the philosopher participates are being used as cover for smuggling, illicit transactions and clandestine financial traffic over the borders of the old Iron Curtain. Although Jay initially dismisses the idea as ‘conspiratorial Euro-imaginings’, as the stuff of spy novels that had ‘“gone right out of fashion since the end of the Cold War”’, he comes to realise that Criminale is ‘far more complex, obscure, and no doubt deceitful […] than I had troubled, in my innocence, to imagine’ (pp. 188, 199, 254). He finally accepts that the radical and revisionist philosopher had […] signed a Devil’s Pact with Stalinism in 1956. Then that meant political betrayal: he had become a creature of a corrupt and conspiratorial regime and system, repressive to its marrow, and everything he said and did thereafter could be considered suspect. There was personal betrayal: when Criminale made his high-level contacts and friendships in the West, he was reporting everything back to […] the Hungarian (which must also have meant the Russian) secret police. (p. 290)

As one Hungarian character argues, Criminale’s venality, secretiveness and betrayal are merely the qualities that one needed for survival in a communist country. The comment, while meant as reassurance, actually implies that corruption was endemic in the former Eastern Bloc, a point reiterated by a Bulgarian academic from Criminale’s home town who admits ‘“we are not Europe and cannot live like Europe”’ (p. 338). This sense of Criminale as metonym for regional dissolution produces a distinct anxiety about the efficacy of western borders. Just as Criminale travelled during the Cold War ‘as if frontiers were abolished [and] his books crossed the East-West divide as if it had never been there’, so the entire population of eastern Europe can now migrate westward after ‘the opening up of the Eastern frontier’, summoning the horrifying image of corruption sweeping unchecked from ‘the European fringes’.67 In this ‘brave New Europe’, the novel articulates, when the continent is being converted into ‘“[a] great and complicated mega-country”’, there are parts that are considerably less desirable, and would be best left out (pp. 280, 294). It should be mentioned that the British literary approach to south-east Europe, with its ongoing deployment of gothic imagery, has been repeated by other national literatures. This is particularly true of contemporary American fiction, where the Balkans are commonly construed as ‘some quaint corner of Hell’, its people ‘as remote to

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most modern Europeans as the dough-faced peasants of a Breughel painting’ and their immigrant presence in western countries as ‘a diaspora of feud and vengeance’.68 The most famous example in kind is Dan Simmons’s Children of the Night (1992), a novel whose concern with migrancy is only one amongst many borrowings from Stoker. Dr Kate Neuman is a haematologist who discovers in Romania’s orphanages an abandoned child whose extraordinary autoimmune system might hold the cure for AIDS and cancer, but who happens to be a member of a family of Transylvanian vampires that survive by ingesting human blood. The family head is the fivehundred year old Vlad Ţepeş, the shadowy power behind Romania’s political leadership, and when Kate adopts the child and takes it to the United States, he sends his warlocks after them, bringing death and destruction to Colorado.69 A similar reliance on gothic motifs is found in Barbara Wilson’s Trouble in Transylvania (1993), which details the Romanian adventures of Cassandra Reilly, an American translator. Reilly’s entrance into the country immediately recalls that of Jonathan Harker (‘it felt as if we had come to […] this ancient land by a sinister magic’), while also repeating Bradbury’s evocation of a two-tier continent: ‘[t]raveling into Romania from the West’, she declares, ‘was like leaving the wealthy drawing room upstairs for the downstairs servants’ quarters.’70 During a stay at a spa town, close to the birthplace of Vlad Ţepeş, Reilly unearths an alien world of wolves, witch-hunts, superstitions and ‘“corrupt”’ civilians segregated by ethnic hostilities, a combination that suggests ‘the Devil’s own country, filled with backward, starving serfs’.71 She soon becomes embroiled in the mystery surrounding the recent death of Dr Ion Pustulescu, the director of the spa complex whose regenerative cures have apparently solved the ageing process. Like one of the ‘Undead’, Pustulescu’s usage of his own medicine has enabled him to live to ‘over a hundred’, an impression of immortality heightened by his ‘“dark hair”’, ‘“evil old eyes”’, ‘alert and erect’ posture and lecherous behaviour towards his female staff (pp. 108, 76, 76, 108). When Reilly discovers a woman carrying his child, she thinks of him as an ‘evil spirit that […] still seemed malevolently alive’, one which, as ‘no one had put a stake through’ his heart, has ‘risen from the autopsy table and [is] stalking the dark countryside in search of new victims’ (pp. 212, 221). Despite the novel being saturated with gothic imagery, Wilson seems to feel that she has not done enough with her material:

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late in the novel, one of her characters expresses surprise ‘“that the subject of vampires hasn’t come up more often […]. After all, we are in Transylvania”’.72 While authors such as Wilson, Mooney and Bradbury have determinedly addressed the new currents in post-Cold War history – the fall of the Berlin Wall, the growth of the European Union and the demographic shifts across the continent – their narratives remain entrenched in representational patterns that stretch back to the nineteenth century and beyond. In a period of literary postmodernism that prides itself on experimentalism and innovation, it is remarkable the way that Stoker’s novel ‘has remained central to the West’s understanding not only of its Transylvanian-Romanian setting, but also of the wider Balkan region.’73 Since 1989, there have been few British or American authors who heed the words of the Romanian protagonist in Paul Bailey’s Kitty and Virgil (1998): ‘“He is your Count Dracula, not ours. The preposterous undead Count […] is one blood-sucking demon who does not belong to us.’”74 The deployment of gothic imagery as part of a broader framework of denigratory representation has helped to recreate south-east Europe as the West’s most immediate civilisational antitype, maintaining a style of intraEuropean alterity that seemed set to disappear after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. In 1996, Magdalena Zaborowska spoke of a Europe inhabiting ‘the threshold […] between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of some new “Era X”, which is yet to be named by historians and novelists’.75 A few years later, that era would commence with the events of September 11, 2001, gaining the emotive and memorable designation, ‘the war on terror’. Yet during the ten years between 1989 and the rise of the ‘Axis of Evil’ it was south-east Europe that stood in as the post-Cold War other, receiving a form of vilification similar to that projected onto the communist world and revealing how cross-cultural discourse, by enduring the changes between different historical periods, can question the very notion of change. It is the gothicism of postmodern writers like Bradbury and Barnes, little altered from that of Stoker’s nineteenth-century narrative, which has done much to reactivate demonic representations of east-central Europe and the Balkans. In our supposedly more liberal age, Dracula continues to offer, in Simon Gatrell’s words, ‘only a slightly exaggerated image of the English (sic) view of activities appropriate to this region’.76

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NOTES 1

Kostova, ‘Meals in Foreign Parts: Food in Writing by Nineteenth-Century British Travellers to the Balkans’, Journeys, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2003), p. 41. 2 Francesca M. Wilson, Portraits and Sketches of Serbia (London: The Swarthmore Press, 1920), p. 69; J. Swire, King Zog’s Albania (London: Robert Hale, 1937), p. 68. 3 As David Punter points out, the eighteenth-century gothic genre was not so much a new form as one ‘into which a huge variety of cultural influences, from Shakespeare to “Ossian”, from medievalism to Celtic nationalism, flowed’ (Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day: Volume 1, The Gothic Tradition, 2nd edn (1980; London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 87). 4 Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 43. 5 Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 2. 6 E.L. Clery, Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000), p. 2. 7 As Ludmilla Kostova argues, the ‘concern with boundaries is a feature Gothic and travel narratives share’ (Kostova, Tales of the Periphery: The Balkans in NineteenthCentury British Writing (Veliko Turnovo: St. Cyril and St. Methodius University Press, 1997), p. 11). 8 St Clair and Brophy, Residence in Bulgaria, p. 50. 9 Božidar Jezernik, Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers (London: Saqi/The Bosnian Institute, 2004), p. 36. 10 Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania, new edn (1817; New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1971), pp. 97, 99, 99, 112. 11 Ibid., p. 110. 12 Lear, Journals, pp. 124, 122, 54-5. 13 Brown, Winter in Albania, pp. 105, 165, 170. 14 Arthur J. Evans, Illyrian Letters: A Revised Selection of Correspondence from the Illyrian Provinces of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, Addressed to the ‘Manchester Guardian’ during the Year 1877 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1878), p. 199; de Windt, Through Savage Europe, p. 209; Barkley, Between the Danube and Black Sea, pp. 246-7. 15 Ozanne, Three Years in Roumania, p. 164. 16 Berger, Winter in the City of Pleasure, p. 248. 17 Boner, Transylvania: Its Products and its People (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1865), pp. 40-1, 43, 135, 142, 46, 43. 18 Gerard, ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’, in Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, new edn (1897; New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997), p. 332. 19 Ibid., p. 332. 20 Ibid., p. 333. 21 Berger, City of Pleasure, p. 134. 22 Bram Dijkstra, ‘Dracula’s Backlash’, in Stoker, Dracula, p. 460. 23 For example, Kostova argues that late nineteenth-century narratives such as Dracula came ‘to represent late Victorian geopolitical fears occasioned […] by the decline of the British Empire’ (Kostova, Tales of the Periphery, p. 129).

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24 Although Dracula may be interpreted as an expression of nineteenth-century antisemitism, and its central character as a metaphor for the Jew, it is most straightforwardly a novel that illustrates the period’s demonisation of south-east Europe (see Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 86-106). 25 See Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and Times (New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1989), pp. 221-34. Stoker was aware of, and drew upon, the myths surrounding the Wallachian military leader, Vlad Ţepeş, or Vlad the Impaler, whose bloody exploits Count Dracula reproduces (see ibid., pp. 221, 229-31, and Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and Legend (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1985), pp. 89-98). As Markman Ellis details, Stoker could also draw on a wealth of vampire myth and fiction: see Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 161204. 26 See Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 79-81. 27 Stoker, Dracula, new edn (1897; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 1. The page numbers cited hereafter in the text are taken from this edition. 28 Ibid., pp. 5, 2. Matthew Gibson comments on how novels like Dracula mark ‘the conversion of an East European or Near Eastern superstition to a West European political comment about East European society’ (Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 11). 29 As one character bemoans, ‘the old centuries […] have powers of their own which mere “modernity” cannot kill’ (Stoker, Dracula, p. 36). 30 There is a sense that Harker, when discovering Dracula sated with blood in the coffin-like box, suddenly foresees the vampire’s activities as an immigrant in Britain. As he claims, ‘[t]he very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster. There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face’ (ibid., p. 51). 31 Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation’, in Glennis Byron, ed., Dracula: Bram Stoker (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 119-44; Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 227-53. 32 Stoker, Dracula, p. 51. The immigration motif also appears when Van Helsing expresses alarm about Dracula ‘“leaving his own barren land”’ and ‘“coming to a great city”’ in which the ‘“life of man teems till they are like the multitude of standing corn”’ (ibid., pp. 319-20). 33 For a discussion of how Stoker’s Protestant upbringing and his commitment to chivalric masculinity impacted upon his writing, see William Hughes, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 14-96. 34 Stoker, Dracula, p. 37. As Arata notes, the figure of Dracula – fecund, vigorous, imbued with complete conviction – contrasts to the enervation and frailty of the British, suggesting that, in this Darwinian struggle for space, the latter are not the strongest race (see Arata, ‘Occidental Tourist’, p. 126).

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35 Derek Patmore, Invitation to Romania (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 92; E.O. Hoppé, In Gipsy Camp and Royal Palace: Wanderings in Rumania (London: Methuen, 1924), pp. 96-7; D.J. Hall, Romanian Furrow (London: Methuen, 1933), p. 160. 36 Walter Starkie, Raggle-Taggle: Adventures with a Fiddle in Hungary and Roumania, new edn (1933; London: John Murray, 1935), pp. 164, 257, 164, 164, 164. 37 Leslie, Where East is West, p. 228; M. Edith Durham, Twenty Years of the Balkan Tangle (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1920), pp. 79-80. 38 Alexander, Stones, Hilltops, and the Sea: Some Jugo-slavian Impressions (London: Alston Rivers, 1929), p. 190. 39 Ibid., pp. 78, 99. 40 Edwards, A Wayfarer in Yugoslavia (London: Methuen, 1939), pp. 24, 144; Edwards, Profane Pilgrimage: Wanderings through Yugoslavia (London: Duckworth, 1938), pp. 221, 221; Edwards, Wayfarer, p. 70. He compares one location in Montenegro to ‘the scene of a gothic novel’ and writes on another in Croatia that ‘[o]n a medieval map one would not be surprised to find it marked: “Here bee monsters!”’ (Edwards, Wayfarer, pp. 144, 70). 41 Edwards, Profane Pilgrimage, p. 240. 42 Ibid., pp. 239-40. Nora Lavrin’s collection of pen and ink drawings recording her impressions of a journey through Yugoslavia, published in 1935, is an example of the Balkan gothic in art. As she states in her foreword, Yugoslavia is a ‘wild’, ‘austere’ and ‘fantastic’ country, where ‘the mixture of sea and rock becomes overwhelming’ and where the ‘medieval’ and ‘Oriental’ combine to suggest ‘the unadulterated East’ (Lavrin, Jugoslav Scenes (London: Stanley Nott, 1935), p. 11). 43 Thornton, Ikons and Oxen (London: Collins, 1939), pp. 274-5. 44 Drace-Francis, ‘Sex, Lies and Stereotypes: Romania in British Literature since 1945’, in George Cipăianu and Virgiliu Ţârău, eds, Romanian and British Historians on the Contemporary History of Romania (Cluj-Napoca: Cluj University Press, 2000), p. 90. 45 Starkie, Raggle-Taggle, pp. 244, 196, 196. 46 Ibid., p. 199. 47 Horowitz [R.G. Waldeck], Athene Palace Bucharest: Hitler’s ‘New Order’ Comes to Rumania, new edn (1942; London: Constable, 1943), pp. 6-7, 27. 48 O’Connor, Walking Good: Travels to Music in Romania and Hungary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp. 44, 48. 49 Longinović, ‘Vampires Like Us: Gothic Imaginary and “the Serbs”’, in Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić, eds, Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 56. He also points out that ‘the Mittel Land invoked in Dracula’ continues to be treated with a ‘centuries-old bias nurtured by the gothic imaginary’ (ibid., pp. 41, 55). In a similar vein, Vesna Goldsworthy speaks of the region’s crises over the last fifteen years – the wars, revolutions, recessions and waves of impoverished asylum seekers – and describes how the ‘Western “horror” at what is going on in the Balkans contains, like Gothic horror, a frisson of pleasure that is difficult to own up to’ (Goldsworthy, ‘Invention and In(ter)vention: The Rhetoric of Balkanization’, in Bjelić and Savić, eds, Balkan as Metaphor, p. 29).

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50 Drysdale, Looking for George, pp. 13, 231, 231, 135; Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, p. 81; Harding, In Another Europe, p. 88; Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, p. 84. 51 Thurnham, Sophie’s Journey: The Story of an Aid Worker in Romania (London: Warner, 1994), pp. 35, 29, 30. 52 Colonel Bob Stewart, Broken Lives: A Personal View of the Bosnian Conflict, new edn (1993; London: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 322. Stewart goes on: ‘We are talking about our back door; maybe we should remember what Churchill called it, “the soft underbelly of Europe”. The rest of us could easily be vulnerable to what happens there and the sooner everybody realizes that the better’ (ibid., p. 325). 53 Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, 3rd edn (1992; London: Penguin, 1996), p. 2; Selbourne, Death of the Dark Hero, p. 98. 54 Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War (London: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 126. 55 Winchester, Fracture Zone, p. 106. 56 Hamilton and Solanki, Albania: Who Cares? (Grantham: Autumn Park, 1992), pp. 65, 66. One American author states that ‘[i]t was the presence of these immigrants, and the challenges – cultural, racial, and linguistic – that they posed, which seemed to me the great, intractable dilemma that the future held in store for the rich world’ (David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, new edn (1995; London: Vintage, 1995), p. 32). 57 Mooney, Lost Footsteps, new edn (1993; London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 105, 52. 58 It is also a dominant interpretative framework in many other contemporary British novels and travelogues on Romania. For example, the Romanian population in Christine Pullein-Thompson’s The Long Search (1991) are ‘like walking skeletons’, or ‘like people appearing from hell’, with Ceauşescu ‘high above them like the devil’ (Pullein-Thompson, The Long Search (London: Andersen Press, 1991), pp. 98, 30). 59 Mooney, Lost Footsteps, p. 477. For Ana, the West is a ‘world of achievement’, its citizens marked by ‘their confidence, their wholeness’ (ibid., p. 352). She even wonders what it might ‘be like to be like them’: ‘To walk confidently in the light knowing you are right – that your system is right – and so feel no fear of speech or of action’ (ibid., pp. 476, 433). Although much of the narrative comes from Ana’s viewpoint, there is little sense that Mooney disagrees with her. 60 Brownjohn, The Long Shadows (Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1997), pp. 311, 294, 381. 61 Aycliffe, The Lost (London: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 158. 62 Trench, Fran’s War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), p. 7. 63 Barker, Double Vision, new edn (2003; London: Penguin, 2004), p. 53; de Bernières, A Partisan’s Daughter (London: Harvill Scker, 2008), p. 34. 64 Barnes, The Porcupine, new edn (1992; London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1993), pp. 31, 133. 65 Bradbury, Doctor Criminale, new edn (1992; London: Quality Paperbacks Direct, 1992), pp. 85, 3-4, 86. 66 Bradbury, quoted in Ludmilla Kostova, ‘Inventing Post-Wall Europe: Visions of the “Old” Continent in Contemporary British Fiction and Drama’, in Andy Hollis, ed., Beyond Boundaries: Representations of European Identity (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 2000), p. 85.

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67 Bradbury, Doctor Criminale, pp. 33, 85, 4. A major feature of Criminale’s threat is that he is an adept border-crosser, as Jay realises as he himself is passing the border by train from Austria into Hungary: ‘He had lived in occupied cities, crossed dangerous borders, been overlooked by watchtowers and telephone bugs and unmarked cars and censors, menaced by gulags and all the dangers that had been hidden in the kind of landscape I saw beyond the window’ (ibid., p. 92). 68 Dan Fesperman, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows, new edn (2003; London: Black Swan, 2004), pp. 192, 49, 76. 69 Considering the nature of his own novel, it is ironic that Simmons’s Vlad Ţepeş should denounce ‘Stoker’s abominable, awkwardly written melodrama, that compendium of confusions’ (Simmons, Children of the Night, new edn (1992; London: Headline Book Publishing, 1993), p. 297). For a discussion of Dracula and Children of the Night, see David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 136-51. 70 Wilson, Trouble in Transylvania, new edn (1993; London: Virago Press, 1993), pp. 69, 65. As in Mooney’s Lost Footsteps, the West is viewed as the positive pole of the European binary: ‘“When one lives in a country that is morally corrupt”’, one of Wilson’s Romanian characters explains, ‘“[t]he only sanity is to remember that there are countries not like this, other places where the purpose of life is not to lie and cheat and steal, but to create health and happiness for all”’ (ibid., p. 266). 71 Ibid., pp. 95, 61. For the novel’s epigraph, Wilson takes Jonathan Harker’s comment: ‘I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some imaginative whirlpool’ (ibid., unpaginated). 72 Ibid., p. 253. Other examples of the gothic in north American balkanist fiction are Jon Evans’s The Blood Price (2005), which concerns itself with people smuggling in the region, and Starling Lawrence’s Montenegro (1997), a historical novel which has a local insurgent impale an Austrian officer during the uprisings of the early twentieth century (see Lawrence, Montenegro, new edn (1997; London: Black Swan, 1998), pp. 335-6). 73 Yonka Krasteva, ‘Western Writing and the (Re)Construction of the Balkans after 1989: The Bulgarian Case’, in Andrew Hammond, ed., The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945-2003 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 99. 74 Bailey, Kitty and Virgil, new edn (1998; London: Fourth Estate, 1999), p. 133. 75 Zaborowska, quoted in Kostova, ‘Inventing Post-Wall Europe’, p. 84. 76 Gatrell, ‘Introduction’ to Gatrell, ed., The Ends of the Earth, 1876-1918 (London and Atlantic Highlands: The Ashfield Press, 1992), p. 47.

Chapter 4: Balkanism in Political Context The debate about what the term ‘Europe’ signifies – to pick up a theme from chapter 1 – has acquired increasing importance in recent years. Since the end of the Cold War, questions about the nature and constitution of European civilisation – what it believes, what its frontiers are, what you need to get in – have become a staple ingredient of political speeches, newspaper editorials and academic publications. Far from reassuring western European populations, the defeat of communism seems to have initiated a profound crisis of identity. On the one hand, commentators have outlined the difficulties of defining this small, multifarious, expansionist region that is, after all, merely an appendage to the vast continental landmass of Eurasia. Hayden White argues that ‘Europe’ remains a geo-political concept which exists only ‘in the talk and writing of visionaries and scoundrels seeking an alibi for a civilization whose principal historical attribute has been […] to destroy what it cannot dominate, assimilate, or consume’.1 On the other hand, there has been a wave of neoconservative sentiment that understands Europe to be the true locale of culture and value, and that uses the contemporary fear of asylum seekers, economic migrants and international terror to forge the region’s political coherence. Such sentiment has been exacerbated by the rise of exclusionary practices in a number of western and eastern societies. The growth of the extreme right in France, Germany and Austria, the nationalist conflicts in Cyprus, Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, and the ‘hard border’ initially erected between eastcentral Europe and the Balkans all express the hierarchical notion of the continent as a nucleus of decision-making states and an outer sweep of marginal nations and ethnicities for whom decisions need to be taken. The countries of south-east Europe have long exemplified the non- or quasi-European in the western geographical imagination. Caught between Catholicism and Byzantium, Christendom and Islam,

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the western powers and Russia, the peninsula has been conceived as an unruly borderland where the structured identity of the imperial centre dissolves and alien, antithetic peripheries begin. From the days of the Ottoman expansion into Europe, the result has been an ongoing political involvement on the part of the Great Powers, who have considered western control of these peripheries essential for the preservation of peace on the continent. In the nineteenth century, France, Britain, Austria and Russia all made incursions into the region, both to master Europe’s eastern border and to pursue the strategic and economic gains that proceed from conquest. The persistence and violence of Great Power interference led inevitably to suspicion and rivalry, and produced many of the international crises – the Crimean War, the Russo-Ottoman War, the First World War – upon which the region’s reputation has been based. It also helped to provoke the nationalist insurgency that the imperial nations so feared. As I mentioned in chapter 2, the term ‘balkanisation’ – to divide into smaller, mutually hostile units – evolved in the early part of the twentieth century when the region’s burgeoning nationalism resulted, via the First Balkan War of 1912 and the events of 1914-18, in the expulsion of the Ottoman and Austrian Empires from the peninsula. In other words, integral to the term is an imperial anxiety about the breaking-up of empire by subject populations. Despite the decline of European imperialism in the twentieth century, the mistrust of an independently functioning south-east Europe and the attendant readiness to intrude have persisted, most obviously in the expansionism of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, but also in the contemporary enlargement of the European Union, in which gradual political and economic mastery is being achieved over central and eastern Europe. Adam Burgess, discussing ‘the virtually colonial character of relations between the two halves of the continent’, is not untypical in deploring the ‘new division of Europe, one half of which enjoys the right to set targets for the other.’2 This chapter will expand upon my earlier introduction to British political engagement in the Balkans by looking in more detail at the forms of power that balkanism has facilitated over the centuries. That such forms of power are present may be inferred from the discourse’s status as one of the most powerful representational traditions in British culture, with its motifs of discord, immorality, savagery, violence and congenital backwardness achieving not only an extraordinarily

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forceful expression, but also an extensive presence in the works of travel writers, novelists, diarists and historians, who have presented the Balkans as a region antithetical to western European values. Significantly, denigration has been most potent in the Victorian and post-Cold War periods, between which a notable similarity occurs in discursive register, tone, imagery and evaluation. The regional portraiture offered by the average nineteenth-century traveller was not dissimilar to that deployed by co-nationals on Britain’s colonised territories: these were ‘wild stern regions’ inhabited by ‘inferior nationalities’ who proved ‘great thieves and liars, and more backward […] than any people in Europe’.3 Such accusations are perhaps unremarkable in an age of empire, but are strangely anachronistic at the turn of the twentieth-first century, when the peninsula has once again been considered ‘discordant, anarchic, demonic’, a ‘dystopian nightmare’ in which the towns are ‘pure George Orwell’s 1984’, the villages suggest ‘people living in bestial poverty’ and the population groups succumb to ‘indiscriminate [...] ethnic-religious-hereditary conflicts’.4 During these two major periods of denigratory balkanism, Britain has played an important part in western European interventionism: specifically, in the Great Power response to the decline of the Ottoman Empire and in the EU’s eastern enlargement after 1989. Its participation might not have amounted to the colonial practices pursued by France, Austria or Russia, but has certainly entailed political and economic frameworks whose strength and influence mirror those being endorsed by classic imperial discourse.5 During the nineteenth century, the question of what should be done with the territories vacated by the decaying Ottoman Empire – the so-called Eastern Question – was one of the great themes of Great Power diplomacy. This straggling eastern empire was still a force to be reckoned with in the early part of that century, its dominions stretching across the Middle East, northern Africa and the eastern and southern Balkans. Yet it was not the power that it had once been. In the Balkans, the signs of degeneration were everywhere: a corrupt bureaucracy, a chaotic administration, a lawless and insubordinate military and an unnecessarily onerous tax burden that stimulated the rise of nationalist feeling, if not outright revolt, amongst the largely Christian population. The spread of nationalism was as much a source of concern for the Great Powers as it was for the Porte. Once its threat to western Christendom had diminished after the seventeenth century,

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the Ottoman presence in the Balkans actually helped to ease mistrust between Britain, France, Austria and Russia and, as long as no nation upset the balance of power, to facilitate stability in Europe. There were growing fears, however, about the extent and focus of Russian ambition. During the eighteenth century, Russia had benefited from the Ottoman withdrawal along the north shores of the Black Sea, and, as the oppression of the South Slavs became more evident, a very real danger emerged of Russian intervention in south-east Europe. The consequent fall of Constantinople and the Straits would have threatened Britain’s Near Eastern trade, its sea routes to India and its naval supremacy in the Mediterranean. As a consequence, British statesmen – along with their French colleagues – spent much of the nineteenth century preserving the integrity of the Ottoman Empire through sustained diplomatic and military assistance. It was a policy that Austria also supported. Although it had expanded into the western Balkans after the defeat of Napoleon, Austria shared Britain’s concerns about Russian expansionism and showed a willingness to assist British and French plans for the region. Indeed, all the Great Powers involved in the Eastern Question were working from the same basic principles: that it was their absolute right to manage south-east European affairs for the good of Europe and that western interests were the only consideration. The imperialist bent of the Great Nations is best illustrated by their response to the ‘Eastern Crisis’ of the 1870s. Signalling the end of Ottoman power in Europe, the crisis comprised a series of insurgencies and wars across the peninsula, incited by economic distress, a growth of nationalist movements and a surge of Russian opportunism. In 1875, the Christian peasantry of Bosnia and Herzegovina finally rose against their overlords, inspiring insurrection in Bulgaria in 1876 and a declaration of war against the Porte by Serbia and Montenegro in the same year. The latter, a quixotic gesture at best, put pressure on the Tsar to come out on their side in April 1877, and the Russian army, despite resistance along the way, made rapid advances through Romania and Bulgaria, ending up ten miles from Constantinople. Although faced with a south-east Europe under Russian control, British public opinion was divided. For William Gladstone, the liberal leader, the Ottoman reprisals against the Bulgarian insurgents in 1876, which led to the murder of thousands of civilians, indicated a degenerate regime whose expulsion from Europe

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was overdue. For Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative Prime Minister, the imperative was to obstruct Russian designs in order ‘to maintain the British Empire and the prestige and image of England (sic) in Europe and throughout the world.’6 It was the conservative camp that won out. By the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano, forced on the Porte by Russia in March 1878, full independence had been granted to Serbia, Montenegro and Romania, and an enlarged, autonomous Bulgaria had been created that was likely to ensure Russian control of trade in the Black Sea and the Aegean, none of which was acceptable to the western powers. In June, at the hastily convened Berlin Congress, the independent Bulgaria envisaged by the earlier treaty was decimated, the larger portion being returned to the Sultan, and although Serbia was granted independence its territorial gains were significantly reduced.7 The Treaty of Berlin also allowed Austria to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina, a province which Austrian strategists had long believed necessary for the defence of Dalmatia, and which it went on to annex in 1908. The Berlin Congress, in short, disregarded the wishes of native populations, effectively returning millions of Europeans to colonial rule and sowing the seeds of further national struggle in the region, including the Austro-Serbian rivalry that would trigger the First World War.8 This idea that national aspirations were the least important factor in the arrangement of south-east European affairs was also apparent in the sphere of economics. For the British Empire, territorial conquest was always supplementary to the achievement of commercial gain abroad, and its intervention in the Near East was not so much aimed at controlling territory per se, than at ensuring economic advantage. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English Levant Company was flourishing: French commercial activity had languished after the defeat of Napoleon and, with British traders looking for alternatives to the highly protected Russian market, the value of British exports to the Ottoman Empire rose from £88,065 in 1783 to some £7,620,140 in 1845. With the region coming to overshadow France, Russia and Austria as a destination for British manufactured goods, as well as a source of agricultural and industrial raw material, Lord Palmerston would declare, in 1841, ‘that with no country is our trade so liberally permitted and carried out as with Turkey (sic).’9 The shifting commercial priorities of the later nineteenth century only re-emphasised the importance of the Near

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East. As competition for markets increased, Britain turned to investment as an alternative source of revenue, using the nation’s considerable reserves of capital for speculation across the European mainland and beyond. The Porte, wishing to develop its railways, ports and military capacity, borrowed heavily from British, French and German financiers, accumulating a debt of some 3.9 billion francs by 1914.10 Despite severe tax increases for the peasantry (which served to exacerbate discontent), the debt repayments came to account for a sizeable percentage of the national revenue, with the Porte declaring itself bankrupt as early as the mid-1870s, the decade of the Eastern Crisis. The result was western Europe’s ever-greater supervision of the Ottoman economy and – with political considerations always underlying the advancement of loans – expanding influence over domestic and diplomatic policy. Yet the West’s economic penetration of the Near East was not limited to the Porte. During the late nineteenth century, those Balkan states that had gained independence also faced escalating budget expenses and an over-reliance on foreign loans for infrastructural development, accumulating huge levels of debt to western European creditors that absorbed national income and inaugurated foreign control over the region’s finances. By 1914, with Romania owing some 1.7 billion francs, Serbia 903 million francs and Bulgaria 850 million francs, such states were reduced to ‘a chain of increasingly dependent economies, each one in turn more heavily fettered to its more powerful Western neighbours.’11 Naturally, the style of nineteenth-century balkanism offered a convenient explanation for the multiple problems (poverty, insurgency, dependency) that Western interference helped to create. The accusations of semi-savagery, backwardness, ethnic strife and moral dissolution to be found in British travel writing not only suggested that such problems were an innate consequence of native deficiency, but also offered a triumphant vindication of foreign rule. This was emphasised by the direct support that travellers would give to British policy in the Near East. S.G.B. St Clair and Charles A. Brophy are in no doubt that Russian interest in the Eastern Question is merely ‘a pretext for aggression leading to territorial aggrandisement’: that is, a desire for intervention on behalf of the Slavic Orthodox Christians only ‘in the hope of one day becoming their sovereign’.12 With this in mind, and with the Christian population being ‘brutish,

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obstinate, idle, superstitious, dirty’ and lacking the ‘uprightness of character necessary to form a basis for a national civilization’, their solution is the continuation of a ‘Turkish administration untrammelled by foreign influence’.13 In a similar way, J.J. Best is aware that the Ottoman Empire is in retreat, but wants it ‘propped up by the external influence of the great nations of Europe’ in order to ensure ‘the preservation of the balance of power, and to prevent the far greater evil of endless and bloody contentions amongst themselves for the detached portions’.14 From the 1870s onwards, this speculation as to the fate of south-east Europe after the Ottoman withdrawal was increasingly common. During the uprisings in Herzegovina, W.J. Stillman believes that the last thing these ‘ignorant’ populations need is ‘representative government, dependent on […] universal suffrage’, which can only lead to further ‘anarchy’; far better a Great Power administration conducting ‘a system of patriarchal despotism.’15 Arthur Evans’s solution is ‘an immediate Austrian occupation of the province’, and in the long term a ‘prolonged administration […] by an European commission.’16 This remedy was soon to be applied at the Berlin Conference, and Austrian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was swift. Robert Dunkin, travelling through the region in the mid-1890s, had only praise for the subsequent advances in law, communications, sanitation, education and the like, proclaiming that Austrian ‘administration of the Herzegovina is at once simple and admirable, and its results are a triumphant justification of the methods of civilization.’17 On the eve of the First World War, travellers were continuing either to suggest that ‘the misrule of the Turk is preferable to […] freedom’ in some parts of the Balkans, or to insist that the best option is ‘efficient European control by the representatives of all the Powers.’18 However the notion was expressed (‘administration from outside’, ‘the guidance and control of Europe’19), there were few nineteenth-century commentators who questioned western governance of Europe’s eastern border. Once established, the concept of the Balkans as a frontier zone that required policing from without persisted into the twentieth century, although became re-routed into new channels. After 1918, full independence was extended to all the territories lying between the Adriatic and Black Seas, and constitutional monarchies were established which exerted sovereign control over domestic and foreign policy. It was a situation that could never last. When recession spread

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through the continent in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a bankrupt, impoverished south-east Europe became vulnerable to German penetration, which manipulated the trade clearing agreements arising from the depression to control the region’s agrarian exports and to demand its purchase of German industrial products. By 1938, Hitler had gained such wide-ranging economic and political leverage that the Balkans ‘were more or less included in the Reich’s Großraum.’20 German influence was consolidated during the Second World War, when Bulgaria and Romania experienced varying degrees of economic and military control, Serbia and Croatia languished under puppet regimes and Albania endured German and Italian occupation. Nor did liberation arrive when the Axis powers were defeated. In October 1944, the notorious percentages deal struck by Churchill and Stalin21 led to the ascendancy of the Soviet Union, which attempted to reduce the region to a series of satellite states through trading and fiscal arrangements and through political pressure. In the West, there was a good deal of sympathy for the oppressed populations of the communist East, cut off as they were from the freedom and prosperity of democratic Europe, as Cold War discourse had it. Once liberation was finally achieved, however, the ‘free world’ was not sure it wanted them. After the initial euphoria of 1989, the post-communist peoples were quickly re-imagined as an uncontrollable mass – of criminal gangs, traffickers, prostitutes – that threatened the imminent destruction of western stability. That such invasion imagery was now projected onto civilians, rather than being limited to governmental and military elites, illustrates how the Cold War division of Europe has broadened from the purely geopolitical implications of the ‘iron curtain’, understood as temporary and anomalous, to a ‘civilisational fault line’ that is viewed as innate.22 It was at this point that the control of the eastern border passed to a reinvigorated European Union which, with its rhetoric of ‘eastern expansion’ and ‘eastern enlargement’, began asserting itself like some nineteenth-century empire. Originally entitled the European Economic Community, the EU emerged from the immediate concerns of the post-Second World War period, when a collection of six nations, believing that ‘an exhausted and divided Europe […] presented both a power vacuum and a temptation to the USSR’,23 sought closer economic and political ties. At the heart of the EU’s commitment to free trade between member states was a desire to preserve ‘European’ values and practices in the

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face of the ‘non-European’ mores of the communist East. The idea of the East/West divide as a motor for integration was shown in the community’s on-going programme of growth, drawing in Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom in 1973, Greece in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986. It also partly explains its confused and indecisive response during the 1990s to the spate of applications from the former communist countries. In demographic terms, these applications proposed the most ambitious enlargement on record, entailing a 20 per cent increase in the population of the European Union and an accommodation of the sizeable economic disparity between the incumbent and accession nations (in terms of GDP per head, this ranged from Slovenia’s 70 per cent of the EU average to Bulgaria’s 25 per cent). Yet it was in eastern Europe’s political dissimilarity during its transition from planned to market economy, not to mention the legacy of antagonism between the two halves of Europe, that one senses the source of the caution and the explanation for the EU’s stringent admission criteria. By the time Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Malta, Cyprus and the Czech Republic joined in 2004, and Romania and Bulgaria were accepted for a second wave of accession in 2007, they found themselves with less sovereignty than they had had as members of the Eastern bloc.24 As established at the 1993 European Council in Copenhagen, and as detailed in Agenda 2000 (1997), the EU’s measurable targets for admission focused upon the absolute adherence to the form of government, notion of citizenship and principal of competitive free market economics prevalent in the West.25 The preparation for simultaneous entry into the single market and the Schengen system has necessitated in central and eastern Europe sweeping changes to monetary policy, fiscal arrangements, capital flows, immigration controls and political and institutional frameworks, including the fulfilment of a number of pre-accession ‘criteria […] that even the current members are not expected to meet.’26 The fact that the latest enlargement has involved no changes whatsoever to these established nations, who claim to be promoting civil society but whose glaring deficiencies in such areas as minority rights, asylum policy and institutional transparency are a matter of record,27 suggests less a genuine merger than a wholesale take-over. A nation’s entrance into the EU has always entailed surrendering to European bodies control of

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activities traditionally accorded to the nation-state; yet never before has EU expansion placed greater limitations on national sovereignty. The long-term members have taken upon themselves the right to choose the candidate nations, stipulate the pre-accession criteria, screen their progress, set the probationary period and, effectively, take charge of the domestic affairs of over fifteen nations. Needless to say, the enlarged acquis communitaire (the EU’s extensive corpus of laws and policies) was not evolved in discussion with the central and eastern European countries (CEECs), who have been told that, however unrealistic the EU’s demands, non-adoption will result in non-admission.28 The western European tutelage of the accession and candidate countries is illustrated by the Europe Agreements, which require the CEECs to open their economies in full to Western European market forces. The Single Market Programme, which regulates continental trade via an integrated market economy, demands the removal of all barriers to the movement of capital, services, goods and persons, as well as the privatisation of industry, the liberalisation of prices and the development of regional specialisation in key areas of production. An example of the EU’s economic interventionism is the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), an austere fiscal framework which requires all member countries to pursue a balanced or surplus budget. Although the terms of the Pact have altered in the interim, the Amsterdam Treaty (1998) determined that budgetary behaviour would be closely supervised and that – with exemptions for any annual decrease in output of more than 2 per cent – penalties would be imposed for excessive deficits. If negligence was shown in tackling deficit, there had even been provision for financial sanctions. For the transitional economies, under the constant surveillance of EU bodies, the punitive nature of the SGP has not only mitigated against borrowing (for the kind of investment in transport, education and health integral to economic growth) but has also been found to encourage cuts in public spending on essential areas of infrastructure. There are many other examples of the CEECs’ loss of independent decision-making. The stabilisation of inflation and exchange rates necessary for the region’s mandatory entry into the European Monetary Union, and for its economic convergence with other EU members, is both controlled and monitored by the executive body of the EU, the European Commission, as is the package of educational and training schemes

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that comprise the Labour Market Programme, which aims to regulate employment and develop an entrepreneurial spirit. Speaking of the pressure for compliance placed on the region, a Czech diplomat once exclaimed, ‘[w]hat can we do? If we want to become members of the Union, we have to accept what is decided’.29 As the SGP illustrates, many of the accession mechanisms may look reasonable on paper, but have proved disastrous in practice. Although it is difficult to tell how the CEECs might have progressed without external interference, it is certainly possible to itemise some of the negative effects of that interference. In the early 1990s, the high growth rates that were expected from the ‘shock therapy’ applied to the region failed to materialise, with a number of countries plagued by unemployment, falls in output levels, high inflation rates and, in places, the social unrest consequent on recession, crippling price adjustments and the influx of western goods that people could barely afford.30 The burgeoning unemployment figures remain an on-going source of instability. The EU’s insistence on regional specialisation means that certain industries will be phased out in each nation, resulting in an undermining of the labour market and an increased reliance on imports. By 2004, 50 per cent of these were already coming from the long-term EU members, who now represent the major source of trade for the accession nations, weakening their links to other markets. There are also signs that the free flow of labour will result in the more educated and skilled workers migrating to the ‘core’ nations, leaving the low-rent, low-wage ‘periphery’ for unskilled industries. In order to ease the transition to a market economy, longterm investment in the region is urgently needed, although this has proved disappointing. As an example, the 22 billion euros provided in grants and loans to the Balkans by the EU and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development during the 1990s, and the $16 billion provided by the United States, compares unfavourably to the financial assistance given to Greece and Yugoslavia alone after the Second World War, particularly as much of the recent money has gone on political and economic reform.31 Any direct investment has also tended to go to the Visegrad countries rather than those of southeast Europe, such as Romania and Bulgaria, whose economic progress towards membership, already obstructed during the 1990s by the embargo on Danube trade and the war in neighbouring Yugoslavia, is also hampered by shortfalls in structural aid. What would have greatly

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assisted these economies in the absence of significant investment was an ability to compete for EU markets in those commodities in which the region is rich. Unfortunately, throughout much of the 1990s, the EU pursued protectionist measures against almost 50 per cent of its industrial products and placed strict tariffs and quotas on its agrarian produce, a particularly damaging limitation on a region whose climate and soil are advantageous for an agricultural industry in which 25 per cent of the workforce is employed (the consequent price gaps between member and accession nations are as high as 40 to 50 percent in both the crop and livestock sectors).32 As Christopher Preston pointed out in 1997, ‘[t]he limitations imposed on “sensitive” agricultural products, steel, coal and textiles are precisely those in which the CEECs have a competitive advantage, and on which international trade theory suggests export-led growth should be based.’33 Yet the West’s anxiety about the integration of central and eastern Europe is not primarily economic. For governments and populations alike, the real fear is of a mass of immigrants from the CEECs and beyond in search of refuge from poverty and crisis. The governments of the long-term member states, aiming to reduce public alarm, have devised a wide-ranging Justice and Home Affairs package with the intention of controlling crime, terrorism and immigration (three issues which, after 9/11, are perceived to be inextricably linked). The Schengen Convention, which ostensibly champions the free movement of peoples within the European Union through the abolition of identity checks at the internal borders, simultaneously (and paradoxically) advocates the tightening up of external border mechanisms, making free movement into integrated Europe even more difficult. Once again, the measure entails a range of directives that no previous EU enlargement has required. The accession nations, situated along Europe’s eastern rim, are required to implement tougher immigration controls, prohibit cross-border trade, improve policing in frontier zones and obstruct the influx of people seeking asylum: in short, to recast themselves as a kind of buffer-zone for ‘fortress Europe’. The restrictions on asylum, including the asylum seeker’s need for correct visa documents (hardly likely when fleeing crisis) and the border officials’ ability to automatically return them to the source countries, has provoked criticism from the UNHCR and the Helsinki Committee for their open contravention of human rights. Yet this is of little concern to a European Union that is desperate to reduce the

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pressure of immigration on member states, and that will block or delay the membership of any candidate nation that fails to implement the Schengen criteria. As Alina Mungiu-Pippidi has commented, ‘there is no room for negotiation here, with East European countries becoming passive consumers of asylum and border policies set by the EU.’34 The installation of a ‘hard border’ around Europe most obviously disadvantages those countries that are ostracised to the east (Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Ukraine) and to the south-east (Serbia, Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina). Degraded in the European hierarchy, excluded from economic development and denied easy cross-border trade with accession states, their obligation to seek membership and its privileges becomes all the more pressing. But the accession states have their own causes for concern. To begin with, the European Union has decided that, with the history of corruption in their police forces and lack of independence in their judiciaries, the CEECs cannot be left to themselves to supervise these sensitive borderlands, but require substantial assistance. This has involved funding, equipment and technology, as well as liaison officers and police attachés from France, Germany and the UK, who are being stationed in particular candidate countries to train and advise the local forces.35 As Didier Bigo points out, the concept of European-wide policing means in practice western European states carving out colonial-style ‘spheres of influence’ that reduce the CEECs’ sovereign right to control their own institutions (their governments commenting, pointedly, on ‘the imbalance between the number of EU police officers on their territory and the number of their own representatives […] invited to EU countries’36). At the same time, the accession states have not found that freedom of movement has been greatly improved. The creation of a hard border to the east of the old ‘iron curtain’ has not only increased economic hardship in the frontier regions, but also restricted the cross-border movement of those ethnicities who straddle frontiers, a stricture on interchange that involves millions of people across central and eastern Europe (between the Hungarians in Hungary and Serbia, for example, or the Romanians in Romania and Moldova). Nor is the EU enthusiastic about free movement westwards. The candidate states might have been obliged to implement the Schengen agreement from the moment that their applications were accepted, but the circulation of their citizens around the opportunity-rich West (to take up undesirable low-class jobs) will

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be phased in gradually. The European Commission originally established a restriction on labour movement of up to seven years after accession takes place, dependent on the Commission’s assessment of the labour needs within the long-standing member states.37 Throughout the 1990s, the westward migration of south-east Europeans was also curtailed by the humiliating and expensive process of visa application and by the necessity for letters of invitation from citizens of the country of destination; soon, they were also being asked for visas for such first-wave aspirant nations as Slovenia, which was once part of an eastern Europe in which populations travelled freely.38 Rather than being ‘taught democracy’ by the West, such people are learning to cope with being second-class citizens denied the basic rights enjoyed by their western counterparts. Commenting on how ‘the legacy of the Cold War divide persists’, Jan Zielonka details the way that many central and eastern Europeans view Schengen ‘as an imposed regime with discriminatory implications […], a symbol of exclusion of the poor and allegedly less civilized European nations by wealthy and arrogantly superior ones.’39 In rhetoric that is usually associated with contemporary US policy in the Middle East, the Schengen Convention is part of the West’s stated ambition to ‘export democracy’ and ‘promote human rights’ throughout the continent. What lies behind such phrases is the need for evidence that accession countries have broken with their communist past and will not relapse into authoritarian practices, a fear accentuated by the gains made by socialist parties in several CEECs during the 1990s. To this end, western Europe has been establishing institutions there that guarantee ‘civil society’ and the rule of law, nurturing and training local NGOs, screening public administrations, promoting an independent judiciary and monitoring human rights. Yet there is no better instance of the West’s current meddling than the attempts to directly supervise political leaderships. During the 1990s, the Albanian ex-communist, Sali Berisha, who had given assurances that Albania would not be pursuing irredentist goals in Kosovo and Macedonia, was championed by the West, receiving military support from the United States and economic and political assistance from Germany, including advice on re-election campaigns from the Konrad Adanauer Institute. In the tainted Albanian election of 1996, both Germany and Italy put pressure on the OSCE to validate the results in order that Berisha retain power. In a similar way, the OSCE was able

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to ban particular parties from running in the Bosnian election of 1996, and American organisations such as the International Republican Institute attempted to manage Romanian elections by promoting antigovernment NGOs, sponsoring ‘independent’ media and training ‘democratic’ parties; as one IRI adviser put it, ‘[w]e taught them what to say, how to say it, and even what to wear when saying it’.40 The United States has installed so many high-ranking advisers in the governmental administrations of the southern Balkans that, in Adam Burgess’s words, ‘countries like Bulgaria and Albania have been virtually run from Washington’.41 In the West’s efforts to export its political structures one catches a glimpse of the embryonic federalism that has emerged in EU thinking, with the groundwork for an integrated supranational organisation already apparent in its rudimentary defence and foreign policies and in the proposed European constitution. On occasion, when south-east Europe has failed to adhere to political directives, international bodies such as NATO and the UN have taken strident measures to ensure compliance. During the military crises in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, EU leaders proved far less qualified to intercede than in the more sedate realms of finance and administration. The incompetence, vacillation and mutual suspicion that marked their response to the wars in the former Yugoslavia finally resulted in the United States assuming responsibility for stabilising Europe’s eastern border, military action becoming a common occurrence in the 1990s. For one commentator, the air of moral crusade that pervaded these ‘humanitarian interventions’ evoked a kind of ‘reworking of the white man’s burden discourse.’42 In Bosnia, this entailed the deployment of peacekeeping forces, of enforced negotiations, of punitive air strikes and, after the Dayton Accord, of the West’s eventual mandate for economic and political reconstruction. Emphasising the country’s status as a western protectorate, Glynne Evans, head of the United Nations Department of the Foreign Office, expressed a ‘desire to construct a great humanitarian empire, policed by British forces under United Nations auspices.’43 In Kosovo, similarly, NATO’s bombardment of the Serbs in 1999, spearheaded by the US, was pursued without approval from the UN Security Council and, after failing either to prevent expulsions or to depose Milošević, was followed up by the imposition of an international administration of some 50,000 NATO troops. James

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Mayall echoes the sentiment of many commentators when describing Bosnia and Kosovo as ‘trusteeships in all but name’,44 a situation that has pertained to a lesser extent in Macedonia and Albania. Even Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, countries not directly involved in the ex-Yugoslav conflicts, found their air-space appropriated and their territories used for military bases (it was due to their compliance during the Kosovo crisis that, in December 1999, Romania and Bulgaria were invited to open EU accession negotiations). Inevitably, Serbia has been especially exposed to the West’s ‘civilising mission’. Between the end of the war in Bosnia and the fall of Milošević, the EU froze government funds, prohibited foreign investment, backed the bombing of non-military targets and imposed both limited sanctions and flight bans from member states to Serbia.45 The Rambouillet Agreement, which proposed the occupation of the country prior to the bombardment, went so far as to demand that ‘NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] including associated airspace and territorial waters’, a provision that entailed ‘the right of bivouac, manoeuvre, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations.’46 The document was a powerful articulation of the West’s sense of itself as an interventionist power and of the Balkans as a place for intervention. I would not argue that, as the death toll rose in the former Yugoslavia, intervention did not become necessary. In fact, some form of disinterested arbitration, shorn of economic and political ambition, was exactly what was required to prevent the continuation of Serbian and Croatian atrocities in Bosnia, and should have been pursued far more swiftly than it was.47 For the Cambridge historian Brendon Simms, the determination of John Major’s conservative government between 1991 and 1995 to resist any military strategy that might have blocked the Serbian advance in Bosnia signalled Britain’s ‘unfinest hour since 1938’.48 Headed by Douglas Hurd, the foreign office argued vociferously against any proposal on the part of the international community either to intervene militarily or to lift the UN arms embargo on the ‘warring factions’, an embargo which critically disadvantaged the Bosnian Muslims who had no access to crossborder trade. As Simms argues, Britain’s decision to supply troops for the UN peacekeeping force was also fortuitous, as it ‘provided

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Whitehall with a figleaf to conceal its politico-military unwillingness to confront Bosnian Serb aggression’.49 Hurd’s stated reason for his obstructionism was the notorious claim that lifting the embargo would ‘remove any incentive from the Bosnian Muslims to go to the negotiating table’ and would create a ‘level killing field’;50 a supply of armaments, in other words, would enable the victims of genocide to resist the perpetrators of that genocide, who up until that point had presumably been enjoying an ‘uneven killing field’.51 At the same time, British political, military and diplomatic leaders spent three and a half years derogating the entire region via spurious clichés about ‘civil wars’ and ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’, all of which suggested a moral equivalence between victim and aggressor. In one short story, Hurd was typical in evoking Bosnia not as ‘a war of right against wrong’ but as ‘a mess in which politicians and generals in all three communities destroyed their own country’.52 In the same vein, the cochairman of a UN-EU mediation team, Dr David Owen, blamed events on ‘a culture of violence within a crossroads civilisation’, and the British commanders Major Vaughan Kent-Payne and General Michael Rose viewed Serbs, Croats and Muslims as ‘savages’ equally prone to ‘a brutality that bordered on the bestial’.53 The discourse of equal culpability was so intense in governmental circles, and the arguments against non-intervention so persistent, that many have supposed that Britain’s real strategy for ensuring peace in the Balkans was to expedite Serbian and Croatian victory. Interestingly, subsequent reviews of the actions of the international community in Bosnia have been censorious in the extreme. In a report into the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, Kofi Annan, the General Secretary of the UN, condemned the ‘prism of “amoral equivalency”’ used to vindicate the West’s non-action and berated its reliance on ineffectual negotiations which ‘amounted to appeasement’, while the International War Crimes Tribunal was unequivocal in calling Milošević and the Bosnian Serb leaders to account for genocide and crimes against humanity.54 By this time, tragically, almost 200,000 people had died in Croatia and Bosnia, up to 250,000 people had fled abroad and almost a million had lost their homes.55 Nevertheless, what I would contend is that the form of direct intervention that has occurred in the Balkans is part and parcel of the EU’s broader project of gaining dominion over its eastern border, just as British policy towards the Ottoman Empire had intended dominion

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in the nineteenth century. The historical continuum becomes even clearer when considering the kind of culturalist racism that has vindicated the last fifteen years of EU enlargement. As typified by Kent-Payne and Rose’s comments above, the West’s authority to evaluate and master the political conditions of central and eastern Europe is predicated on a symbolic ordering of the continent that positions the region at a lower level on the evolutionary scale. Behind the images of congenital violence, corruption, poverty and ethnic unrest that one finds in contemporary cultural production, lies the implicit argument that the region cannot progress by itself, but requires external guidance to avoid slipping into the mistakes of the past. The point is often made explicitly in western travel writing and journalism. Robert Carver, pondering Albania’s apparently endless cycles of unrest, finds the answer in a ‘European-enforced order and industry’, and in a reinvigoration of ‘the centres of ultimate power’ that pertained in ‘the old colonial days’.56 Robert Kaplan, an American author whose depiction of the Balkans in Balkan Ghosts (1993) is one of the most notorious examples of post-Cold War balkanism, confidently asserts that ‘[o]nly western imperialism – though few will like calling it that – can now unite the European continent and save the Balkans from chaos’.57 In the early 1990s, the Canadian liberal intellectual, Michael Ignatieff, was finding a direct link between south-east European disorder and the absence of imperial restraint. Noting that the transition from communism was achieved without the Great Power regulation that marked Versailles in 1919 or Yalta in 1945, he says of the Balkans, Not surprisingly, their nation states are collapsing, as in Somalia and in many other nations of Africa. In crucial zones of the world, once heavily policed by empire – notably the Balkans – populations find themselves without an imperial arbiter to appeal to. Small wonder then, that, unrestrained by stronger hands, they have set upon each other for that final settling of scores so long deferred by the presence of empire.58

What one wonders about here are Ignatieff’s liberal credentials. One may be equally surprised to find, in the pages of the Guardian, Julian Borger suggesting that a ‘benign colonial regime’ was necessary for democratic development in Bosnia, and his colleague, Martin Woollacott, advocating ‘an open ended occupation’.59 The similarities

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to nineteenth-century prescriptions for the region – a ‘European commission’, ‘efficient European control’ – bring to mind the anxious debates that formed the basis of the Eastern Question. Indeed, one may argue that it is only after the decline of the Soviet Bloc, which mirrored the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent concerns about policing eastern Europe in the wake of imperial dissolution, that Great Power supremacy finally came to pass. It is certainly the case that continental unity has been as difficult to achieve over the last twenty years as it was during the nineteenth century. With Russia and western Europe at loggerheads over Bosnia and Kosovo, Britain expressing suspicion about French pretensions to continental leadership and a number of western governments fearful about a strong, reunified Germany, it appears that ‘[t]he echoes of the states and empires of old Europe are once again clearly perceptible among the continent’s political elites.’60 Although not all travel writers have been as openly supportive of western intervention as Ignatieff and Kaplan, their common reliance on the denigratory clichés of nineteenth-century balkanism still advances, by insinuation, a very nineteenth-century form of territorial control. During the 1990s, calls for the extension of the UN mandate in south-east Europe were so common in cultural and political discourse that a travelogue critical of the region could hardly escape complicity. This is even the case in commentaries that expressed reservations with western involvement. In After Yugoslavia (2001), Zoë Brân’s research into the condition of post-war Bosnia involves contact with so many international organisations – ‘OHR, SFOR, UN, UNHCR, UNPROFOR, OSCE, ICTY, PHR’61 – that she has little doubt about Bosnia’s real masters. ‘The list of acronyms in my notebook gets longer,’ she writes, ‘as the extent to which this country is directed by outside agencies becomes clearer.62 In 1994, Peter Morgan experiences a similar epiphany when, during his reportage of the war in Bosnia for Channel 4, he stumbles upon a British Army map of the country. Designed for the purposes of UN peacekeeping, the map exchanges native cartography for ‘signs and symbols [either] adapted from Ordnance Survey maps’ or borrowed from weather charts, with ‘thin isobars’ for frontlines and ‘cartoon arrows’ for troop movements. Ignoring its written injunction, ‘FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY’, Morgan decides to examine further this ‘snugly familiar [...] kind of Little England’, although discovers that

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In spite of a note which states that the map ‘“is not to be taken as necessarily representing the views of the UN on boundaries or political status”’, the wide-ranging concealment of native topography is an emphatic enough statement of political mastery. When considering this alternative mapping of the region, and its indication of a very different perspective on local realities, it is no surprise to find misunderstanding prevailing between ‘internationals’ and indigenous populations. When Brendan O’Shea, an EC Monitor in the former Yugoslavia, remarks that ‘no one really knew what was going on’,64 he captures the sentiments of many other personnel on the ground. Colonel Bob Stewart, a UN commander in Bosnia, senses on the faces of local leaders ‘a certain look [...] that seemed to say, ‘“You simply don’t understand”’, Colonel Mark Cook, a commander in the United Nations Protection Force in Croatia, laments his difficulties when ‘trying to communicate with the locals’, and John Haggerty, a soldier in the British UN contingent, gets no further than ‘learn[ing] some useful Serbo-Croat phrases from one of those “Teach Yourself” books’.65 David Owen admits that, ‘so bad is [his] ear for pronunciation’, it took him ‘a memorable five days’ to learn how to say ‘Herzegovina’.66 In the light of this, it is perhaps inevitable that the proposed solution for the war drawn up by Owen and his conegotiator Cyrus Vance was an unmitigated disaster. The VanceOwen Peace Plan (VOPP) of 1993 aimed to end ethnic conflict by dividing Bosnia into a number of cantons each governed and legislated by the dominant ethnic group. For local military leaders and politicians surveying draft maps of the cantonisation, the plan appeared either to grant territory their particular faction did not possess or else withhold territory which it did. The outcome was predictable: the Serbs stepped up the ethnic cleansing of their proposed cantons and the Croats, sensing ‘a “green light” from Geneva’, terminated their military alliance with the Bosnian Muslims and ‘scrambled to secure and extend the territory awarded to them

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under the VOPP.’67 The fact that British public opinion remained supportive of western activities in the former Yugoslavia, however incompetent and imperious, can only be explained by the weight of denigratory images in circulation. There is no doubt that the Balkan countries have made positive advances in a number of areas since the end of the Cold War. The structural funds that have been made available to less developed regions, the advancement of equal opportunities and the distinct, albeit gradual, rise of productivity have had their benefits.68 Nevertheless, one may wish that progress could have been achieved without the peremptory demands of a European Union whose intention, after all, has been to protect the economic and political dominance of long-term members, not yield that dominance to impoverished newcomers. One may also wish that alternative political systems could have been posited and tested after the upheavals of the 1989-91 period. This is not only for the sake of the central and eastern European nations, for whom aggressive, market-led capitalism has hardly helped the transition from centralised economies, but also for western mass publics that are increasingly sceptical of the decision-making processes of European-wide institutions even more politically remote than national governments. Yet there has been little chance of a ‘third way’ in the face of the West’s absolute sense of political selfrighteousness. The so-called ‘return to Europe’ of the CEECs is clearly an inauthentic process when the right to award or deny European citizenship is monopolised by western nations who are simultaneously obstructing the exchange of ideas and influences that would occur across a more egalitarian continent. Without doubt, the last one hundred years of eastern European history offer profound insights into the forces that have shaped the whole of modern Europe. Étienne Balibar, speaking in October 1999, called for Europe to ‘recognize in the Balkan situation not a […] a pathological “aftereffect” of underdevelopment or of communism, but rather an image and effect of its own history’, one that it should use ‘to put itself into question and transform itself.’69 Sadly, the opportunity to learn from eastern Europe’s alternative experience of the twentieth century, and to begin a serious questioning of ‘what is Europe and how European is it’,70 has been neglected.

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NOTES 1

White, ‘The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity’, in Bo Stråth, ed., Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2000), p. 67. 2 Burgess, Divided Europe: The New Domination of the East (London: Pluto Press, 1997), pp. 107, 8. 3 Tozer, Researches, I, 196; Allen Upward, The East End of Europe: The Report of an Unofficial Mission to the European Provinces of Turkey on the Eve of the Revolution (London: John Murray, 1908), p. 279; Knight, Albania, p. 36. 4 Maclean, Stalin’s Nose, p. 186; Winchester, Fracture Zone, p. 114; Thurnham, Sophie’s Journey, p. 8; Goodwin, On Foot to the Golden Horn, p. 259; Jan Morris, Fifty Years of Europe: An Album, new edn (1997; London: Penguin, 1998), p. 155. 5 K.E. Fleming understates Western imperialism in the Balkans and underestimates the way that balkanism manages both to vindicate imperial interference and to blame the ‘natives’ if interference goes wrong: see Fleming, ‘Orientalism’, pp. 1220-4. 6 Richard Millman, Britain and the Eastern Question 1875-1878 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 105. 7 The major articles of the treaty are set out in M.S. Anderson, ed., The Great Powers and the Near East 1774-1923 (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), pp. 108-12. 8 Significantly, the Berlin Congress either banned or silenced representatives of the aspirant Balkan nations. ‘At Potsdam there are mosquitoes’, wrote the head of the British delegation, ‘here there are minor powers […]. I don’t know which is worse’ (Lord Salisbury, quoted in M.S. Anderson, The Eastern Question 1774-1923: A Study in International Relations, new edn (1966; London: Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press, 1972), p. 211). 9 See Stavrianos, Balkans since 1453, pp. 227, 321. 10 Ibid., p. 419. 11 Statistics from Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, Vol. 2: Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 23; Robin Okey, Eastern Europe 1740-1985: Feudalism to Communism, new edn (1982; London and New York: Routledge, 1986), p. 117. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many British travel writers used their texts to encourage trade with and emigration to the Balkans. For examples of the latter, see R.H.R., Rambles in Istria, pp. 37-9; St Clair and Brophy, Residence in Bulgaria, pp. 192-204; Herbert Vivian, The Servian Tragedy: With Some Impressions of Macedonia (London: Grant Richards, 1904), p. 243; Herbert Vivian, Servia: The Poor Man’s Paradise (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897), p. 147; and de Windt, Through Savage Europe, pp. 188-9. 12 St Clair and Brophy, Residence in Bulgaria, pp. 405, 313. 13 Ibid., pp. 408, 409, vii. Likewise, seeking ‘a satisfactory settlement of the Eastern Question’, Henry Fanshawe Tozer believes that independence might one day come, but that for the present the ‘Slavonic races [are] willing to accept permanently the suzerainty of the Porte’ (Tozer, Researches, I, 393). 14 Best, Excursions in Albania, pp. 142-3. 15 Stillman, Herzegovina and the Late Uprising: The Causes of the Latter and the Remedies (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1877), pp. 155-6. 16 Evans, Illyrian Letters, p. 83. 17 Dunkin, Land of the Bora, p. 192.

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Fraser, Pictures from the Balkans, pp. 15-16. Upward, East End of Europe, p. 45; William le Queux, An Observer in the Near East (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), p. 291. 20 Stevan K. Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans 1804-1945 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), p. 271. See also Edgar Hösch, The Balkans: A Short History from Greek Times to the Present Day, trans. by Tania Alexander (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 162-3. 21 In what John Lukacs terms a ‘sphere of interest agreement’, Churchill and Stalin resolved that the Soviet Union would have primary control of Bulgaria and Romania, western Europe would have full control of Greece, and Yugoslavia would be divided equally between the two (Lukacs, The Great Powers and Eastern Europe (New York: American Book Company, 1953), p. 589). 22 The term ‘eastern’, with all its cultural, rather than geographical, implications, has also come to incorporate the features of what is perceived as the communist mentality: that is, suspicion, paranoia, secretiveness, a lack of individuality and a bent towards authoritarianism and censorship. 23 Ali M. El-Agraa, ‘A History of European Integration and Evolution of the EU’, in El-Agraa, ed., The European Union: Economics and Policies, 7th edn (1980; Harlow: Prentice Hall/Financial Times, 2004), p. 25. 24 In the same period, Turkey, Croatia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia began accession negotiations, and European Partnerships were set up with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the erstwhile Serbia and Montenegro. 25 Hans van den Broek epitomises the western-centric view of the membership criteria, saying that the EU seeks evidence that candidate nations ‘are becoming “normal” European countries’; that is, countries that ‘share the fundamental values on which our own institutions are founded’ (van den Broek, ‘Preparing for the Enlargement of the European Union’, in William Nicoll and Richard Schoenberg, eds, Europe Beyond 2000: The Enlargement of the European Union towards the East (London: Whurr Publishers, 1998), p. 4). 26 Jan Zielonka, ‘Introduction: Boundary Making by the European Union’, in Zielonka, ed., Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 8. 27 For instance, previous accession states have not had to sign up to the ‘Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities’ (1995) – which was specifically designed for central and eastern Europe – despite the fact that racism and ethnic hostility are burgeoning in these countries and elsewhere in the West. As an example in kind, the EU seems incapable of understanding the contradiction inherent in condemning the treatment of Roma in eastern Europe while generally denying them asylum in western countries. 28 See Peter A. Poole, Europe Unites: The EU’s Eastern Enlargement (Westport and London: Praeger, 2003), p. 9. 29 Václav Kuklik, quoted in Charlotte Bretherton, ‘Security Issues in the Wider Europe: The Role of EU-CEEC Relations’, in Mike Mannin, ed., Pushing Back the Boundaries: The European Union and Central and Eastern Europe (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 200. 30 See Ray Barrell, Dawn Holland and Olga Pomerantz, Integration, Accession and Expansion (London: National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2004), p. 2. 19

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31 John Lampe, Balkans into Southeastern Europe: A Century of War and Transition (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 290-2. Much of the direct investment is aimed at companies producing goods for the local market which have negligible competition (with western European investors even insisting upon tariff protection in order to safeguard their investment). 32 While tariffs continue to protect the western market from certain eastern European produce (such as fruits and vegetables), the Common Agricultural Policy also demands a modernisation of production and restructuring of management, which will drive up prices. Naturally, western investors have the capital to buy up the best farmland, threatening small, semi-subsistence farms, just as they have the capital to take over the most promising industries. 33 Preston, Enlargement and Integration in the European Union (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 199. See also Derek H. Aldcroft and Steven Morewood, Economic Change in Eastern Europe since 1918 (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995), pp. 219-20. 34 Mungiu-Pippidi, ‘Facing the “Desert of Tartars”: The Eastern Border of Europe’, in Zielonka, ed., Europe Unbound, p. 67. This is despite the fact that external border controls are hardly likely to restrict smuggling, human trafficking or terrorism (see ibid., p. 59). 35 In 1999, the European Police College was established for training constabularies in central and eastern Europe, and the Orwellian-sounding Eurojust was created for assisting central and eastern European nations in areas of law enforcement and judicial practice. 36 Bigo, ‘Border Regimes, Police Cooperation and Security in an Enlarged European Union’, in Zielonka, ed., Europe Unbound, p. 221. As he goes on to ask, ‘[w]ould we accept having our own police forces inspected by foreign governments and forces?’ (ibid., p. 231). 37 See, Barrell, et al, Integration, Accession and Expansion, pp. 74-5. At the time of writing, the unexpected number of Polish immigrants that have arrived in Britain since 2004 is encouraging the British government to restrict the rights of Romanians and Bulgarians to work in the UK after their nations joined the EU (see Will Woodward, ‘Romanians and Bulgarians Face Immigration Curbs’, Guardian, 21 August 2006, p. 10). 38 This is not to mention the use of military force to prevent unwanted migration: both Austria and Italy deployed troops during the 1990s to deter Romanian gypsies and Albanians respectively (see Burgess, Divided Europe, p. 57). 39 Zielonka, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-2. 40 Quoted in Burgess, Divided Europe, p. 109. 41 Ibid., p. 168. 42 Bo Stråth, ‘Multiple Europes: Integration, Identity and Demarcation of the Other’, in Stråth, ed., Europe and the Other, p. 419. As Philip Towle asks: ‘what is peacekeeping […] but imperialism with a multinational and humanitarian face?’ (quoted in Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, new edn (2001; London: Penguin, 2002), p. 238). 43 Evans, paraphrased in Simms, Unfinest Hour, p. 244.

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44 James Mayall, ‘The Concept of Humanitarian Intervention Revisited’, in Mary Buckley and Sally N. Cummings, eds, Kosovo: Perceptions of War and Its Aftermath (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 277. 45 See Nicholas Moussis, Access to European Union: Law, Economics, Policies, 11th edn (1991; Rixensart: European Study Service, 2002), p. 518. 46 Quoted in Noam Chomsky, ‘Bombing and Human Rights: Behind the Rhetoric’, The Spokesperson, Vol. 65 (1999), p. 17. 47 The embattled population of central Bosnia had to wait three and a half years before the West intervened. At the same time, despite Article 51 of the UN Charter granting member states an inherent right to self-defence, the West placed an arms embargo against the Bosnian government that often made self-defence impossible. See Stjepan G. Meštrović, The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 39, and James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (London: Hurst, 1997), p. 90. 48 Simms, Unfinest Hour, p. 2. 49 Ibid., p. 222. 50 Hurd, quoted in ibid., pp. 80, 86. 51 See Mark Almond, Europe’s Backyard War: The War in the Balkansm, new edn (1994; London: Mandarin, 1994), p. 321. 52 Hurd, ‘Warrior’, in Hurd, Ten Minutes to Turn the Devil (London: Little, Brown and Co., 145. 53 Owen, Balkan Odyssey, new edn (1995; London: Indigo, 1996), p. 3; Rose, Fighting for Peace: Bosnia 1994 (London: Harvill Press, 1998), p. 72; Kent-Payne, Bosnia Warriors: Living on the Front Line (London: Robert Hale, 1998), p. 353. 54 Simms, Unfinest Hour, p. 1. 55 R.J. Crampton, The Balkans since the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002), p. 268. 56 Carver, Accursed Mountains, pp. 133, 169. 57 Kaplan, quoted in Krasteva, ‘Western Writing and the (Re) Construction of the Balkans’, pp. 105-6. 58 Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, new edn (1993; London: Vintage, 1994), p. 8. 59 Borger and Woollacott, quoted in Burgess, Divided Europe, p. 111. 60 Lutz Niethammer, ‘A European Identity?’, in Stråth, ed., Europe and the Other, p. 91. 61 Brân, After Yugoslavia (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 2001), p. 201. 62 Ibid., p. 201. 63 Morgan, A Barrel of Stones: In Search of Serbia (Aberystwyth: Planet, 1997), p. 68. 64 O’Shea, Crisis at Bihac: Bosnia’s Bloody Battlefield (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), p. 122. 65 Stewart, Broken Lives, p. 320; Cook, Promise of Hope (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), p. 57; Haggerty, Letters from a Nobody (London: Minerva, 1995), p. 36. 66 Owen, Balkan Odyssey, p. 25. 67 Simms, Unfinest Hour, p. 143. 68 Bartlomiej Kaminski reviews these benefits in Kaminski, ‘The Europe Agreements and Transition: Unique Returns from Integrating into the European Union’, in Sorin

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Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds, Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2000), pp. 306-31. 69 Balibar, We, The People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. by James Swenson (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 6. 70 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Unpacking the West: How European is Europe?’, in Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood, eds, Racism, Modernity and Identity: On the Western Front (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 129.

Chapter 5: An Inflexible Exile In late 1916, as the German army lay siege to Bucharest, Queen Marie of Romania hastily gathered her entourage and decamped to the Moldavian town of Iaşi. There was little chance of refuge even here: Romania’s eastern provinces were beset by starvation and disease, and with the enemy advancing from the west, and her Russian ally succumbing to revolution, the prospect of defeat and humiliation became a daily anxiety. It would seem a wretched position for this English princess, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, to find herself in. After a sheltered childhood in England, one imagines her union with Crown Prince Ferdinand in 1893 and exile from the royal circles of the West had already caused severe misgivings about the marital arrangements of European dynasties. For the signs of self-pity, however, one searches her war memoirs in vain. Marie’s nostalgia for England had gradually lessened, her writings tell us, giving way to a devotion to Romania long before the years in Iaşi had begun. In awe of its cultural traditions, she had cast off the constraints of her station and gender, dressing in native costume, trekking alone across isolated country, fraternising with troops in front-line trenches and dining with peasants in impoverished villages. So great was her new affinity that when she wrote from Iaşi of the ‘tears, sorrow and regret’ of being ‘banished’, and of her ‘fearful yearning for the home I had lost’,1 it is not England to which she refers. The memoirs dwell on a separation from central Romania that had been, for her, a far more grievous exile. Of course, there is no reason for us to trust Marie’s account. The patterns of self-representation that one finds in autobiographical writing are hardly an accurate account of lived experience, and are more dependable as a record of the ideal selfhood that an author wishes to circulate. Yet Queen Marie’s alleged integration into an adopted homeland offers some indication of the flexible, hybrid possibilities of exilic identity. In the crossing of national borders, a cultural and psychic dislocation is produced that can entail profound

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consequence for the encultured self. Whether one is an exile, expatriate or traveller, the loosening of the bonds of cultural practice, with its vertiginous sense of loss and dissolution, occasions both a reformulation of personal identity and an accompanying opportunity for social transgression. The experience is similar to what Frances Bartkowski calls ‘the traveler’s sublime’, a little death to the self in which the sudden advent of release ‘seems to seduce new selves into being’.2 Such a response to estrangement has clear import for those supposedly hegemonic discourses that constituted the former selfhood. Edward Said has developed in his work a notion of the border subject, a position of non-allegiance, or in-betweenness, where physical departure from home reconfigures one’s relationship to power and authority. Writing with perhaps his own border crossing into the West in mind, Said argues that by retaining an autonomy from the home and host culture, and by exchanging cultural ‘dogma and orthodoxy’ for ‘the exile’s detachment’, identification can be eased from the coercive grasp of collective subjectivity.3 ‘Exiles cross borders,’ he believes, and in so doing ‘break barriers of thought and experience’.4 Drawing on Said’s work, Abdul JanMohamed repositions the border subject as one less detached from social mores but still finds potential for liberation. Through allowing themselves to feel ‘“at home” in both cultures’, exiles are ‘able to combine elements of two cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and experiences’, reinventing themselves in a way ‘that resists stability and the coercive tendencies of fixed, indigenous identities’.5 It is an area upon which critics like Homi Bhabha and Anthony Coulson have expanded, opening up a postcolonial understanding of exile as a contrapuntal or interstitial space invested with social and intellectual potential.6 Alongside such achievements, however, there lies another, more inflexible response to displacement, one which this chapter aims to explore through a survey of British expatriate memoirs. The theoretical focus on estrangement-as-release can elide the fact that it is the very space of exile – either enforced or self-imposed – where the practices binding the self have frequently gained formulation. The process I have in mind is exemplified by that coalition of myth and convention we term ‘Englishness’, to be understood here as modes of personal subjectivity and behavioural custom shared with the national group.7 The various characteristics of English identity – common sense, decency, forbearance, industriousness – are not transcendental

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categories, emerging from some deep internal essence, but articles of faith which derive their vigour and relevance from the same terrifying presence of otherness that supposedly delivered Marie into liberation. In this alternative exile, the displaced Englishman or Englishwoman, alienated from home, adrift amongst alien mores, confronted with the imminent perils of insignificance and vacuity, revitalises the customary channels of behaviour to generate stability and assurance. The result is a solidification of the original self: ‘a petrified subject’, as Syed Manzurul Islam terms it, whose rigid construction of personal boundaries ‘only returns the self to the self and most obstinately prevents any [...] crossing of the line’.8 The point can be illustrated by the era of British colonisation, when transgression and hybridity gained little foothold amongst the army of soldiers, settlers and administrators, whose contribution to the tremendous processes of global expansion necessarily entailed staunch resistance to disorientation and doubt. During their ‘colonial exile’, to borrow Patrick Brantlinger’s term, the practices that had trained imperialists to be ‘polite, unexcitable, reserved [...], steadfast and trustworthy’, not to mention ‘class-bound, hidebound and incapable of expressing [...] emotions’, worked to consolidate personal identity, while also serving the more exacting requirements of territorial appropriation and national power.9 In exploring the nature of this inflexible exile, my aim is to address the question of how, when faced with the apparently overwhelming challenge of alterity, the British expatriate is able to avoid the anxieties and enforced adaptations which have commonly defined the contrary migration into western metropolitan societies.10 In the context of the Balkans, the memoirs of consuls, militarists, engineers and surveyors, often driven into the region by financial or professional necessity, illustrate via their scripted responses to crosscultural encounter a level of intractability equivalent to that of compatriots employed in colonised territories. The procedure is integral to a wider pattern of autobiographical construction whose study is essential for understanding the particular forms that balkanist representation has taken. As with any cross-cultural discourse, balkanism is a binaristic framework of diction, imagery and evaluation predicated on the strict opposition between the domestic and foreign culture. The origin of the discourse, I would argue, is located not in the material realities of the foreign object, if such realities can ever be

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ascertained, but in the ideological presumptions of the domestic subject, who has borne primary responsibility for the discourse’s formulation and transmission over time. The specific motifs governing our understanding of south-east Europe have emerged both from the collective identity of the British nation as a whole – its wealth, modernity, democracy – and from the personal self-image of individual Britons. Eager to establish themselves as civil, moral and rational, and keen to set off those qualities for their readerships, travellers and expatriates have used negative images of the indigenous other as a gauge of self-worth. The strategy mirrors the classic narrative structure of imperial fiction in which the native threat is ‘placed in the text as a foil to the white man’ and the ‘white man’s’ victory over that threat evinces an ‘idealised vessel [...] preserving all that is valued and worthwhile’.11 With the ethnocentrism of expatriates in the Balkans being based on exactly the same collective identity as that of British imperialists, their evocation of cultural difference can be as profound and their behavioural models as inflexible.12 By studying a range of their memoirs, I hope to indicate the persistence of five dominant practices and beliefs which, while not necessarily complex in themselves, combine to form the British expatriates’ intricate and highly resilient pattern of self-preservation. By focusing again on travel writings from the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, the two major periods of British mastery over the region, I also aim to tease out the characteristics of Englishness which have helped to formulate the British concept of the Balkans. The first strategy of self-preservation is the elementary attachment of expatriates to the company of co-nationals, a feature James Buzard summarises, neatly, as ‘the clustering tendency of the English’.13 Eschewing the mores of the host culture, the custom has been to gather in social formations of such solidity, practising activities of such national particularity, that it is as if a small piece of England has been wrenched from the homeland and deposited on foreign shores. For example, Patrick O’Brien’s residency in Romania during the 1850s is bearable only through the constant companionship of British consular staff, and Maude Parkinson, later in the century, is consoled during her twenty years in Bucharest by the fact that the British have ‘the largest colony’ there, the author deeming it ‘preferable [...] to be in the midst of my own countrymen’.14 During her sojourns in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, Fanny Blunt is in

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no doubt about ‘the soundness, charm, and delicacy of English society’, and, worrying about being ‘cut off [...] from the civilised world’, always establishes ‘pleasant acquaintances among English people’.15 The creation of a British ‘colony’ was not always straightforward in the Balkan peninsula and required systematic, determined groundwork. For an idea of the mechanisms involved, Robert Graves’s arrival in 1903 for duty at the British consulate in Thessalonka offers a brief introduction. At that time, the town was the administrative centre of Ottoman Macedonia, a multi-ethnic province whose cultural diversity and turbulent clashes between nationalist insurgents and Ottoman troops presented ample scope for those inner upheavals to which strangers are prone. Graves’s response to the daily ‘excitement and confusion’16 has the touch of mastery. After serving his consular apprenticeship in Sofia and Plovdiv, where there was either ‘not much social life’ or ‘no British community’ (pp. 46, 103), one of his first acts as consul-general in Thessalonika is to provide the ‘colony’ of diplomats, missionaries, landowners and pressmen with a timetable of demonstrably English pursuits. ‘These were not at all to be despised’, Graves writes, for the Gulf provided excellent boating and bathing, while across the water first-class wild-fowl shooting was to be found at the mouths of the Vardar and Galliko rivers, and there was good riding ground within easy reach of the city. We found a suitable place for a lawn tennis court near the Consulate, and in his few leisure hours Heard superintended the levelling and laying out of a hard court, and began to look about for a sailing-boat and a couple of ponies. (p. 199)

What is interesting here, over and above Graves’s importation of English sport, is his thorough approach to tackling the business of leisure. Beneath the informality of the prose lies a widespread strategy of territorial marking which, in its scale and resolution, suggests the crucial importance that leisure has for the British. Once Graves and his vice-consul, Beauchamp Heard, have constructed their matrix of ‘pleasant distractions’ it is inevitable that ‘the rather miscellaneous British community’ can cohere through social alienation and political upheaval without any damage to their Englishness (pp. 199, 196). Secluded from indigenous mores, this is British cultural space, a zone of civility and energy where any ‘locals’ who happen to appear – as servants, guests, intruders – themselves become the foreigners.17

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The patterns of play which the British follow in Thessalonika are connected to the second method of retaining Englishness, that of a strict adherence to personal routine. A notable feature of Victorian and Edwardian expatriate texts is the way their evocation of indigenous culture, often the stated raison d’être of textual production, is persistently interrupted by depictions of the small particulars that constitute the authors’ daily lives. Graves’s allusion to regular hunting trips in Bulgaria, Blunt’s recurrent focus on her domestic arrangements in Macedonia and Ardern Hulme-Beaman’s reference to ongoing refurbishment of his quarters during consular service in Romania, are not instances of individual indulgence, but part of an extensive adoption of routines – of washing, preening, exercising, celebrating – that see these expatriates reproducing the codes of the home population.18 For Parkinson, more specifically, regular afternoon gatherings of British residents in Bucharest are not just ‘to have a cup of real English tea’ but also to have a ‘laugh [...] at any little faux pas made by the native handmaiden’.19 No matter how far the Briton has travelled, such passages inform us, the personal itinerary is being formed from the practices of national culture and identity is being maintained in the face of otherness. This usage of routine gained particular urgency for those expatriates cut off from British company. Mary Adelaide Walker, whose brother served as a clergyman in the southern Balkans, is shocked to discover the solitary lives endured by so many British consular staff there. In contrast to the British community in the Greek port of Kavala, which enjoys picnics, horse treks and annual celebrations of the Queen’s birthday, consuls in the Macedonian interior are often stationed in towns where ‘there was not another Englishman’ and where ‘complete isolation from all the privileges of home’ is consequently endured.20 For Walker, this has an inevitable effect on morals: Having scarcely an opportunity of making the acquaintance of Englishwomen, they frequently marry ladies of the country, whose taste and modes of life quite unfit them for subsequently settling in England; their children are generally brought up by their mothers in the Greek or Roman Catholic Church, and are in constant and injurious contact with native servants; so the family quickly becomes ‘Levantine,’ and their children are in danger of losing the healthy standard of English principal and the traditions of home. (p. 15)

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The result of isolation, in short, is miscegenation, which in turn threatens to contaminate the national stock by corrupting the Englishman and defiling his offspring. Stationed in ‘some intolerable hole’ in the Balkans,21 in Edith Durham’s phrase, a British consul cannot be relied upon to be properly ‘British’. As part of Walker’s treatment of the topic, she contrasts this experience to the life of the vice-consul in Kavala, who is married to ‘a very clever, kind-hearted’ British woman (p. 15). Alongside their social activities, the couple follows a healthy schedule of private reading – pursuing ‘an almanac’ or ‘studying a classical dictionary’ – which helps to maintain English domestic routine and to bring ‘perfect refinement [to] the education of the children’ (p. 16). When severed from the company of compatriots, or when overcome by the ‘intense longing for home and country which sometimes seizes these poor exiles’ (p. 160), the consuls’ adherence to personal routine can deter that major bugbear of imperial civilisation, ‘going native’. Perhaps the most effective routine to be followed was that of work. The devotion to labour was a vital tenet of English identity, but also a function for sustaining that identity during the dangerous descent into elsewhere. The reference that Graves makes to Heard’s ‘few leisure hours’, for instance, is more than an idle remark. In a device typical of the Balkan memoir, the author constantly draws the reader’s attention to a respectable pursuit of industry and duty (‘busy time’, ‘busy year’, ‘fully occupied’) which shelter his staff within English practice and further lessen the opportunity for social transgression.22 It is of no small significance that even casual travellers during the nineteenth century appear obsessed with the work ethic. Robert Dunkin’s camping trip in Dalmatia, H.A. Brown’s treks across northern Albania and Edward Lear’s painting tour of Macedonia are presented, not as simple vacationing, but as forms of productive industry. Perhaps the best example from the period is Andrew Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians (1878), depicting a journey around what are now Serbia and Romania. In spite of ‘the true holiday feeling’ that motivates his departure,23 the author’s arrival in the Balkans initiates a gruelling round of early risings and lengthy horse treks, not to mention researches, en route, into the region’s flora and fauna. Should time permit it, then Crosse, a fellow of the British Chemical Society, is not averse to galloping off to inspect the shafts and blowers of any local mineral works. Although also useful for an

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expatriate community, this personal exertion has two particular benefits for the solitary wanderer. Firstly, it can establish one’s character and integrity for a British readership, especially when set against the constructed iniquity of the local populace. Crosse not only directly promotes himself as a ‘restless Englishman’, defined by ‘selfhelp’ and ‘straight good sense’, but also contrasts these characteristics to the delinquency of the southern Romanians (or ‘Wallacks’), who seem predisposed to ‘intolerable delay[s]’ and ‘slovenly ways’ (pp. 164, 67, 299, 8, 164, 200). ‘The peasants in the Hatszeg Valley’, he claims, are all Wallacks, and as lazy a set as can well be imagined; in fact, judging by their homes, they are in a lower condition than those of the Banat. So much is laziness the normal state with these people that I think they must regard hard work as a sort of recreation. Their wants are so limited that there is no inducement to work for gain. [...] If the Wallack could be raised out of the moral swamp of his present existence he might do something, but he must first feel the need of what civilisation has to offer him. (pp. 141-2)

The accusations of racial indolence in the text, when contrasted to Crosse’s strenuous efforts, place him even more firmly on the side of British enterprise and progress. It should be no surprise, however, to find such portraits resorting to dubious empiricism (‘judging by their homes’) and guesswork. As the second benefit of the process, Crosse’s punishing schedule allows scant contact with the people he so confidently denounces, and, apart from dealings with servants and the occasional member of the native ruling classes, the journey is achieved in uninterrupted alienation from indigenous society. It is one of those details which problematises the attempt to distinguish the practices of travellers and expatriates. When W.J. Stillman, in the 1870s, referred to those ‘common people [...] with whom the casual traveller has no intercourse’ he could as easily made reference to the aloofness of long-term residents: J.W. Ozanne’s three years pursuing business in Romania, for example, or Henry Barkley’s twelve years overseeing railway construction in Bulgaria failed to produce any greater intimacy with the host culture.24 It is a short step from the cosseting of the selfhood in work to the observance of strict codes of masculinity, the next method of selfpreservation. Significantly, the English notion of ‘manliness’, that compound of honour, camaraderie, chivalry and courage, was

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undergoing systematic development in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This was partly the result of transformations in Victorian institutional life, particularly in public schools, whose twin emphasis on sports and the classics suggested an educational system in which ‘the core of the curriculum was masculinity’.25 As importantly, territorial expansion abroad was increasing those spheres of activity deemed appropriate for Victorian and Edwardian manhood, offering realms in which ideologies of the gendered subject could be actualised, codified and, via the travel journal, transmitted back to both domestic and exilic populations.26 The etiquette that resulted was far from merely restrictive. The dedication to masculine decorum which the nation expected of male colonials could create a sense of collective belonging and, when performed against the perceived decadence and duplicity of the ‘natives’, a sense of personal triumph. Moreover, imperial masculinity was predicated on an inflexible code of behaviour, a certain manner of regulating the self which, especially for the solitary exile, could stave off that ever-present threat of colonial dissolution. The same male codes pertained in the Balkans. The way that Graves lodges with ‘splendid specimens of young English manhood’, or that Alfred Wright, a volunteer surgeon and soldier at the Serbo-Ottoman War, attempts to ‘maintain [his] reputation as a brave Englishman’, reins in these wandering subjects and preserves them within the wider beliefs and practices of Englishness.27 A more profitable example to pursue is Robert Macfie’s With Gypsies in Bulgaria (1916), in which masculinism appears to save the author from gross transgression. Set during the build-up to the Second Balkan War, the text focuses on Macfie’s attempts to depart Bulgaria after a sojourn on the Black Sea coast, a feat that mobilisation, with its restrictions on civilian movement, seems to have rendered impossible. Undaunted, Macfie learns some words of Romany, dresses in local attire and heads to the Romanian border with a tribe of gypsies. It is difficult to see, at first, how one could gain greater distance from the conventions of Georgian Britain. Yet here the self-regulating codes of English manhood come into effect. Firstly, in contrast to the drunkenness and treachery that Macfie imputes to Bulgarians, the diligence, sobriety and comradeship of his co-travellers indicates that a company not unsuitable for a British male has been chosen. The Roma are not only ‘clean, honest, industrious folk’, he informs his

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readers, but also ‘polite, hospitable, and well provided with the necessaries of their nomad life’.28 At the same time, the author’s presence within the fraternity offers him an opportunity to rehearse his own adherence to masculine decorum, particularly when situated, as the journey is, within a locale of danger and adventure. Lastly, the evocation of his closest Romany associate as ‘bright, manly, and intelligent’, with a beauty comparable to the ‘statues [...] erected at Olympia to commemorate athletes’ (pp. 88, 89), hints at that characteristic bonding of English masculinism which, when combined with a strict detachment from the associate’s petty thievery, further secures him within familiar models of behaviour. This retention of Englishness becomes unequivocal in a parallel that Macfie draws between his life with the Romany caravan and the ‘similar’ life he later experiences in the trenches at Flanders (p. iv). There, his corps were together in ‘camps and bivouacs’ for over a year, enjoying that peculiarly tender intimacy and unselfishness, exercising that wonderful forbearance and tolerance, which, rare alike in the city streets and country mansions of so-called civilisation, attain their majestic perfection [...] through long association in the field, and after common trials – summer’s heat and dust, winter’s cold and mud, discomfort, hunger, thirst, fatigue, sickness, danger, and often heroism. (p. iii)

As Macfie is careful to contrive, the passage is so apt a description of his gypsy wanderings, even down to forms of accommodation and vagaries of climate, that the experience seems little more than preliminary training for that ultimate adventure of English masculinity, the First World War. His critique of the decadent civilisation of the West, repeated at points throughout the text, is not enough to suggest disloyalty or transgression. In the absence of compatriots, the foregrounding of masculinism redeems Macfie in both textual and exilic space, and proves ultimate fidelity to the nation from which his vagabondage may otherwise appear to have distanced him. Naturally, the adherence to the codes laid down for one’s sex may have been useful for assisting the male, but involved female migrants in a host of complications. A preservation of the selfhood in the ideals of domesticity and motherhood, most obviously, would have disallowed the conjunction of movement, adventure and

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expression that underpin the pursuit of a literary exile. Doubtless, this explains the scarcity in nineteenth-century balkanism of expatriate accounts by women, who tend to enter the genre only as peripheral figures in their husbands’ memoirs. The accounts of female expatriatism that do exist gain considerable value, not least for their capacity to both enforce and destabilise hegemonic constructions of self and other. As the topic will be explored in the following chapter, suffice it to say here that any transgression resulting from foreign travel is mitigated with loyalties that maintain the female self in the face of dissolution or censure. There are two methods by which this complex negotiation of identity tends to be achieved. On the one hand, transgression is merged with the acceptance of such regulations as male chaperones and rigid dress codes, thereby reducing the sense that decorum has been breached or non-English identity assumed. As the most famous example, Viscountess Strangford’s journeys around the western Balkans in 1863 are comprehensively supervised by a party of four Englishman and an agent of the prince of Montenegro.29 On the other hand, the violation of male space is pursued more wholeheartedly, and the consequent decrease of ‘femininity’ is tempered by the author making the readers aware that the masculinism pursued is of a thoroughly English variety. This link between male and female identity is evidenced in the fourth means of self-preservation, the attainment of personal authority. In their displacement to foreign climes, the English had an uncanny knack of procuring a status equal or higher to their former class and station, and thereby surrounding themselves with a range of social and professional barriers. Many of the employees of the Levantine consular service achieved genuine jurisdiction in their particular regions. Being an ‘agent of all-powerful England’, even the lowliest of consuls was besieged by local inhabitants airing grievances and seeking redress for the abuses of the Ottoman or Austrian administration, elevating him into a kind of ‘supervisor to the Governor of the district’.30 Wadham Peacock, a consul-general to north Albania, is in no doubt that in the Ottoman Empire ‘the Consular official of a Great Power, and of a little one if he could bluff sufficiently, was a sacred person’.31 The authority gained by British residents is even more obvious amongst those pursuing military service in south-east Europe. Valentine Baker and J.C. Fife-Cookson, a major general and military attaché respectively, both served the

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Porte during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-8, and became used not only to commanding native troops, but also to appropriating native houses, looting native villages and commandeering native servants.32 Even Britons entering the region in civilian capacities found that their nationality exempted them from local regulations and obviated the need to fraternise with the general host population. For example, Barkley’s administration of railway building in Bulgaria and Emma Pearson’s relief work in central Serbia facilitate an authority over and distance from indigenous societies which, had the Britons relinquished authority, may have threatened to swamp them.33 The availability of personal power is exemplified by the fact that even short-term visitors to the region gained social standing, although any study of the phenomenon should be preceded by a note of caution. Travellers and residents in the Balkans are always eager to record the honorifics by which local people address them, suggesting the achievement of local prestige, yet fail to mention that these honorifics – ‘Herr Baron’, ‘high and nobly born Excellency’, ‘Queen of the Mountains’ – frequently emerge from modes of politeness embedded in regional languages.34 Similarly, the respectful comportment of south-east Europeans in the presence of Britons was a product less of subservience than of local codes of hospitality. When Arthur Moore finds his hands ‘seized and covered in kisses’ by a party of Bulgars in Ochrid, or when the kindness of Serbians makes Herbert Vivian feel like ‘a great Sovereign on a triumphant progress’,35 it is not necessarily British prestige that is being dramatised, despite the authors regarding it as such. Nevertheless, a measure of authority seems to have been achieved by many. On the most basic level, Victorian and Edwardian travellers were rarely without a horde of servants and dragomans whose presence at least intimated a position of control and mastery. On her journeys around Dalmatia, Montenegro and Albania, Strangford is attended by a cook and two menservants, as well as an occasional guide and zaptieh (or mounted policeman). Strangford’s relationship to her subordinates – and through them to the wider population – has all the power and poise of a colonial administrator. Regarding one armed guard, she expresses satisfaction with his ‘modest, unservile, but deferential’ temperament and with his uncanny ability ‘to force the peasants to provide all that one requires in the way of food and forage’.36 During a trip from Cetinje to Shkodër, she expresses distaste for the way her Montenegrin hosts

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distribute her baggage ‘on the backs of five women, who walked in front of us the whole way’, but does not mind allowing ‘slaves to kiss the hem of my dress’ in an Ottoman harem or giving a troublesome guide a ‘a blow or two’ with a stick.37 Such punishment is particularly germane in the context of female travel, reminding us that the discourses – of class, gender, race – that comprise identity are so tenacious that the relinquishing of one does not necessarily entail escape from the others. The use of corporal punishment, however, is far more common in male travelogues. An example is found in Arthur Evans’s memoir of a Bosnian journey taken with his brother during the Christian insurrection of 1875, when the country was flooded with Ottoman troops and armed irregulars. In Travnik, convinced that the local ‘Bosniac Turks regarded Englishmen’ with ‘brotherly feelings’,38 Evans wanders out to sketch a nearby castle, only to have his work interrupted by a Muslim boy pelting him with stones. Enraged, he gives ‘the stripling a good hearty box on the ears’ and immediately aggravates the local villagers: The rage of the Turks knew no bounds. For a moment they recoiled a few paces as if struck dumb with amazement; then, with a look of fury, one of them drew his sword-knife and was making at me, but before he had time to disentangle it from his sash or its sheath, I was on him with my stick – happily a good heavy one – and the coward let go his handshar and took to his heels. The other Turk, who was beginning to draw his weapon, imitated the example of his mate; the boy ran off in another direction, and I was left in possession of the field. (p. 205)

Worried that ‘this spark might serve to kindle [a] conflagration of fanaticism’, Evans retreats to his quarters and, with his brother ‘once more by my side, and our revolvers in our hands, felt more at ease’ (p. 205). This portrait of the casual traveller as a quasi-military authority is repeated during a scene in which Evans publicly castigates an Ottoman zaptieh and is applauded by Christian onlookers, ‘who from that moment dubbed us Consùls – a name given by the Bosniacs to any Europeans who are not subject to the caprices of Turkish gendarmes’ (p. 143). Evans’s aggression is tame in comparison to that recorded in other journals, where one can find English workmen shooting at robbers, for example, or English colonels murdering Bulgarian insurgents.39 When considered alongside the other crimes that travellers commit, including trespass, forgery and poaching,40 the

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remarkable freedom achieved by Britons in the Balkans illustrates how a discursive structure like Englishness is not solely prohibitive, but compensates its adherents with gratifications and status. Until now, I have focused on the preservation of Englishness through practices enacted during the period of exile. In doing so, I am not unaware of the problems surrounding autobiographical narratives of displacement, which should not be unquestioned as accurate documents of expatriate activity. ‘Travellers, poets and liars’, Richard Brathwaite reminds us, ‘are three words of one significance’.41 Whether this would deny the existence of our practices of selfpreservation, however, is another matter. It is less the sheer ubiquity and similarity of their description that interests me, than the personae of the expatriates that emerge from the texts. Phlegmatic, prosaic, confident, cheerful, aloof, not without certain self-deprecating irony, the narrators show no sign of having suffered unduly from the exilic disintegration and self-estrangement that Julia Kristeva, in a suitably violent image, terms the ‘shattering of the former body’.42 Similarly, the typical narrative form of the memoirs, with its linearity, structure and scientific naturalism, speaks not of past hybridisation, but of unchallenged faith in unity and enduring coherence. As if to crystallise the lack of assimilation, these scriptings of foreign residencies, apart from the occasional questioning of patriarchy, also tend to reproduce British moral and philosophical certainties without query or modification. As Crosse’s construction of the Wallacks exemplifies, the perceived savagery of the Balkans is constantly contrasted to the rationality, civility, progressiveness and stability of the homeland, a range of Enlightenment virtues which, with that curious circularity of British cultural discourse, the expatriates’ own self-representations [un]consciously dramatise. Clearly something has happened during their residencies abroad, something I locate in their social groupings, routines, masculinism and mastery, that has retained these British subjects within domestic ideology. At the same time, we need not assume that the expatriate’s adherence to such ideology can be gleaned solely through a study of textual self-representation. If ideology is manifest during the period of writing, there is reason to believe that the personal history with which that writing engages has itself been suffused with ideological assumptions, and that these assumptions have left their trace in the patterns of scripted behaviour. The point seems to me important, for

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the ideology held by the encultured expatriate is much more than simply textual expression. It is both the incentive underlying practices like clustering or routine and a means of self-preservation in itself; not a practice, certainly, but a rigidly held system of belief whose generation of certitude and strength forms the fifth and final explanation for the extraordinary inflexibility achieved by the British in south-east Europe. There is much to indicate that the Victorians and Edwardians believed – as one of them admitted – that their nationality made them ‘so very, very superior to all others that they could do exactly as they liked’.43 This easy assurance and moral supremacy, indicative of a nation at the height of imperial prowess, would further account for their success at patrolling the boundary between self and other. This was a period in which fleeting memories of the homeland were enough to sustain British residents in the Balkans. When Captain W.V. Herbert, another veteran of the Russo-Ottoman war, comes across a ‘fresh bunch of violets’ in the Bulgarian town of Pleven he is transported: ‘They brought back to me England’, he enthuses, ‘which at that time I despaired of ever seeing again [...] – brought back the smell of the British soil after rain, the odour of wet leaves, the fragrance of buds, the scent of an English spring.’44 The ideological conviction that offered expatriates the greatest comfort was Christian faith. In one telling scene in O’Brien’s memoir, the author describes a journey by horse across the Carpathian mountains, where cold, danger and desolation produce such ‘over-wrought sensations’ that he ‘instinctively [...] knelt in the snow and prayed’.45 Amidst the perceived depravity of the Balkans, O’Brien relates, the process of ‘[o]pening one’s heart to God is an instant relief’.46 The faiths and practices of Englishness are as present and as powerful today, and it is the contemporary manifestation of ideological assurance that seems most urgent to address. The expatriate memoirs that have appeared since the lifting of political barriers in 1989 describe short residencies, certainly, but residencies which offer no evidence that the social and psychological barriers which the Victorians erected in the region are about to crumble. Robert Carver’s experience in Albania, mentioned in chapter 1, is the most useful illustration in kind. Although the author’s stay is not the most extensive of the period, The Accursed Mountains exemplifies the political and moral judgements being made by long-term expatriates and clarifies the way such ideology can support their chosen isolation.

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His series of journeys took place in the mid-1990s when, during the administration of Sali Berisha, Albania was continuing its postcommunist slide into social and economic collapse. Drawing on nineteenth-century traditions of denigratory balkanism, and rejecting the ‘contemporary cant’ of ‘cultural relativism’, Carver builds an extraordinary portrait of thievery, mendacity and barbarity which, essentialised in both time and space, feeds into his specifically Christian denunciation of Albania as a place of ‘ignorance, evil, corruption and sin’.47 The author is no less forthcoming about his adherence to the enlightened Englishness that channels his representation. Addressing what he sees as the ‘cycle’ of dependency and sloth debilitating the country, and wondering how a society based on ‘order’ and ‘prosperity’ could be developed, Carver proscribes a very English dose of ‘hard work, independence, honesty and fair dealing’, or else, failing that, the ‘strict discipline’ of authoritarian rule (pp. 171, 246, 246, 171, 246). It is a political and cultural perspective which would not look out of place in the most intransigent of Victorian journals. Indeed, there is a distinct strain of imperial nostalgia running through The Accursed Mountains that one may well source in Carver’s upbringing in the British-held Cyprus of the 1950s (where he ‘had been fed and fussed over by Greek maids and nannies’ (p. 92)). Accordingly, he expresses real fondness for those old imperialistic British travelogues where the inevitably well-connected authors drift into the capital from the Gobi Desert or the High Pamir, still suffering from beriberi, dressed in rags and reeking of yak’s pee, only to launch immediately and effortlessly into diplomatic high life with borrowed dinner jackets, putting up at the Embassy and squiring bored young debs around in rickshaws from languorous tennis match to smart cocktail party. (p. 153).

It is when circulating amongst the ‘diplomatists in the capital’ that Carver reveals his own penchant for clustering and collective routine, just as his masculinist response to each ‘local test of machismo’ encountered elsewhere in Albanian sustain him in a country in which ‘there was an ever-increasing chance I was not going to get out alive’.48 This reliance on masculinism is apparent in a wide range of contemporary male texts. Philip Glazebrook’s nostalgia for ‘[t]he virtues which the Victorians professed to admire most – resolution,

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independence, steadiness under fire, courage’ – is repeated during the Yugoslav Wars by Anthony Loyd, who gets an ‘undeniable buzz’ out of ‘megadeath, murder and mayhem’, and by John Haggerty, who becomes so blasé about being shot at that ‘his reaction [is] one of, “oh, no, not again”’.49 Similarly, Carver’s retrograde imperialism is far from unique: Glazebrook admires ‘those Englishmen of the middle years of the nineteenth century, who travelled restlessly about [like] the knights-errant of Malory and Tennyson’, and Richard Bassett regrets the passing of the south-east European upper classes, with their ‘lost chivalry’ and ‘general air of aristocratic sprezzatura’.50 Yet few of Carver’s compatriots achieve quite his level of sustained bigotry. The end of European empire, he declares, is a calamity for postcolonial countries, which are now ‘abandoned to a ruinous oppression by their native tyrants after tasting the sweets of European-enforced order and industry’ (p. 133). This staunch refusal to assign value to the cultural other informs Carver’s unrelenting aloofness from the Albanians he meets. While obliged by the necessities of his research to seek out company, he recoils from the host population and desires as little genuine interaction as possible. The absence of co-nationals across most of the country reduces the possibility of either clustering or collective routine, and, although the author’s comparative wealth offers a certain status, it is the utter conviction of moral and philosophical superiority that finally gives him the energy to maintain his detachment. The following exchange with Mimoza, the mother of a local contact, exemplifies how such boundaries are erected. Mimoza is telling Carver about the difficulties of her life in post-communist Albania, including her desperate need for a western sponsor to pay for her son’s education abroad. Carver has been silent, listening with a certain discomfort, until Mimoza makes the suggestion that Albania’s poverty might be similar to poverty found in Britain. It is a comment tailormade to challenge this most resolute of Englishmen: It would have been so easy to lie. I couldn’t do it. I had to be truthful and therefore almost unbearably brutal. ‘No, Mimoza. Albania is as poor as Africa at its very poorest. Nowhere in Europe is this poor.’ She looked at me with small, hurt eyes [...]. ‘Do cultured, educated people in Albania take bribes?’ I asked. ‘Of course.’

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After a period during which Mimoza has dominated, Carver’s intrusion alone indicates a move to self-assertion. The reference to ‘African’-style poverty, however, and particularly the sudden lecture on corruption – with its implied opposition to a virtuous West – reduces her to silence and delivers Carver from further interaction, particularly from discussions of western sponsorship. Any hint of remorse about his brutality is unnecessary. The lecture is predicated on presumed moral integrity, derived from his status as ‘European’, and also on a secure belief in his own capacity for ‘truthfulness’, a belief even more immodestly expressed in his claim that, due to the ‘propaganda’ rife in the country, an ‘ill-informed foreigner who had read one history book on Albania knew more of the reality of [its] past than the most erudite Albanian’.51 The authority gained is cognitive, rather than material, and thus less productive of power than nineteenth-century consular service, or indeed of late twentiethcentury service with the United Nations, which allowed an average administrator in Bosnia or Kosovo to run his sector as a ‘personal fief’.52 But it still yields a crucial sense of self-righteousness that reduces any sense of social alienation. This is clearly seen in Carver’s treatment of indigenous males, whose company he loathes with a passion and who he treats with truculence, suspicion and distance. The structures of belief that sustain him, and the wholesale maintenance of selfhood that results, is currently repeated by the majority of longterm expatriates, amongst whom Carver’s portrait of incessant, lifeendangering discord and criminality is not unrepresentative.53 ‘After all, this was the Balkans’, as Carver justifies their collective drive to self-preservation, ‘where after a while a man begins to suspect his own shadow of following him with ill intent’ (p. 277). It was a fascinating image to choose. If there is any single conception that could crystallise the expatriate’s motives for psychic, as well as physical, preservation it is that of the shadow, a strange synthesis of darkness and menace haunting the exilic body. For the

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motifs of balkanist representation, more generally, the image appropriately indicates the British visitor’s own significance as the site of discursive emergence. The rigid structure of Enlightenment binarism, that ‘ready-made conceptual grid’ underlying cross-cultural representation,54 produces a regional portrait that exists not as a charting of geographical actuality, but as an insubstantial imagining cast down by the epistemological body of the homeland. The adherence to binarism may have created the threat of otherness, casting a shadow wherever the stranger sets foot, but is ultimately productive of personal solidity, with the presence of the other holding no danger for one who remains tightly secured inside British cultural ideology. It is this ideological conviction that also produces the beguiling authority of the exilic text and originates those physical practices of preservation that are achieved as triumphantly by a contemporary like Carver as by a Victorian like Crosse. In drawing this resemblance to the fore, I do not wish to essentialise British experience in the Balkans. As I examine in chapter 7, there was a period of migration concurrent with Marie’s reign in Romania which, with its exhilarated response to the conditions of exile, frequently rejected the security of clustering and routine, and showed willingness to decrease reliance on both masculine codes and social authority.55 What I do mean to establish, however, is that the conceptual structures of Englishness, rarely associated with our postmodern age, are continuing to gain formulation and, when encountering otherness, continuing to instil the comforting sense of inviolable selfhood. In his memoir of life as a BBC reporter during the Yugoslav Wars, Martin Bell is certainly frank, but not necessarily unusual, in claiming that ‘[i]n the midst of the mayhem a show of Britishness seemed somehow reassuring’.56 His crew not only ‘flew a Union Jack’ on their vehicle, he recalls, but also marked the end of a working day ‘by holding a flag-lowering ceremony to the music of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance’.57 An elucidation of the techniques of self-preservation – to return to a question I posed at the outset – finally hints at why migration to Britain tends to be a very different affair. The Bosnians, Roma and Kosovan Albanians who have sought sanctuary from south-east European crises are unlikely to negotiate British society with the same disregard and arrogance, and even less likely to preserve over time their former patterns of identification. The reason resides in the final

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two methods of self-preservation that I have surveyed. While the process of social clustering has indeed carved out immigrant space in Britain, and while routine and masculinism may be performed within that space, the multiple privileges granted to British expatriates, and by extension their unchallengable assumptions of cultural superiority, are achieved with considerable difficulty in the face of the Home Office’s ‘discriminatory racialized policies’.58 Denied Graves’s imperious command of their surroundings, lacking the financial freedoms of Evans and Macfie, unblessed with Strangford’s effortless authority, such exiles must subordinate themselves within a vast, impersonal economic system which withholds consideration and respect. The issue is less one of individuals, their abilities or qualifications, than one of wide-ranging regional inequality. In our post-Cold War Europe, the last twenty years have seen a shift from the old division of the continent to that of simply ‘Europe’ and the Balkans, with the latter evoked, as Carver demonstrates, through a denigratory regionalism that leaves one in no doubt as to its position in the European hierarchy. Such denigration has abetted the creation of continental-wide bureaucracy which, on the one hand, promotes the freedoms and entitlements of western migrants in south-east Europe, and on the other ties south-east European migrants in a web of geographical restrictions and economic constraints. It is this political consequence of balkanist discourse, not solely its textual manifestation, that needs to be challenged in British literary and cultural study.

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NOTES 1

Marie, Queen of Roumania, The Country That I Love: An Exile’s Memories (London: Duckworth, 1925), pp. 138, 71, 143. 2 Bartkowski, Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. xx, 86. 3 Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, Granta, Vol. 13 (1984), p. 170. 4 Ibid., p. 170. 5 JanMohamed, ‘Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-As-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual’, in Michael Sprinker, ed., Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 97, 118. 6 See Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 139-70; and Coulson, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-19. 7 The idea of Englishness underpinning my discussion involves a set of beliefs and practices which, though most obviously associated with and developed in geographical England, has also manifested itself in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The term is preferred to ‘Britishness’, which I interpret as a more hybrid configuration that incorporates, rather than defines itself against, non-English or regional identities. 8 Islam, The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 3. 9 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 94; Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People, new edn (1998; London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 1, 1. 10 The chapter will distinguish between involuntary displacement (exile) and voluntary displacement (expatriatism), although the foreign residencies of British nationals, commonly viewed as expatriotism, were often compelled during the nineteenth century by personal or familial need, and consequently felt like exile for the nationals themselves. For a good discussion of contemporary critical approaches to ‘exile’ and ‘expatriatism’, see Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Exsul’, in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 9-23. 11 James Duncan, ‘Sites of Representation: Place, Time and the Discourse of the Other’, in Duncan and David Ley, eds, Place/Culture/Representation (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 50; Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 282. 12 On the one hand, inflexibility is not predicated on involvement in national expansion per se, but can emerge as readily from exile within Europe, for example, as from migration to European colonies. On the other hand, inflexibility is less a specificity of past colonial settlement than a process of ongoing possibility which, even today, can attend the experience of border crossing for both voluntary and involuntary exiles. 13 Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 87. 14 See O’Brien, Journal of a Residence, pp. 19, 58; Parkinson, Twenty Years in Roumania (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921), pp. 158, 63. Parkinson also rejoices in the ‘great influx of Americans’ that the Romanian petroleum industry has

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attracted to Bucharest: ‘our British colony was increased to a considerable extent, as Britishers and Americans naturally hung together’ (ibid., p. 80). 15 Blunt, Reminiscences, pp. 43, 128, 43. 16 Graves, Storm Centres of the Near East: Personal Memories 1879-1929 (London: Hutchinson, 1933), p. 198. 17 Ibid., p. 196. In the early twentieth century, Maude Holbach discovers that Austrians similarly mark out exclusive spaces for leisure in occupied Bosnia. ‘The Austrian officers at Plevlje’, she writes, ‘had a little world of their own outside the Turkish town – an European world girt about by gardens made with infinite labour by the soldiers who had brought soil from a distance, and so turned the bare rock into shady plantations. In the casino concerts were given daily, and every afternoon the tennis courts were a centre of life and gaiety’ (Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane Company, 1910), p. 186). 18 Graves, Storm Centres, p. 58; Blunt, Reminiscences, pp. 66, 186, 215, 271, 302; Hulme-Beaman, Twenty Years, p. 117. 19 Parkinson, Twenty Years in Roumania, p. 155. 20 Walker, Through Macedonia to the Albania Lakes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864), pp. 14, 15. 21 Durham, The Sarajevo Crime (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1925), p. 11. 22 Graves, Storm Centres, pp. 203, 206, 199. Taken collectively, British memoirs of military service on the Eastern Front during the First World War perfectly illustrate the emphasis placed on work in expatriate texts. For examples, see Douglas Walshe, With the Serbs in Macedonia (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane Company, 1920), p. 44; E.P. Stebbing, At the Serbian Front in Macedonia (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane Company, 1917), p. 51, and Albert Barker, Memories of Macedonia (London: Arthur H. Stockwell, c.1917), pp. 18-19. 23 Crosse, Round about the Carpathians (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1878), p. 1. 24 Stillman, Herzegovina, p. 39. See Ozanne’s Three Years in Roumania (1878) and Barkley’s two memoirs, Between the Danube and Black Sea (1876) and Bulgaria before the War (1877). 25 Philip Dodd, ‘Englishness and the National Culture’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, eds, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 5. 26 See Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 68-9. 27 Graves, Storm Centre, p. 205; Wright, Adventures in Servia: Or the Experiences of a Medical Free Lance among the Bashi-Bazouks, Etc (London: W. Swan Sonnenschein, 1884), p. 149. It was sometimes the case that British male expatriates needed to police the behaviour of their countrymen, as J.W. Ozanne finds during his Romanian residency in the 1870s. At a traditional masked ball in Bucharest, in which ‘the men dress up as women’, Ozanne perceives ‘two raw youths fresh from England’ flirting with a couple of masked Romanian males and feels obliged to intervene, making sure that his compatriots stick to ‘wandering about alone’ (Ozanne, Three Years in Roumania, pp. 153, 153, 154).

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28 Macfie [‘Andreas’], With Gypsies in Bulgaria (Liverpool: Henry Young and Sons, 1916), p. 17. 29 Strangford, The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic in 1863: With a Visit to Montenegro (London: Richard Bentley, 1864), pp. 2, 92, 168. 30 Walker, Through Macedonia, p. 104; H.C. Woods, Washed by Four Seas: An English Officer’s Travels in the Near East (London and Leipsic: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), p. 105. 31 Peacock, Albania: The Foundling State of Europe (London: Chapman and Hall, 1914), p. 12. Peacock goes on to express anxiety about the idea of Balkan independence, which will mean British consuls becoming ‘quite ordinary folk in the lands where for many years past they have been little kings’ (ibid., p. 13). 32 For an example of each activity in turn, see Baker, War in Bulgaria: A Narrative of Personal Experiences, 2 vols (London: Sampson Low, Martson, Searle and Rivington, 1879), II, 130-57; Fife-Cookson, With the Armies of the Balkans and at Gallipoli in 1877-1878, 2nd edn (1879; London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin and Co., 1879), p. 145; Baker, War in Bulgaria, II, 251; Fife-Cookson, Armies of the Balkans, p. 143. Although a lowly volunteer, Alfred Wright feels he can respond to a Serbian soldier’s impoliteness by ‘bestowing a kick upon him’ and, when the impoliteness persists, by taking the decision to ‘knock him down’ (Wright, Adventures, p. 46). 33 When Pearson and her colleague Louisa McLaughlin lament that ‘no people on earth are so detestable as the English tourists in the way in which they behave to the inhabitants of the lands they visit’, they are striking a blow for the British resident, not criticising the British per se (Pearson and McLaughlin, Service in Serbia under the Red Cross (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1877), p. 40). 34 Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), p. 179; Crosse, Round about the Carpathians, p. 5; Durham, Struggle for Scutari, p. 107. Cross is prepared to satirise the convention, saying that in south-east Europe ‘it is a settled conviction of the people that we are all lords in Great Britain’ (Crosse, Round about the Carpathians, p. 254). 35 Moore, Orient Express, p. 183; Vivian, Servia, p. 237. If his memoir is to be believed, Allen Upward does achieve a measure of prestige. He has the power, for example, to give the children at one rural school the day off, as it ‘happened to be the English Christmas’, and to interrogate an Ottoman governor on local affairs, despite realising the oddity of ‘a foreign traveller walking into the office of the local governor and proceeding to cross-question him’ (Upward, East End of Europe, pp. 223, 145). 36 Strangford, Eastern Shores, p. 35. 37 Ibid., pp. 168, 191, 17. 38 Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875: With an Historical Review of Bosnia, and a Glimpse at the Croats, Slavonians, and the Ancient Republic of Ragusa (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1876), p. 202. 39 See Barkley, Between the Danube and Black Sea, p. 246, and Upward, East End of Europe, p. 157. 40 See Douglas Goldring, Dream Cities: Notes of an Autumn Tour in Italy and Dalmatia (London and Leipsic: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), pp. 244, 311; Barkley, Between the Danube and Black Sea, pp. 306-12; Creagh, Over the Borders, II, 68.

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41 Quoted in Zweder von Martels, ‘Introduction: The Eye and the Mind’s Eye’, in von Martels, ed., Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing (Leiden, New York and Köln: E.J. Brill, 1994), p. xiv. 42 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (Herts: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 30. 43 Barkley, Bulgaria before the War, p. 85. 44 Herbert, By-Paths in the Balkans (London: Chapman and Dodd, p. 1906), p. 28. During medical service on the Eastern Front during the First World War, J. Johnston Abraham is similarly moved by hearing the national anthem: ‘It was months since we had heard it’, he says, ‘and I felt a lump rising in my throat, a queer moisture in my eyes’ (Abraham, My Balkan Log (London: Chapman and Hall, 1922), p. 168). 45 O’Brien, Journal, pp. 177, 176. 46 Ibid., p. 177. For other expressions of Christian faith, see Herbert, By-Paths in the Balkans, p. 171, Parkinson, Twenty Years, p. 156, and Walker, Through Macedonia, pp. 64-5. Englishmen were so convinced of their rectitude that they could accidentally shoot local women, as one vice-consul does during a hunting trip in central Serbia, and still feel that they had done nothing wrong (see Hulme-Beaman, Twenty Years, pp. 126, 129). 47 Carver, Accursed Mountains, p. 191. 48 Ibid., pp. 104, 234, 116. ‘Over the last thirty years’, Carver complains, ‘the gradual feminisation of society in Britain, and most of the formerly macho northern European democracies such as Holland and Germany, had blanded men down to an acceptably low-testosterone product, suitable only for occasional use by the quasi-liberated woman, as and when required’ (ibid., p. 184). 49 Glazebrook, Journey to Kars, p. 20; Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, new edn (1999; London: Anchor 2000), pp. 225, 207; Haggerty, Letters from a Nobody, p. 90. For other instances of masculine adventure in the Balkans, see James, Vagabond, p. 48, Bell, Harm’s Way, p. 226, and Iris Gioia and Clifford Thurlow, Brief Spring: A Journey through Eastern Europe (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), pp. 196-7. ‘For all their self-depreciation’, Wendy Bracewell comments, these ‘Englishmen are nostalgic for a vanished imperial masculinity that would give purpose and legitimacy to their anachronistic attempts at adventure’ (Bracewell, ‘New Men, Old Europe: Being a Man in Balkan Travel Writing’, Journeys, Vol. 6, Nos 1-2 (2005), p. 95). 50 Glazebrook, Journey to Kars, p. 8; Bassett, Balkan Hours: Travels in the Other Europe (London: John Murray, 1990), pp. 136, 1. 51 Carver, Accursed Mountains, p. 127. Dismissing ‘professors and savants of Third World origin’, with their tricksy postcolonial theories, Carver puts himself on the side of western orientalist traditions, as seen in his statement that Albania ‘was the timeless East, which was supposed to be a malevolent invention of Western orientalists, [but which] lay in the heart of continental Europe’ (ibid., pp. 169, 232). 52 Winchester, Fracture Zone, p. 94. 53 The sense of cognitive and moral authority is present in both British and American travel writings. For examples, see Fonseca, Bury Me Standing, p. 179, Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, new edn (1995; London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 284-5, Tony Hawks, Playing the Moldovans at Tennis (London: Ebury Press, 2000), p. 249, and Morgan, Barrel of Stones, pp. 88-9.

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54 Leslie W. Rabine, ‘Scraps of Culture: African Style in the African American Community of Los Angeles’, Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton, eds, Borders, Exiles, Diasporas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 59. 55 I am indebted to Xavier Girard for his suggestive association of ‘exile’ and ‘exhilaration’: Girard, cited in Linda Nochlin, ‘Art and the Conditions of Exile: Men/Women, Emigration/Expatriation’, in Suleiman, ed., Exile and Creativity, p. 49. 56 Bell, Harm’s Way, p. 30. 57 Ibid., p. 30. 58 Tony Kushner, ‘West is Best: Britain and European Immigration during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini, eds, Myths of Europe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), p. 221.

Chapter 6: Women and War The past two decades have seen a burgeoning of critical attention for female travel writing. Although western European women have been producing records of their journeys for over five centuries, these had rarely been reprinted before the 1980s and were commonly neglected in scholarship. In the British context, early academic study tended to view their authors as indomitable but eccentric spinsters whose travels were a mere footnote to the more consequential journeys of male counterparts.1 Over the last twenty-five years, however, a number of critics, influenced by feminist theory, have begun a more serious analysis of their writings, particularly those published in the Victorian age. In a period when women were trained for domesticity and routine, female travellers offered an alternative model of identity, exchanging the role of the ‘angel of the house’ for the patterns of mobility and adventure traditionally viewed as male preserves. Whereas in so much nineteenth-century literature women were designated ‘as the symbolic embodiment of home’, foreign travel was ‘a means of redefining themselves, assuming a different persona and becoming someone who did not exist at home.’2 At the same time, the act of recording their journeys offered women a covert means of participation in public discourse. Even when produced in the form of letters or diary entries, which conformed to the private modes of literature deemed suitable for female expression, their travel writing seldom eschewed social and political commentary. The most obvious way that it broke ‘the cultural taboo against women as public speakers’ was its frequent opposition to the colonial practices witnessed on the journey, with Wendy Mercer deducing that women, oppressed by patriarchy, tended to ‘identify more closely with other oppressed groups of people’, exhibiting faiths and practices that countered the masculinist ethos.3 In this way, travellers such as Mary Kingsley, Isabella Bishop-Bird and Alexandra David-Neel have been reinterpreted as ‘proto-feminists’: that is, as ‘strong resourceful […]

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women’ who ‘struggl[ed] against the social conventions of the Victorian period’ and challenged imperial attitudes with ‘anticolonialist statements’.4 As with other forms of literary expression, however, it is difficult to view female travel writing as any one thing. In an important study from the early 1990s, Lisa Lowe drew upon the work of Foucault and Bakhtin to problematise previous attempts at a unified reading, demonstrating that the genre is neither straightforward nor monologic, but composed of a bewildering range of competing ideologies which work to fracture and destabilise the texts. In the context of eighteenth-century writings, Lowe describes the female travelogue as a ‘paradoxical, or multivalent’, composite emerging from the contrary ‘discourses of gender, class, and orientalism’.5 Lowe’s approach was expanded in the work of Sara Mills, whose Discourses of Difference (1991) is an attempt to explore the multiple articulations of women’s travel writing during the age of high imperialism. While Mills acknowledges that there are aspects of the memoirs that contest the hegemonic ideologies of the era, she finds others which converge with male writing and, indeed, which bear traces of the imperialist and capitalist discourses dominant in the nineteenth century. This entails a disparagement of native populations, an ethnocentric advocacy of British privilege and superiority, a defence of bourgeois cultural values and a faith in the economic and political rectitude of the imperial project. It also entails an adherence to patriarchal models of female identity. In general, even the most audacious and hardy of travellers insist that ‘feminine’ decorum has been maintained during their journeys and exhibit selfhoods produced by, rather than constructed against, consensual belief systems. Emphasising the genre’s availability to a range of critical interpretations, Mills summarises the variegated expressions of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in women’s travel literature as a set of ‘discourses in conflict’, arguing that it is ‘possible to “prove”, by selective reading, that these writers were proto-feminist, antifeminist, colonial and anti-colonial.’6 The same ideological complexity is discernible in women’s commentary on south-east Europe, which, although understudied, has formed an important strand within balkanist fiction, anthropology, journalism and travel literature. John Allcock and Antonia Young argue that ‘of the large fund of writing about the Balkans which has

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accumulated over the past two centuries a very significant proportion of it [is] written by women’.7 This is overstated for the nineteenth century, when female travellers in the region were rare, but is certainly true for the twentieth century. Their presence became so marked during periods of crisis that an article in a 1912 edition of The Graphic, under the title ‘Why the Balkans Attract Women’, was already struggling over the question of how ‘those rough, wild, semicivilised and more than half Orientalised little countries, [could] appeal so strongly to some of our astutest feminine intelligence’.8 The anonymous author overlooks the fact that it was the peninsula’s very reputation for adversity that had appealed to British women eager to escape lives of mundanity and restriction. Their presence in the region was also a result of institutional changes in the mid-Victorian period, most significantly the facilitation of foreign service by the National Aid Society for the Sick and Wounded in War. Later known as the British Red Cross, the charity’s formation in 1863 suddenly made participation at such conflicts as the Franco-Prussian War and the Boer Wars available to female nurses, doctors and surgeons. The Balkans played a central role in extending this participation. During the Christian uprisings of the 1870s, a flurry of charitable organisations appeared (the Eastern War Sick and Wounded Relief Fund, the Bulgarian Peasant Relief Fund, the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Fugitives and Orphans Relief Fund) that were driven ahead by British women active both in fund raising and in volunteer work in the field.9 Female service continued in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and reached a peak during the First World War. Here, through such charities as the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service and the Serbian Relief Fund, women ‘managed to brush aside rigid conventions to the extent that they were successfully carrying out complicated surgery and running entire hospitals and ambulance columns in a devastated theatre of war’.10 The copious body of writings that these women left behind indicated not only an aptitude for dangerous travel but also a determination to intervene in political and cultural discourse. This chapter will attempt to outline the literary properties of this intervention from the nineteenth-century Eastern Crisis to the Second World War, paying particular attention to the complex discursive splits which have characterised memoirs published during periods of conflict.

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In the Victorian age, women’s response to crisis was encapsulated in Georgina Muir Mackenzie and Adeline Paulina Irby’s Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe (1867). Detailing the suffering of the Balkan populations under Ottoman rule, the book records a series of research trips taken by the two women through Serbia, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Albania and Montenegro between 1861 and 1863. These entailed such difficult journeying – by horse, carriage and litter, often with a troop of mounted guards – that their biographer suggests they found it ‘much more exciting […] to be two Englishwomen in the wilds of Turkey than to be at home in England’.11 In the resulting memoir, largely written by Mackenzie, their passionate advocacy of Slavic freedom was supported by testimonies collected from local authorities and eye-witnesses, including merchants, journalists, teachers and peasants.12 Such advocacy was continued in the 1877 edition of the memoir. Indicating their growing acclaim, this was proof-read by Florence Nightingale and prefaced by William Gladstone, a tireless critic of Ottoman governance who drew on their research in speeches and parliamentary debates on the Eastern Question.13 The edition added to their standing by including Irby’s account of a tour of Bosnia and Herzegovina that she took with another compatriot, Priscilla Johnston, during the insurrection of 1875. In a period when knowledge of south-east Europe was slight, one historian maintains that their Travels ‘discovered’ the region for British readers, introducing them ‘to a virtually unknown subject: the plight of the subject Slavs.’14 The authors’ entrance into political debate is illustrated by their vehement attacks on the Ottoman Empire. This foreign administration, they write, not only fails to develop regional infrastructure, but also entrenches itself through forced labour, heavy taxation and summative justice, executed by an army of ‘licensed and fanatical marauders’ (I, 32). Between 1875 and 1877, the Ottomans’ suppression of the Christian revolts in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria, which included widespread atrocity and the destruction of villages and crops, resulted in starvation, disease and refugeeism. For Mackenzie and Irby, the imperial ‘system of violence and corruption’ was descending further into ‘insurrection, terror, massacres’, with ‘Christians being impaled and flayed alive, and cruelties of the worst ages committed on helpless women and children’ (II, 87; I, 35, 9). Their view of the Ottoman overlords is briefly stated: ‘we prayed God that on the first convenient

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opportunity they all might be transferred to Asia’ (I, 282). The opposition to the Porte, so radical for the age, is supported by an equally radical commendation of the subject population.15 Their favoured Bulgarians, typically, are ‘honest, clean, and chaste’, marked by an ‘eagerness for education’, a ‘shrewd intelligence’ and an ‘industrious’ approach to agriculture (I, 69, 80, 140, 80). The crucial point about such praise is the way it is used as an argument for national sovereignty. The quality of diligence, for example, is cited as evidence that genuine progress will occur when Bulgaria is ‘free[d] from vexatious interference’, the authors promoting ‘any arrangement that would disencumber the thrifty and well-disposed Bulgarian of the yoke of his present barbarous master’ (I, 68, 66). The point is even clearer when attention is turned to the Serbs, another favoured people, whose religion, history, literature and architecture are lauded throughout the text.16 In the Serbian principality, which had gained de facto independence by 1867, the citizens are ‘as hardy a race as one could wish to see’, demonstrating the ‘[f]ortitude, independent spirit, self-respect, and […] nobleness of character’ that one would expect of ‘members of a well-ordered community’ (I, 220, 221, 281). They go on to accentuate the radical distinction between the Serbian and any of the Mahommedan peoples of Turkey. His idea of order and right is not Oriental, but European. In the principality, where he has his own way, popular government is found compatible with quiet and contentment; and his is the only country hereabouts where brigandage and official corruption are kept down. (I, 220-1)

This evidence of enlightened self-rule – law, morality, order – is presented as a vindication of Serbian autonomy and as an argument for that autonomy to be extended to other subject peoples. In fact, so taken are the authors with Serbia that they believe the neighbouring territories also ‘“belonged to the Serbs”’, encouraging Montenegro and ‘Free Serbia’ ‘to liberate the adjacent rayahs’ and to draw Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina into ‘one Serbian fatherland’ (II, 4, 209; I, 16). In the light of these peoples’ clear desire to express their freedom ‘by political union under a native ruler,’ Mackenzie and Irby also condemn ‘“the selfishness and inhumanity”’ of a Britain which displays such ‘want of interest […] in the Slavonic Christians’.17 Aside from their discursive support for the Serbian cause – extended

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via public lectures and letters to British consuls – they also offered practical assistance, establishing a training centre for schoolmistresses in Sarajevo and conducting humanitarian work through the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Fugitives and Orphans Relief Fund, to which the proceeds of Travels were donated.18 Their work was regarded by Sir Arthur Evans, a colleague of Irby’s who reported on the Bosnian crisis for the Manchester Guardian, as ‘an oasis in the lengthening waste of human misery’.19 The authors’ involvement in political activity and commentary is advanced by the text’s proto-feminist engagement with the plight of Balkan women, although it is here that Travels reveals itself as less resistant to hegemonic ideologies. Certainly, Mackenzie and Irby lament the restrictions on female education, the oppressiveness of marriage expectation and the abuses of traditional rural custom,20 a critique of patriarchal mores abroad which, not unusually for women’s travel writing, is simultaneously a critique of those mores at home. For example, they acknowledge that the specific tasks allotted to Montenegrin women are ‘laborious’, but ‘are not such as to […] debase her social character’, and wish ‘that the same could be said of the life of women in more civilised countries’ (II, 271). Similarly, their extended commentary on fabrics, dress codes and domestic arrangements, rarely found in male travelogues, strikes a blow for an expressly female form of commentary, which can often be more informative about local culture.21 Nevertheless, on the issue of gender, the idea of Mackenzie and Irby as radical writers becomes problematic. There was always a certain humility surrounding the two women’s self-presentation, as though aware that their travelling and publishing careers contravened codes of femininity. A pamphlet of 1865 included the self-effacing opening statement that the authors ‘beg to submit to those who may be interested on the subject the following notes’,22 and was also published anonymously, as were two further early pieces, Across the Carpathians (1862) and ‘Christmas in Montenegro’ (1862), which disclose female authorship, but also suggest that the author is being chaperoned by an aunt. Such humility continued in the first edition of Travels, whose introduction claimed an ignorance of military, economic and scientific matters, and intimated that any regional knowledge was derived from male authorities: ‘A political opinion of our own’, they profess, ‘we do not offer, being well aware that it must be valueless.’23 At the same time,

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the reported action of the travelogue insists upon the maintenance of social and sexual propriety. As Shirley Foster and Sara Mills have argued, female travel writers in the nineteenth century showed a ‘great concern in their texts [with] dressing and behaving “correctly”’, devoting an ‘amount of textual exposition […] to establishing the femininity of the narrator’.24 Accordingly, Travels drops constant hints that its authors wear ‘European dress’ – composed of a ‘flowing skirt, and fluttering veil’ – and either arrange ‘separate chambers’ in the wayside khans or sleep ‘in full travelling costume on a shakedown in the stable’ with armed guards ‘interposed between us and the rest of the wayfarers’ (II, 106; I, 149; II, 133; I, 133). They even carry a tent with them and, whenever possible, ensure privacy by having it ‘pitched in the khan’ (II, 136). As a consequence, it is inevitable that Mackenzie and Irby exhibit other, more disagreeable, traits on their journey. They demand ‘obedience’ and ‘“respect”’ from all local people who ‘“served travellers who are English”’ and make sure ‘that our servitors should understand that our will was to be done – not theirs’.25 As critics have pointed out, their ‘Englishness asserted itself time and again’, revealing ‘all the attitudes and beliefs of [their] age and class’.26 An example of these attitudes is Mackenzie and Irby’s descent into denigratory balkanism whenever they speak about Bosnian Muslims, Albanians and Vlachs. Bosnian Muslims, for example, are ‘renegades and traitors’ and Albanians are ‘cruel, rapacious, and lawless’, a set of ‘credulous semi-savages’ given to ‘unscrupulous action’ (I, 264, 166; II, 91; I, 220). Although the Catholic Albanians are accused of ‘making Judas bargains with the Turks’, the Christian bias of Travels is evident in the comment that Muslim converts are ‘cut off from Europe’ and that only those professing Christianity ‘maintain a link with civilising influences’.27 Indeed, Bosnia has such a ‘savage and Oriental aspect’ that ‘you may fancy yourself in the wilds of Asia’, this being a locale of ‘dirt, squalor, and misery’ where the traveller ‘will come upon no works of modern enterprise, no monuments of ancient mediaeval art’.28 On occasion, eastern Europe as a whole is considered a place of ‘disunion and barbarism’, full of ‘ignorant peasants’ and ‘antipathetic races’ which the Ottoman Empire controls simply by ‘turning them against each other’ (I, 86, 29, 57, 226). As these comments may suggest, their advocacy of an enlarged, self-governing Serbia became more hesitant over time, particularly

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with regard to Serbian designs on Bosnia-Herzegovina. When Arthur Evans expressed the belief, common amongst late Victorian travellers, that ‘Austria should incorporate Bosnia in her dominions,’ being ‘the only Southern state at present existing that can weld into unity that perplexed array of petty principalities and rival provinces’, Irby concurred, not perceiving in the South Slavs ‘an administration able enough or experienced enough’ for overseeing full independence.29 And it was Austrian occupancy, of course, which soon transpired. As mentioned, the Berlin Congress which followed the Russo-Ottoman War granted Austria-Hungary the control of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which it went on to annex in 1908. Although Ottoman maladministration was ended, injustices would remain, including over-taxation, inequitable employment practices and restrictions on the public usage of the Cyrillic alphabet. While Irby continued to raise a voice against imperial rule, her criticism was more muted from 1878 to her death in 1911, not least due to a need to placate the Austrian authorities to ensure the survival of her educational projects. It was shortly after Irby died – in Sarajevo, where she had taken up residence – that imperial rule in the Balkans was finally terminated. Triggered by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the First World War, ‘known briefly as the Third Balkan War’,30 not only facilitated self-government across the peninsula, but also forged major changes in balkanist representation and in patterns of female travel. The conflict has long been viewed as a key stage in the history of female emancipation. From 1914 to 1918 women vastly extended their involvement in the workplace, with some five million filling posts in factories, fields and offices that had been vacated by enlisted men, and also found themselves ‘increasingly immured in the muck and blood of no man’s land’,31 working on the battlefield as nurses, ambulance drivers, surgeons, quartermasters, administrators and, in one or two instances, soldiers. Although Sharon Ouditt cautions against overplaying its contestation of male power,32 such activity inspired a sense of professional equality with men and precipitated the achievement of female suffrage in 1918. At the same time, the war helped to draw women’s writing to the forefront of national literature. As Agnès Cardinal and others have argued, literary treatment of military conflict had traditionally been the preserve of male authors, who perpetuated ‘[t]he notion that war is man’s affair,’ feeling that women had ‘little to contribute to a set of predominantly masculine

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myths’.33 By producing a specifically female history of the First World War, women’s writing challenged the male dominance of travel literature and journalism, a challenge that intensified in the literary modernism of the 1920s. Although found most famously in the work of Vera Brittain, Sylvia Pankhurst and May Sinclair,34 wartime participation is powerfully evoked in women’s memoirs of volunteer work in the Balkans. These flooded the market from 1916 onwards, appealing to a readership eager for news from the Eastern Front and supplementing the factual bias of newspaper reportage with personal, impressionistic accounts of experience amidst conflict. The travelogues were commonly produced by non-professional writers and were published expeditiously in order to reach the British public as close to the detailed events as possible, forming a major source of information, as well as a vehicle for promoting national loyalty and raising morale. In the context of early twentieth-century feminism, the writings of Francesca Wilson, Mabel St Clair Stobart and Caroline Matthews, amongst others, communicate a palpable excitement about the new roles that the war made available.35 For Matthews, the members of the Scottish Women’s Unit stationed in western Serbia had ‘hearts which vibrate to the Call of the Wild’ and resembled the heroes of ‘those stories of adventure which I used to read in my […] youth.’36 For Wilson, the female volunteers of the Serbian Relief Fund revealed ‘a genius for organisation’, a ‘strength of character’ and a capability for ‘real friendship for one another’.37 This ardour for duty reached a peak in Stobart’s two memoirs of relief work in central Serbia. A veteran medical volunteer of the Balkan Wars, Stobart brought to her reminiscences a determined emphasis on female empowerment, asserting not only that ‘Militarism is maleness run riot’ but also that, because ‘Women’s dislike of militarism is an instinct,’ warfare ‘can only be destroyed with the help of Woman.’38 As such writings demonstrate, it was specifically Serbia, Britain’s major ally on the Eastern Front, in which these women found their vocation, and the cross-cultural friendships which developed there inevitably affected regional portraiture. As Francesca Wilson, Mabel Dearmer and Ellen Chivers Davies relate, the Serbians are ‘not wild savages as people had imagined’, but are ‘pleasant, smiling and civil’, full of ‘kindness and gratitude’ and ‘capable of great endurance’.39 For Monica Stanley, it was the Serbian women who are particularly ‘splendid, […]

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handsome and strong looking’, displaying ‘magnificent courage’ and ‘such patriotism’ that the British ‘can but kneel and pray for the [same] simple faith’.40 Leila Paget, commenting on the Serbians’ ‘courage and […] sacrifice’, drifts into hyperbole when proclaiming that their ‘depth and power of devotion […] remind me of the ancient martyrs from whose bodies, when most tortured and racked with pain, the spirit rose triumphant.’41 The shift from nineteenth-century denigration is seen in Flora Sandes’s two memoirs of service in the Balkans, An English WomanSergeant in the Serbian Army (1916) and The Autobiography of a Women Soldier (c.1927). Born in Yorkshire in 1876, the youngest daughter of an Anglican rector, Sandes pursued an active life long before her time in south-east Europe, rejecting the prohibitions placed on English womanhood and spending her days riding, shooting and touring the countryside in a French racing car. Upon the outbreak of war, she was quick to volunteer for overseas work with the St. John Ambulance Brigade, working for 18 months as a medical orderly in a Red Cross Unit attached to the Serbian Army’s Second Infantry Regiment. Although nursing was dangerous enough, exposing practitioners to shellfire and typhus, Sandes soon sought greater adventure. As the Austrian and Bulgarian forces swept across Serbia, forcing a general military evacuation through Albania to the Adriatic Sea, she took up arms as a private and saw action during both the Great Retreat and the later offensives that retook the country. The young woman’s bravery as a soldier catapulted her through the ranks to sergeant and finally to captain, and gained her a decoration for valour from the Serbian king. It also gained her first volume of reminiscences a wide and effusive readership: the London Graphic considered her tour of duty exemplary of the ‘adaptability of the new English woman’ and the Glasgow Herald termed her ‘the model of the modern girl’.42 It was perhaps with these reviews in mind that the later Autobiography, published some nine years after the war, situates her experiences within the gender politics of the age. ‘When a very small child’, she announces in the opening line, ‘I used to pray every night that I might wake up in the morning and find myself a boy’; she also expresses delight at exchanging her initial wartime role of nurse, ‘surely the most womanly occupation on earth,’ for a military service that offered ‘practically a man’s life.’43 Sandes’s engagement in guard duty, trench life, reconnaissance and the bitter raids and skirmishes

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along the frontline leaves one in no doubt about her repudiation of ‘femininity’ and its delicate convention. This is revealed both by the reported action of the texts and by the manner in which Sandes reports them. The following description of the Serbian campaign during the latter half of 1916 is stylistically indistinguishable from the male military memoirs of the period: Scorching days followed by freezing nights, when we lay on the bare mountainside in clothes soaked with perspiration, and shivered, with no covering but our overcoats. Incessant fighting, weariness indescribable, but hand-in-hand with romance, adventure and comradeship, which more than made up for everything. Days and weeks went by during which one never took one’s boots off; always on the alert, contesting very inch of the way; steadily driving the Bulgars from the positions on one mountain-top after another. Daily increasing casualties among officers and men, who not only called me ‘Brother’ – the usual term of address among Serbs – but whom I had grown to look upon as such in the close camaraderie of the Albanian Retreat […]. I served my apprenticeship in war with a vengeance, and my tough and hardy comrades, most of them young veterans of two previous wars, taught me how to be a Serbian soldier. (A16-17)

Pacy, assertive, muscular, Sandes’s narrative-driven stream of empirical data allows little space for reflection or feeling, but echoes the ‘dogged, unheroic, matter-of-fact attitude […] of the men at the Front’ (A24). Indeed, reading such passages one may feel that her transgression of patriarchal codes is complete, until one notices the many moments of ambivalence shadowing her reinvention of self, which remains at all times subject to male supervision. In the social milieu of the officer class, most obviously, Sandes ‘could never be quite sure when I was supposed to behave as a “lady” […] and when as a plain sergeant’ (A82). After a luncheon-party thrown by a French admiral, for example, during which she is seated ‘in the place of honour at his right hand at table, and treated […] as a lady guest’, she is censured for a failure to ‘comport myself as a sergeant should in the presence of his superior officers’ (A82). Similarly, she recalls being invited to dinner by a Serbian Military Commandant who, despite spending most of the evening treating her as a woman, ‘suddenly remarked […] that my hair wanted cutting, and that he should send his barber round to me next morning.’44 The best illustration of the incompleteness of Sandes’s metamorphosis comes with demobilization in October 1922. The process of resuming the social

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position of ‘an ordinary woman’ – the exchange of her uniform for a dress, the loss of male comradeship and the end of soldierly assertiveness – seems to her ‘like losing everything at one fell swoop’, and she looks back on service ‘as though it were some previous life I had lived’.45 Suffused with melancholy and loss, the coming of peace terminates not just a period of Sandes’s life, but a vital side of her selfhood that she is unlikely to recapture as a civilian. The patterns of cross-cultural representation found in her writing are similarly susceptible to reabsorption by dominant ideologies. On the one hand, and as her above description illustrates, Sandes’s view of Serbia appears to reject the ethnocentrism of nineteenth-century discourse, substituting the motifs of chaos and backwardness with those of a civilised, moral society. Instead of barbarity, there is a continual emphasis on the Serbians’ chivalry, politeness and kindliness, as well as on their affability and humour (‘their gaiety and high spirits bubbl[ing] up even under the most adverse circumstances’).46 In a direct challenge to denigratory balkanism, Sandes comments that ‘[p]eople who do not know anything about them have sometimes asked me if I was not afraid to go about among what they imagine to be a race of wild savages, but quite the opposite is the case’ (E122). This attack on preconceptions is furthered by her descriptions of the Serbian Army. The average private, ‘far from being the undisciplined soldier […] that some people suppose’, does everything ‘in good order’, as shown by the mutual respect between ranks, the absence of looting and the humane treatment of prisoners, which demonstrates that ‘cruelty is absolutely foreign to their natures’ (E45, 64, 40). Furthermore, the regular troops are ‘big, good-looking fellows’, ‘a magnificent set of men’ who endure every privation – cold, starvation, physical danger – as they fight their way back from Greece, ‘ousting the enemy from one position after another’ (A82; E102; A155). Extending Mackenzie and Irby’s support for Serbian nationhood, Sandes also admires the way that her comrades are ‘passionately attached to their own country’, evidence that in the face of Austro-German aggression ‘the spirit of Serbia was still unquenchable’ (E113; A15). The sentiment was a staple of women’s memoirs in the period. Matthews, for example, desires ‘the rebirth of the nation’ and the fulfilment of its ‘glorious destiny’, and Davies champions not only ‘Serbia’s independence’ but also the concept of ‘a new Great Serbia’ that would absorb Bosnia,

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Herzegovina, Dalmatia and Istria.47 So attached is Sandes to the nation that she becomes ‘like one family’ with the soldiers (who consider her ‘“Nashi [sic] Engleskinja”, Our Englishwoman’) and feels ‘almost as if it was my own country’, eventually swearing an oath of allegiance to the Serbian crown.48 On the other hand, there are limits to Sandes’s apparent attempt to merge her identity with that of the host culture. The author was, after all, stationed in Serbia at a time when British interests were threatened in the Near East, and her propagandising for the allied cause during trips to Britain and continual praise for the achievements of its troops establish her as a ‘representative of England’ (A13), as the Serbian soldiers call her. Significantly, Sandes only enters the Serbian Army after the move is condoned by British officialdom: initially ‘doubtful’ about enlisting, she is relieved when a locally stationed British consul and a British officer ‘both commended it, and […] told me to stick to it’ (A14). Thereafter, the military life is adopted on terms which strictly coincide with English notions of soldierly conduct. Throughout this ‘Great Adventure’, the courage she maintains in the field, the ‘grin and bear it’ attitude she shows towards hardship and the decency and self-sacrifice she shares with her regiment, not to mention a fondness for quoting Tennyson and Kipling ‘to keep up my spirits’, all conserve her within the codes of the home culture (A88, 21, 35). With a characteristic tenacity, she mocks those who romanticise war, yet admits that she seems to ‘thrive and grow fat on it’, and takes such delight in having a ‘whack at the enemy’ that she gains a ‘reputation for bravery and coolness’ (A24; E242; A43). Her patriotic loyalty to the allied cause also leads her to vilify the most immediate of Serbia’s enemies. The Bulgarians that Mackenzie and Irby extolled are now ‘wild’ and ‘marauding’, with a propensity for ‘cruelty’ evident in the way they ‘tortured and roasted alive’ their prisoners.49 Sandes’s Englishness emerges most clearly in the status she gains in the Serbian Army. Despite serving under native command, she finds that even as a private ‘privileges were often extended me’, including the allocation of a horse, the arrangement of personal accommodation and the companionship of the officer class, who treat her as one of their own and often allow her to ride ‘at the head of our company’ (A105; E151). This position of authority is also achieved in her work as a medical volunteer. During the military advance into central Serbia, the army comes across an emergency

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hospital run inefficiently by a Greek doctor, whom the author – herself suffering from fever – impugns for the ‘fearful state of things’: He then told me to do what I liked with the hospital, for […] he was sick and going to bed. Go to bed he did, and stayed there for two weeks, though there was no other doctor in the place. The three or four bolnichars (hospital orderlies) were good fellows, and the senior one priceless. All were willing to work, but said they had no one to give them orders, and begged me to do something. So, as Fate seemed to have landed me there, I took charge, and the responsibility and hard work soon completed my own cure. (A176)

From this point on, she supervises the local nurses, arranges the bedding, disinfects the wards and disciplines the unruly French patients: ‘a tough lot’ that the Serbian ‘orderlies could not handle’ but that ‘meekly’ submit to a ‘telling off’ from Sandes.50 Her femininity may be reduced, in other words, but she gains a level of influence and control that accede to the collective self-image. The maintenance of Englishness is especially evident on those occasions when she finds herself in the presence of countrymen – ‘my own kind’, as she terms them (A58) – with whom she is far less willing to transgress social codes. After one long stretch with the Serbs, for example, Sandes rides into a local town ‘to see the sights’ and stumbles upon an English sergeant-major. ‘I almost fell on his neck in my excitement,’ she gushes, ‘and he seemed equally astonished and pleased to see a fellow countrywoman. He took me up at once to the headquarters of the British Adriatic Mission, and fed me on tea and cakes’ (E172-3). Belying her previous incarnation, Sandes’s resumption of a particularly English social routine is immediate, as is her childlike passivity towards the sergeant-major, a pertinent metonym for patriarchal Britain. It was doubtless such lack of conflict between this ‘woman soldier’ and the British military hierarchy that helped reviewers to lend praise for her otherwise irredeemable incursion into masculine space. Indeed, recalling much nineteenth-century women’s travel writing, Sandes’s memoirs are insistent in pointing out that feminine decorum and sexual propriety are observed: that is, baths are taken, clothes and boots retained for sleep and sentries placed at her door at night.51 In spite of their limitations, Sandes and her contemporaries forged an important break in the discourse of balkanism. In the interwar years, an evolved strain of complimentary representation came to

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dominate British writings, not just on Serbia, but on the whole of the Balkans, as shown in the work of Grace Ellison on Yugoslavia, Margaret Loughborough on Romania, Henrietta Leslie on Bulgaria and Theodora Benson on Albania. The best example came from the radical journalist and author, Rebecca West, whose Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was, as mentioned in chapter 1, an exemplar of discursive innovation. Recording two journeys taken with her husband through Yugoslavia in 1937 and 1938, the memoir did not emerge from the experience of Balkan conflict but, composed during the Second World War, soon developed into an extended, if not epic, meditation on war, imperialism and the crisis of capitalist economics. Indeed, the travelogue would surely be considered one of the greatest works of the modernist period if only it had not been written in a genre (travel writing) and on a region (eastern Europe) marginalised alike in British literary studies.52 While rarely examined outside the context of women’s writing, Black Lamb can be viewed primarily as an intervention into the balkanist tradition. Building on Sandes’s attack on Victorian preconceptions, West condemns the usage of the word ‘Balkan’ as ‘a term of abuse, meaning a rastaquouère type of barbarian’, which articulates ‘a disorder that defies human virtue and intelligence’ and is expressed ‘with a hawking excess of gross contempt’ (pp. 21, 137, 77). Her aim is to deconstruct ‘the dark map of Europe we all of us hold in our minds’, unravelling ‘the popular legend’ of the region constructed by male journalists, historians and travel writers, who ‘tended to form an unfavourable opinion of the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire on the grounds that they were dirty and illiterate’, and who far preferred an imperial power to act as ‘custodian of the Balkans’ (pp. 44, 21, 1095-6). One of the few nineteenth-century texts selected for praise is Mackenzie and Irby’s Travels: ‘an admirable work’ which ‘told the truth’ and whose authors ‘were, like so many Victorian women outside fiction, models of courage and good sense’.53 There are several ways in which Black Lamb augments and surpasses the work of Sandes’s generation, not least being its harsh attacks on metropolitan culture. Whereas Sandes retained a fealty to the homeland, West denounces its meanness, moral laxity and spiritual impoverishment, viewing the ‘mechanized age’ as ‘superficial and economically sadist’, reducing the majority to an ‘economic Hell’ and teaching nothing of the true values of ‘birth and

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love and death’ (pp. 15, 137, 780). At the same time, she berates the continuing subjection of women in the supposedly developed nations. The text is littered with caustic asides on women needing to ‘pretend that they are inferior to men’, on women being ‘told from the day they are born that they must be beautiful’ and on the dearth of ‘repartees that the female governed can make to the male govenors’ (pp. 330, 263, 166). She consequently doubts ‘that the battle of feminism is over, [or] that the female has reached a position of equality with the male’.54 Her social criticism reaches a peak in the many passages addressing the iniquities of western imperialism, passages whose tone and import prefigure contemporary postcolonialism. ‘It is our weakness’, she exclaims, ‘to think that distant people became civilized when we looked at them, that in their yesterdays they were brutish’, remarking that the colonial project has been ‘astonishing in its corruption, in its desire for death, and in its complacency towards its disease’ (pp. 49, 952). The deficiencies of foreign rule are exemplified by the British Empire, which is composed of administrators and soldiers who ‘kick the natives in the face for fear of encouraging revolutionary movements’ and display such ‘roguery and stupidity’ in the colonised regions ‘that the general level of civilization and culture sinks’ (pp. 208, 1090-1). It is also exemplified by Great Power meddling in the Balkans, particularly the ‘criminal idiocy’ of maintaining the Ottoman Empire (p. 576). Under the guise of ‘act[ing] as a civilising influence’, the policy ‘perpetuated Balkan misery’ and ‘deprive[d] the democratic Slavs of their freedom’ (pp. 564, 613, 540). More subtly, she blames much of the peninsula’s poverty and unrest on the results of Great Power treaties, settlements, border adjustments and economic interventions. As with Mackenzie, Irby and Sandes before her, West sees the solution lying in local nationalism: ‘The only considerations which should determine the drawing of Balkan frontiers are the rights of the peoples to self-government and [freedom] from the banditry of the great powers’ (p. 791). When combined with her specific criticisms of Ottoman and Austrian interference, as well as of German and Italian influence from the mid1930s onwards, West reveals a profound grasp of the postcolonial crises of south-east Europe, crises which, despite foreshadowing those of independent Africa, Asia and the Caribbean after the 1940s, remain neglected in postcolonial studies.55

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The author’s stated motive for travelling to Yugoslavia in the heated atmosphere of the late 1930s is to understand the growth of militarism on the continent and the apparent desire that the ‘civilised nations’ have to ‘serve death instead of life’ (p. 14). In conversation with her husband she expresses a conviction that, whereas the value of the West is ‘“very little”’, Yugoslavia will be ‘“more wonderful than I can tell you”’ (pp. 22-3). The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as Yugoslavia had been know until 1929, was constructed from the ruins of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires in an attempt to combine the south Slavs into one nation under the rule of King Alexander, a scion of the Serbian monarchy. Instead of the divisiveness manifest in the rest of Europe, here was unity and progress, as well as evidence of a beauty, vitality and romance which demonstrates a ‘preference for life’.56 West finds the pre-modern landscape, for example, suffused with exuberance and wonder, its coastline forming ‘a glory of clean salt air’ and its countryside representing the ‘highest state of beauty’, where ‘[t]he expression “sylvan dell” seemed again to mean something’ and where mountains and woodlands ‘posed as background to sweet small compositions of waterfalls, fruit trees, and green lawns’ (pp. 135, 794, 295, 295). The nation’s thriving folk culture also testifies to an ‘aesthetic sensibility’ deeper than anything found in western art (p. 227). This is a country ‘where peasants sang in church with the extreme discriminating fervour which our poets envy, knowing themselves lost without it, and wore costumes splendid in their obedience to those principles of design which our painters envy, knowing themselves lost without instinctive knowledge of them’ (p. 75). West’s praise even extends to the urban environment. The warmth and community of the towns mark ‘a lovely spiritual victory over urbanization’, their topography and architecture – ‘white and clean like a peeled almond’, ‘closepacked with palaces’ – giving the visitor the impression of ‘“walking around inside an opening flower”’ (pp. 47, 731, 204, 350). Yet it is the human landscape that offers the greatest scope to West’s genius for exquisite phrasing. Robust and dignified, the Yugoslavs display both a magnificent physique – with ‘faces which recall the crucified Christ’ and ‘bodies […] as economical as a line of poetry’ (pp. 137, 660-1) – and a keen intelligence, their conversation ranging brilliantly through Nietzsche, Bergson, Shaw and Pushkin in a multiplicity of languages. ‘Among these people I walked in rapture’, she enthuses, convinced

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that she has discovered ‘humanity […] in its first unspoiled morning hour’ (pp. 1066, 323). For West, the beauty and dynamism of the Yugoslavs are not just physical qualities but have philosophical underpinnings. As she realises during a visit to a Jewish woman in Sarajevo, this philosophy can be summarised as a ‘loyal state of preference for the agreeable over the disagreeable’ (p. 401). That was brought home to me by this woman’s tender gesture of farewell. First she took all the lilacs from a vase beside her sofa and gave them to me, but then felt this was not a sufficient civility. She made me lay down the flowers, and took a scent-bottle from her table and sprinkled my hands with the scent, gently rubbing it into my skin. It was the most gracious farewell imaginable, and the Western world in which I was born would not have approved […]. She had […] assumed that I would like to receive a gift which showed that somebody who had not known me two hours before now liked me. She assumed, in fact, that I too preferred the agreeable to the disagreeable. (p. 401)

These moments of fragile beauty, recurrent on her journey, reveal ‘a remote and superior race’, one that western Europeans ‘would have to admit are wise and civilized’ (pp. 1034, 381). Such wisdom is nowhere so evident as in the ‘Slavic religious passion’, what her husband terms the Yugoslavs’ ‘“expectation of a continuous revelation that shall bring men nearer to reality, stage by stage, till there is a consummation which will make all previous stages of knowledge seem folly and ignorance”’ (pp. 160, 268). The comment may seem a stereotypical marker of eastern European alterity, projecting onto the Slavs a dense, intractable mysticism, until one realises that it perfectly describes West’s own doctrine of spiritual elucidation. She believes that this will be satisfied in her own life through ‘the revelatory quality’ of Yugoslavia, ‘where everything was comprehensible, where the mode of life was so honest that it put an end to perplexity’ (pp. 200, 1) and where a powerful attachment develops between the traveller and her travelled environment. Indeed, just as Irby settled in Sarajevo and as Sandes went on to live in Belgrade,57 so West quickly feels at home in her surroundings: ‘I was among a people I could understand’, she writes, regarding ‘Yugoslavia as if it were my mother country’.58 There are features of Black Lamb, however, which make the text less radical than it first appears. Despite writing against Victorian

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ethnocentrism, West occasionally repeats previous patterns of discursive production, or, more precisely, adapts those patterns to the political circumstances of a foreign country. In a period when Yugoslavia was far from united, but torn with resentment on the part of minorities towards the Serbian control of state institutions, West enters the political fray on the side of Belgrade, privileging Serbian culture over others in a manner which recalls the binary frameworks of colonial discourse. Most obviously, Serbia is produced as the positive pole in the Yugoslav binary, the level of the self that she awards with honour, piety and prestige. There is a continual textual emphasis on the province, with accounts of Serbian mythology, dynastic lineages and ecclesiastical traditions not only being placed at the physical centre of the book, suggestive of a wider political centrality, but also being far more extensive than those of other provinces. The manner in which she represents Serbian history is indicative of her partiality. Ever since ‘the glories of the medieval Serbian Empire’, this history has been one of nobility and romance, led by brilliant, handsome kings, with their ‘burning eyes’, ‘wild coalblack hair’, ‘strange vibrant voice[s]’ and actions ‘inspired by a Homeric conception of life’ (pp. 519, 520, 520, 520, 589). West finds the epitome of this magnificence in the Serbs’ military achievements. Referring to the years of Ottoman rule, she comments on ‘how much fairer than all the conquering might of Islam their Christian knightliness has been’, and in reference to the later Balkan Wars – to which ‘the Serbians rode southward radiant as lovers’ – she admires the officer class’s ‘sense of the sacredness of military glory’ (pp. 546, 576, 450). West is equally effusive about the new kingdom, an entity she terms a ‘historic poem’, blessed with an advanced constitution, a modern parliament, skilled statesmanship and a civil society that is ‘inherently democratic’ (pp. 593, 554). Yet her praise for the foundation of Yugoslavia is in essence a commendation of Serbia. When writing ‘of the glorious ancient Serbian Empire, of its shameful destruction by the Turks at Kossovo, of the agonizing captivity that lasted five centuries, of the liberation offered through courage by the Serbian people, and the founding of Yugoslavia, that should be as glorious as ancient Serbia’, her narrative of regional history is a history of Serbia alone, failing to acknowledge the contribution of other Yugoslav ethnicities.59 Similarly, with regard to the fresh threats to the nation’s sovereignty, West agrees with her Serbian guide, the

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ebullient Constantine, that ‘a state of Serbs, Slovenes, and Croats, controlled by a central government in Belgrade, is a necessity if these peoples are to maintain themselves against Italian and Central European pressure’.60 This propagandistic justification for a Serbcentred state is typical of Constantine, a pseudonym for Stanislav Vinaver, Press Bureau Chief for the Belgrade government, whose opinions emerge from his ethnic, rather than national, identification: ‘“I am glad that I am not a Croat,”’ he announces openly in Zagreb, ‘“but a Serb”’ (p. 88). As West wrote up Black Lamb during the terrors and uncertainties of the London blitz, it is this same identification, with its intimations of heroism and endurance, that informs her plea, ‘[l]et me behave like a Serb’.61 At the same time, and revealing the complex relationship between balkanism and orientalism, West not only uses orientalist images, motifs and evaluations to condemn Ottoman rule, but also to disparage non-Serb ethnicities, thus entering a more specifically balkanist discourse. The process is most evident in the tropes of lethargy and backwardness used to represent Slavic Muslims. For West, Bosnia-Herzegovina is ‘an undeveloped country’ that is ‘stuffed with poverty of a most denuded kind’, populated by people who ‘sit and do nothing’ and characterised by commercial outlets which have ‘the fly-blown, dusty, waking dream atmosphere that lingers in Balkan districts where the Turk has been’ (pp. 297, 397, 288, 287). Just as this moribund culture is a result of its Ottoman heritage (the Muslims of Bosnia ‘knew themselves dead and buried in their lifetime, coffined in the shell of a perished empire’ (p. 279)), so is its potential for violence and barbarism. On one occasion, seeing the crowds of Sarajevan Muslims who have turned out for a state visit of the Turkish Prime Minister, West fears that they will become ‘intoxicated with an old loyalty’ and will ‘put at a disadvantage all those not of their kind’, the author insisting on their need to be encouraged in an ‘enthusiasm for the Yugoslavian idea’ (pp. 316, 315, 317). This mixture of backwardness and latent aggression, once used to justify Great Power interventionism, is now used to vindicate the centralism of the Belgrade government. The aim of such centralism, Constantine announces airily, is that non-Serbs ‘“should live and be happy”’ (p. 397). West discovers a metonym for the benefits of Serbian control in two medical workers that she meets in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a husband and wife of Serb ethnicity who studied in Belgrade but have

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determined to use their training to advance their place of birth. Radiant with ‘kindliness, discipline, and hope’, the couple express a firm belief in the ameliorative influences which a political centre can exert on its peripheries: They spoke of their work with a sternness which seemed strange in people who are in their own country, which we hear only from colonists and missionaries in Africa and Asia. But they were in the position of colonists and missionaries, because Austria left Bosnians in the position of Africans or Asiatics […]. They told us that when they had left Bosnia after the war to study in Serbia they had been astonished at the superior lot of the Serbian peasant. His country had been sacked and invaded, but nevertheless he was better fed and better clad than his Bosnian brother. (p. 416)

The couple’s transfer of culture and science to a backward region is part of a broader civilising mission, one that seeks to ‘wage war’ on ‘dirt and irresponsibility, violence and carelessness […], cowardice and slavishness’ (p. 416). West’s portrait of other Yugoslavian provinces is similarly grounded in denigratory motifs, although here the focus is less on regional backwardness than on the improvements already made by the Belgrade government. Macedonia, for example, was primitive before 1914, its capital merely ‘a dust-heap surrounded by malarial marshes’ and its countryside beset by ‘highway robbery’, but the incorporation into Yugoslavia has brought significant material progress, ‘the result of much competent engineering, often planned with genius’ (pp. 773, 754, 666). This sketch of Macedonia, a province to which she refers by the loaded toponym, ‘South Serbia’, is similar to that of Kosovo, which she designates ‘Old Serbia’. Despite the fact ‘that many of the Albanians who became Yugoslavs under the Peace Treaty consented to the change with the utmost reluctance’, they are now properly contented, appreciating the marked ‘difference [in] the standard of living’ and the ability to ‘enjoy their share of this new prosperity’ (pp. 667, 956). The only ethnicity that resists the new order is the Croats, who seek ‘independence instead of union with Serbia’ (p. 15) and who protest about the corruption of the capital and its lack of investment in the provinces. West compares them, patronisingly, to a ‘“younger brother”’ who feels himself to be struggling ‘“under some law […] which gives the elder everything and the younger nothing”’ (p. 84). In this way, the Croats appear to resemble what Peter Hulme, in a study of imputed colonised identities,

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calls the ‘treacherous native’.62 They are ungrateful insurrectionists, West elaborates, who ‘continue to wrangle’ out of forgetfulness ‘that agreement is a pleasure and that a society which has attained tranquillity will be able to pursue many delightful ends’ (p. 82). As if worried that her point may have been missed, West ends the text by reminding her wartime readership that while the Serbs were ‘still fighting’ against Nazi Germany, the Croats had established a puppet dictatorship under Ante Pavelić, a German-sponsored ‘organizer of Croat terrorism’ (p. 1147). This is another way of saying that West’s Serbophilia, which can be traced back through Mackenzie, Irby, Sandes and many other male and female travel writers, was not an oppositional narrative, but a gesture of allegiance to British military goals during the Second World War. Indeed, Serbophilia remained such a common feature of British travel writing during the Cold War that it took a long time to disappear in the 1990s. The international response to the Bosnian crisis of that decade, Mark Wheeler argues, ‘produced constellations remarkably reminiscent of the alignments of the Great War: with the former Central Powers backing Croatia and the former Entente Powers indulging Serbia’.63 Once one has located in women’s travel writing this intricate mixture of cultural rebellion and national loyalty, it is difficult to avoid concluding that the genre is too diverse a category on which to base generalisation. As Mills has argued, it appears to display, simultaneously, (proto-)feminist concerns that are ‘self-evidently different to men’s’ and hegemonic ideologies that are ‘shared with male-authored texts’.64 Yet while accepting that travelogues necessarily articulate the ideologies of their age, female commentary on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Balkan crises can be seen as a powerful departure from the masculinist thrust of much male travel writing, exhibiting a belief in charity, community and international co-operation, as well as a sympathy for the suffering of women in wartime and for the right of women to strive for the alleviation of that suffering. And it is here that one discerns the real value of the literature. The travelogues under study helped to inaugurate both a female role in national conflict and a female literature of war, paving the way for authors such as Kate Adie, EveAnn Prentice and Janine di Giovanni, later in the twentieth century, to become some of the most respected commentators on the Yugoslav Wars.

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NOTES 1

Just as the travel genre itself suffers from ‘an acute gender imbalance’, dominated by ‘predominantly male’ authors, so the critical study of the genre had tended to ‘neglect a history of women’s travel’ (Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 111). 2 Karen Lawrence, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 1; Susan Bassnett, ‘Travel Writing and Gender’, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 233. 3 Kaplan, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1987), p. 70; Mercer, ‘Gender and Genre in Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing: Leonie d’Aunet and Xavier Marmier’, in Steve Clark, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999), p. 147. 4 Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 3, 40. 5 Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 31-2. 6 Mills, Discourses of Difference, pp. 20, 4. 7 Allcock and Young, ‘Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Outward and Inward Frontiers’, in Allcock and Young, eds, Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, pp. xvii-xviii. 8 Cited in ibid., p. xv. 9 See Dorothy Anderson, The Balkan Volunteers (London: Hutchinson, 1968), pp. 922. 10 Monica Krippner, The Quality of Mercy: Women at War, Serbia 1915-18 (Newton Abbot and London: David and Charles, 1980), p. 13. 11 Dorothy Anderson, Miss Irby and Her Friends (London: Hutchinson, 1966), pp. 389. 12 This was rare during a century in which British travellers preferred to consort only with Ottoman officials, as was Mackenzie and Irby’s willingness to repeat in their text the inhabitants’ criticisms of British foreign policy. With a knowledge of Serbo-Croat at their command, they chastise previous travellers who despite ‘detailing the grievances of these Christians have seldom had their stories first hand’ (Mackenzie and Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, 5th edn, 2 vols (1867; London: Daldy, Isbister and Co., 1877), I, 270). 13 There were many who believed, with Gladstone, that ‘no diplomatist, no consul, no traveller, among our countrymen, has made such a valuable contribution to our means of knowledge in this important matter, as was made by Miss Mackenzie and Miss Irby’ (Gladstone, ‘Preface’ to Mackenzie and Irby, Travels, I, ix). 14 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, pp. 97-8. 15 Writing against denigratory balkanism, they bemoan the way that, ‘among us Westerners, there is the […] disposition to judge harshly of those nations on whom fell the weight of the Turk […]. It is pleasant to conclude that, because we escaped destruction, we must be better than those who were destroyed’ (Mackenzie and Irby, Travels, II, 305-6).

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16 The text romanticises Serbian history and legend, endorsing the sentiments of an Old Serbian ballad that “‘the Serbs have the proud and princely bearing, and the glad, fearless eye of heroes”’, and commending ‘the atmosphere of poetry and romance which surrounds the mediaeval sites of Serbian power’ (ibid, II, 277; I, 115). 17 Quoted in Anderson, Miss Irby, pp. 32-3; Mackenzie and Irby, Travels, I, 37, 154. The first observation was made in a pamphlet, entitled Notes on the South Slavonic Countries in Austria and Turkey in Europe (1865), written shortly after their return to Britain. Regarding the British ‘patronage of the Turks’, they mischievously report an Italian consul’s comment that he would ‘“be very sorry to eat the amount of dirt swallowed by English consuls in Turkey”’ (Mackenzie and Irby, Travels, II, 272, 177). 18 Education, particularly female education, was Irby’s passion, as evidenced by the text’s continual accounts of school visits and discussions with local teachers. Interestingly, Edith Durham, who in 1906 visited the girls’ school that Irby established in Sarajevo, gives the impression that this was a ‘Nationalist school’ promoting a political Serb Orthodoxy that was ‘wildly anti-Turk and furiously antiCatholic’ (Durham, Twenty Years of the Balkan Tangle, p. 165). 19 Evans, Illyrian Letters, p. 220. 20 An example is their disgust at the Greek superstition that a corpse must be disinterred one year after death, a practice which causes ‘agony’ to those ‘educated mothers’ who have lost children (Mackenzie and Irby, Travels, I, 62). See also ibid., I, 132; I, 149; I, 206-7; I, 269; II, 128; II, 171-2; II, 267-71. 21 Famously, Mary Astell’s preface to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s account of travels through the Balkans to Constantinople comments on ‘how much better […] the ladies travel than their lords’, demonstrating a ‘skill to strike out a new path, and to embellish a worn-out subject with a variety of fresh and elegant entertainment’ (Astell, ‘Preface by a Lady’, in Montagu, The Travel Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, new edn (1763; London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), p. 34). 22 Quoted in Omer Hadžiselimović, ‘Two Victorian Ladies and Bosnian Realities, 1862-1875: G.M. MacKenzie and A.P. Irby’, in Allcock and Young, eds, Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, p. 2. This self-negation occurred in other female texts from the period: the weighty political chapter of Emily Strangford’s The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic (1864), for example, is written by her husband, the eighth Viscount Strangford, a former secretary at the British Embassy in Constantinople. 23 Quoted in Anderson, Miss Irby, p. 36. This is repeated later in the text when the narrator hesitates over ‘venturing an opinion on […] political projects’ (Mackenzie and Irby, Travels, I, 66). The two women also use a welter of male sources throughout, including historians, consular officials and such travel writers as Arthur Evans, Lord Strangford, W.J. Stillman, A.A. Paton and Sir Gardner Wilkinson. 24 Foster and Mills, ‘Introduction’ to Foster and Mills, eds, An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 8. 25 Mackenzie and Irby, Travels, I, 93; II, 150; II, 135. So imperious are they that the inhabitants of Kosovo view them either as ‘“kralitze (queens)”’ or as representatives of ‘the British sovereign’ who has sent them ‘to ascertain the condition of the dominions of her queer ally the Turk’ (ibid., II, 90, 38). Their Englishness even leads them to dream of Bosnia ‘some day becom[ing] our main highway to India’ and to

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lament the fact that attempts by ‘English speculators’ to extract mineral resources are thwarted by ‘the present regime’ (ibid., I, 2, 3). 26 Hadžiselimović, ‘Two Victorian Ladies’, p. 6; Anderson, Miss Irby, p. 202. 27 Mackenzie and Irby, Travels, II, 119, 87. This denigration underpins their contempt for the idea of Albanian independence. The Catholic Albanians, for example, have no ‘national consciousness’ and ‘lack all signs of such modern improvement and organization as that by which the last rulers of Montenegro have succeeded in establishing security and order within their own domains’ (ibid., II, 199, 123). The future for ‘the Albanian Mahommedan’ is likely to be ‘slavery to a despotic government administered by foreign officials ’ (ibid., I, 221). 28 Ibid., I, 1, 25, 3. Significantly, even the indigenous female population is drawn into this denigration: Albanian women are condemned for having ‘dirty and ugly faces’, Greek women ‘fall short’ of ‘the refinement and loftiness of the Western lady’ and Turkish women would be found to have little allure should they ever ‘show their faces honestly beside those of European women’ (I, 180, 58, 238). 29 Evans, Illyrian Letters, pp. xi, 69; Anderson, Miss Irby, p. 168. 30 Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804-1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 312. 31 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century; Volume 2, Sexchanges (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 262. Statistics for women’s wartime employment are found in Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War (London and New York: Routledge, 1981), pp. 46-7. 32 Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 32-3. Suzanne Raitt, paraphrasing Sandra Gilbert, also mentions that ‘women felt intense anxiety and guilt at having got what they wanted at so many men’s expense’ (Raitt, ‘“Contagious Ecstasy”: May Sinclair’s War Journals’, in Raitt and Trudi Tate, eds, Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 65). 33 Agnès Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman and Judith Hattaway, ‘Introduction’ to Cardinal, et al., eds, Women’s Writing of the First World War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 4-5. Eva Figes also comments that ‘History, being written by men, excludes women from its pages’ (Figes, ‘Introduction’ to Figes, ed., Women’s Letters in Wartime, 1450-1945, new edn (1993; London: Pandora, 1994), p. 17). 34 See, for example, Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933), Sylvia Pankhurst, The Home Front (1932) and May Sinclair, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915). The excellent reportage on women’s experiences on the home front includes an article by Rebecca West in which she details their work in the munitions factories. This ‘deadly domestic process’, she writes, produces ‘a life […] completely parallel to that of the regular army’ (West, ‘The Cordite Makers’, in West, The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-1917, ed. by Jane Marcus (London: Virago, 1983), pp. 380, 382). 35 As Stobart remarks on the period, ‘[i]t is true that when I was young it was not customary for girls to have ambitions or professions beyond that of marriage […]; in Victorian days they could faint at the sight of a mouse, and in these days they can cut up human bodies without a shudder’ (Stobart Miracles and Adventures: An Autobiography (London: Rider and Co., 1935), p. 11).

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36 Matthews, Experiences of a Woman Doctor in Serbia (London: Mills and Boon, 1916), pp. 72, 173. 37 Wilson, In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and between Three Wars (London: John Murray, 1944), p. 58. 38 Stobart, The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916), pp. vii-viii. Her view repeats Christabel Pankhurst’s belief that military combat is a sign of the failures of patriarchy: war ‘is the World as men have made it’, she proclaims: ‘only by the help of women could civilisation have been other than cruel, predatory, destructive’ (Pankhurst, ‘The War’, reprinted in Angela K. Smith, ed., Women’s Writing of the First World War: An Anthology (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 15). 39 Wilson, Margins of Chaos, p. 11; Dearmer, Letters from a Field Hospital (London: Macmillan, 1916), pp. 98, 109; Davies, A Farmer in Serbia (London: Methuen, 1916), p. 71. 40 Stanley, My Diary in Serbia, April 1, 1915–Nov. 1, 1915 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1916), pp. 58-9. 41 Paget, With Our Serbian Allies: Second Report (London: Serbian Relief Fund, 1916), p. 99. 42 Quoted in Julie Wheelwright, ‘Captain Flora Sandes: A Case Study in the Social Construction of Gender in a Serbian Context’, in Allcock and Young,eds, Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, p. 86. 43 Sandes, The Autobiography of a Woman Soldier: A Brief Record of Adventure with the Serbian Army, 1916-1919 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, c.1927), p. 9. 44 Ibid., p. 83. On those occasions that she dons women’s clothing she finds herself either disciplined by her superiors or ordered to change back into uniform ‘because they declared they did not know how to talk to me when dressed like that’ (ibid., p. 84). She concludes that ‘[i]t’s a hard world where half the people say you should not dress as a man, and the other half want to punish you for dressing as a woman’ (ibid., p. 85). 45 Ibid., pp. 220-1. As Sandes writes, ‘I cannot attempt to describe what it now felt like, trying to get accustomed to a woman’s life and a woman’s clothes again; and also to ordinary society after having lived entirely with men for so many years. […] Turning from a woman into a private soldier proved nothing compared with turning back from soldier to ordinary woman’ (ibid., p. 220). 46 Sandes, An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916), p. 84. 47 Matthews, Experiences of a Woman Doctor, pp. 55, 40; Davies, Farmer in Serbia, pp. 247-8, 91. 48 Sandes, Autobiography, pp. 91, 14; English Women-Sergeant, p. 14. Her fervent summary of her time with the Serbian Army, ‘I never loved anything so much in my life’ (Sandes, Autobiography, p. 195), was repeated by other volunteers in Serbia. Ellen Chivers Davies claimed ‘I love the life here’ and Monica Stanley wrote that she was ‘quite in love with this place’ (Davies, Farmer in Serbia, p. 142; Stanley, My Diary in Serbia, p. 88). 49 Sandes, English Women-Sergeant, pp. 106, 5; Sandes, Autobiography, pp. 158, 156. This is repeated in her representations of the Albanians. During her account of the Serbian evacuation, the natives are not the ‘fine picturesque race of men’ that she has

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expected, but ‘a very degenerate looking race indeed’, living in ‘squalor and filth’ and playing ‘tricks’ on the retreating Serbs, including ambush and extortion (Sandes, English Women-Sergeant, pp. 121, 120, 131). 50 Sandes, Autobiography, pp. 177-9. Her status is also illustrated by her allocation of a servant, or batman, whose job is ‘to look after you […] day and night’ (ibid., p. 94). It is with proprietorial satisfaction that she describes how one ‘devoted’ servant, whom she terms ‘my little batman’, ‘would cheerfully have given his life for mine if occasion had arisen’ (ibid., p. 23). Her power is increased when she achieves a commissioned rank and gains the command of a platoon, allowing her to issue orders and ‘to punish the vod [platoon] en masse’ when discipline is slack (ibid., p. 204). 51 See Sandes English Woman-Sergeant, pp. 61-2, 28, 50, 54. One curious example occurs when Sandes’s ability to ‘pass as a man’ is put to the test by her captain, who takes her ‘to a sort of café’ and introduces her to some of the ‘girls’ (Sandes, Autobiography, p. 85). She assents to one of the women sitting on her lap, but writes that ‘when she kissed me I could not help turning my head away’, thereby signalling the maintenance of sexual propriety to her readership (ibid., p. 86). The scene, set in a wretched frontline brothel, also shows her tendency to absorb masculinist practices, problematising the idea that this is a proto-feminist text. 52 After 800 pages West realises that this is a work ‘which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length’, and after 1158 pages she admits to considering it a ‘gratuitous labour’ (West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, pp. 773, 1158). Nevertheless, Peter Wolfe is not unusual in deeming it ‘the masterwork of travel literature in our century’ (Wolfe, Rebecca West: Artist and Thinker (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 26). 53 West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, pp. 1156, 1095, 964. As an extension of her attack on western balkanism, the author shows a respect for indigenous commentary on the region and records what she terms the indigenes’ ‘hatred of Western Europe’s hatred of the Balkans’ (ibid., p. 721). She also foresees the development of the academic study of cross-cultural discourse: ‘It is to be hoped’, she comments with balkanism in mind, ‘that some expert historian will at some future date deal with this curious example of the difficulty humanity experiences in acquiring knowledge about itself. When whole periods have been seduced into such fantasies, it is only to be expected that individual authors have succumbed’ (ibid., p. 1153). 54 Ibid., p. 124. West’s feminism is formally announced in the opening lines when, in direct speech, she announces her decision to take a holiday in Yugoslavia to her husband, only to find that he is asleep; male opinion is thus silenced and rarely intrudes upon the female voice (that of West herself) for the rest of the text. Ann Norton considers Black Lamb to be one of the best examples of how ‘West dares to rebel, in the full confidence of her own intellect, against mighty “fathers”’ (Norton, Paradoxical Feminism: The Novels of Rebecca West (Lanham: International Scholars Publications, 2000), p. 80). 55 For example, she condemns the ‘militarist ardour and religious fanaticism’ of the ‘Turks’ which produced a ‘death in life’ for the Christian populations (West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, pp. 649, 137). Similarly, Austrian rule was marked by ‘brutality and inefficiency’, deficiencies that she blames on the Austrians’ ‘violent, instinctive loathing of all Slavs’ (ibid., pp. 4, 5). During the early 1940s, Italian and German occupation of the peninsula is marked by ‘wheedling and demanding and

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snatching’, the conquering forces treating ‘the peasants [as] simply brute beasts for exploitation’ (ibid., pp. 123, 52). As she concludes, ‘[i]t is certain that the Balkans lost more from contact with all modern empires than they ever gained’ (ibid., p. 1095). 56 Ibid., p. 952. The author’s dichotomisation of western Europe and the Balkans is expressed through a representational framework based on life/death symbolism, the most notable instances being the eponymous black lamb and grey falcon. For a discussion of their significance, see Andrew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), pp. 149-51. 57 See Jane Robinson, Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 270. 58 West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, pp. 38, 1. One of the few social factors that counters West’s love of the country is patriarchal injustice: see, for example, ibid., pp. 404, 673-4, 677, 744, 811-12, 945, 1036. 59 Ibid., p. 842. West either dismisses or excuses historical facts that oppose her viewpoint. For example, she defends King Alexander against the accusations of oppression which he received after proclaiming a dictatorship in 1929 and defends Belgrade against accusations of hoarding the nation’s wealth (ibid., pp. 602-14, 477). Furthermore, there are few internal problems which she fails to blame on ‘the criminal idiocy of […] the great powers’ (ibid., p. 576). 60 Ibid., pp. 41-2. She expresses sympathy for King Alexander’s post-war hope ‘not for a Yugoslavia, not for a union of all South Slavs, but for a Greater Serbia that should add to the kingdom of Serbia all the Austro-Hungarian territories in which the majority of the inhabitants were Serbs’ (ibid., p. 590). The similarity of Alexander’s ‘Greater Serbia’ to that sought by the Milošević regime in the 1990s is caution enough against the ethnic supremacism on which is it predicated (see Janet Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 181). 61 West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, p. 1126. Even reviewers of the day felt that West’s partisanship had gone too far. Katherine Woods, reviewing for the New York Times, complained about her ‘excessively pro-Serbian stance’ and Stoyan Pribichevich, in The Nation, felt that she ‘had become a stooge for the government press bureau in Belgrade’ (Woods, quoted in Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 166; Pribichevich, quoted in Carl Rollyson, The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1998), p. 180). 62 Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 163. 63 Wheeler, ‘Not So Black as It’s Painted: The Balkan Political Heritage’, in F.W. Carter and H.T. Norris, eds, The Changing Shape of the Balkans (London: UCL Press, 1996), p. 3. 64 Mills, Discourses of Difference, p. 28.

Chapter 7: An Escape from Decadence In the early years of the eighteenth century, George Gordon, later Lord Byron, spent over a year travelling around the western fringes of the Ottoman Empire. Claiming to be ‘leav[ing] England without regret’,1 Byron went on to discover in the mountains of ‘Turkey-in-Europe’ a frank and terrifying beauty which would inspire some of his best loved poetry. In the second canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), where his visit to Albania is placed into poetic form, his hero approaches a ‘shore unknown / Which all admire, but many dread to view’ and glimpses amid mountains ‘Robed half in mist’ a remarkable human drama: Morn dawns: and with it stern Albania’s hills [...] Arise; and, as the clouds along them break, Disclose the dwelling of the mountaineer; Here roams the wolf, the eagle whets his beak, Birds, beasts of prey, and wilder men appear [...].2

In this primal landscape, humanity is indistinguishable from nature and consequently opposed to the civilisation that Bryon had left behind. Yet in the nobility of their condition, and in their proud maintenance of liberty (these are ‘savage men’ who ‘from their rocky hold / Hurl their defiance far’3), the crude markers of denigratory balkanism are transformed via the poet’s primitivist imaginings into signifiers of worth. This usage of unspoiled landscape as ‘a lonely spot to conjure up visions of the past’,4 in Caroline Franklin’s words, was a distinctive feature of European Romanticism. Indeed, in writing that ‘The scene was savage, but the scene was new; / This made the ceaseless toil of travel sweet’, Byron distilled the essence of Romantic travel, while also creating an alternative portrait of south-east Europe that would influence a strand of balkanism for the next century and a half.

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Although expressed with uncommon talent, there was nothing new about Byron’s desire for an alternative to western decadence. Since ancient times, human consciousness has eluded the crises and concerns of civilisation through an idealised vision of pre-modern reality. With the sense of decline current in antiquity, a belief in the temporal existence of an earthly paradise, the so-called ‘life under Kronos,’ was gradually invested with the attributes of spatial location. As Neil Rennie relates in Far-Fetched Facts (1995), the myth ‘sought to locate in a geographical present what was lost in a historical past,’5 sustaining the hope that the questing Hero could emerge from a state of moral and spiritual malaise and set out towards a locale of prelapsarian splendour. Such mythological ‘travel’ not only produced the etymological ‘travail’ of the physical journey but also the psychological ‘progress’ of growth and realisation. So great was the potential of the pre-modern destination, in fact, that reports of discovering a lost Golden Age recurred in the imaginative accounts of mediaeval and renaissance voyaging, reinvigorating what Heather Herderson has termed the ‘Westerner’s quest for origins’.6 Nonetheless, as unoriginal as Byron’s generation may have been, they brought a new profundity to the theme. With the unprecedented social transitions of the late eighteenth century, and the evident menace of military and technological developments in the early decades of the nineteenth, the pursuit of an earthly paradise also assumed a greater urgency. As a philosophy, Romanticism was mistrustful of the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, opposing its creeds of science and progress and disdaining the corrupt values of a new urban modernity. Instead, poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron turned to an idealised rural world, where an intimate and unbroken connection between the human community and nature offered a deep spiritual solace. In communing with the natural environment, the human mind was believed not only to attain ‘a higher reality beyond the reach of the senses’, but also ‘to escape from the sin of selfhood, isolation, involution’.7 While continuing to inform Victorian literature, Romanticism experienced a powerful revival in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the autobiographical journeys of the travelogue. In another period marked by industrialisation, militarism and rapid social transition, British travellers departed to the ‘primitive’ places of the globe in a purely sentimental quest for lost traditions. Eschewing the scientific

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empiricism of nineteenth-century exploration, they evoked such farflung destinations as the Americas, the African Equator and the South Sea Islands with an uncompromising mixture of esteem and exoticism. At the same time, a conviction of having entered realms of sacred custom inspired the travel writer to lavish accounts of spiritual and emotional renewal, a remnant of the old mythological notion of journeying which, with the sense of arrival in a temporal, as much as a spatial, location, had clear implications for a degenerate West. Mark Cocker goes so far as to term the travel writer ‘a prophet-like figure: [...] someone with a deeply unpopular message to communicate, which is yet of vital importance to society.’8 In this sense, the modernday pilgrimage retained an optimism contrary to the general trend within English literature. From the lowest form of guidebook to the ‘high’ prose of a writer like D.H. Lawrence, travel writing produced revelations which disclaimed both the dreary speculations of early twentieth-century fiction and the escape into aestheticism and artifice by the Decadent movement of the 1890s. As this chapter will detail, the Balkans inspired exemplary enthusiasm from the British traveller. The ‘much-bedevilled peninsula’ formed the closest appropriate destination for what Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of the most celebrated of those travellers, has termed the Westerner’s ‘flight from the humdrum’.9 Early twentieth-century commentators discerned in the region’s archaic social structures and primordial stretches of countryside, not backwardness and savagery, but a beauty, vibrancy and ‘fascinating touch of romance’ that aroused their admiration.10 This is not to say that appreciation of pre-modern society was absent in travelogues of the nineteenth century, when it formed a subordinate strand of representation; nor was it the sole style of portraiture in the inter-war years, when there were texts, or sections of texts, which continued to denigrate the peninsula. Yet Romanticism undoubtedly moved from a subordinate to a dominant position in balkanist discourse, consolidating a paradigm shift that had been inaugurated by the writings of the First World War. The primitive climate of the region, firstly, compared favourably to what Matthew Arnold termed the ‘depression and ennui’11 of decadent society. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the British discourse on northern Albania, a remote, inaccessible tribal region still governed by the code of the blood feud, prefigured the Romanticism of the 1920s. Wadham Peacock, a former

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British Consul-General stationed in Shkodër, remarks in Albania (1914) that the country was so obscure that the British postal service had only ‘vague notions as to our whereabouts’: ‘[a] letter plainly addressed “Albania”’, he reports, ‘was once sent to America, and returned from Albany, N.Y., with the inscription, “Try Europe”’.12 Despite moments of condescension, Peacock grows so attached to the rugged scenery, archaic townscapes and ancient customs and superstitions that ‘other countries seemed vague and unreal’ in comparison, the author regretting that Albania will inevitably become ‘Europeanised’ and that ‘the old life will pass away to be replaced by a bastard civilisation’ (pp. 132, 84, 52). This love of the picturesque is nowhere more evident than in his descriptions of the Albanian men. These appear to be ‘theatrical-looking brigands’, with their ‘tightfitting clothes of white felt embroidered with black’ and their ‘arsenals of weapons, pistols and long knives’, yet are ‘fine, honest fellows’ given to courtesy, hospitality and an old-fashioned dignity (pp. 11-12). The respect for native masculinism is expanded elsewhere in the text: the average chieftain, ‘proud and silent on his crags’, is ‘a king among men’, being ‘straight and slim’, ‘with long fair moustaches, keen eyes, square shoulders and stately carriage’, and having a ‘doggedness’ characteristic of this ‘nation of warriors’ (pp. 128, 179, 105, 199, 39, 51, 128). Although Peacock laments the prevalence of the blood feud, which can erupt over the most trivial of disagreements between families or clans, he shows a sneaking admiration for the Albanians’ love of weaponry,13 as well as for the wild vitality that the vendettas produce. Shkodër is ‘enlivened by an interchange of shots whenever the members of families […] had blood between them’, and, with the Albanians tending to express pleasure by ‘firing a bullet into the air regardless of possible accidents’, a celebration such as the end of Ramadan is marked by ‘the roar of cannons and the banging of rifles and pistols’ (pp. 129, 33). Other travel writings on the region were remarkably similar in style and content. Edith Durham, whose journey recounted in High Albania took place some years after Peacock’s residency, is equally fascinated by local gun culture and, despite striving for the empirical tone of ethnology, barely contains her rollicking, infectious delight at this ‘Land of the Living Past’.14 The custom of firing off a salvo upon greeting acquaintances, for example, which the Englishwoman joined in with abandon, certainly brings out the best in her writing. ‘As each batch came in sight of the church they

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yelled for the priest’, she writes on one Sunday gathering of tribes; then ‘bang, bang went fifty rifles at once; swish-ish-ish flew the bullets; pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop replied the priest’s old sixshooter’ (p. 49). The turbulence of the region is given such lively attention in High Albania that one timid reviewer bewailed that the ‘book literally reeks of blood.’15 Yet the western traveller’s sympathy for pre-modern culture was far from the ‘spiritual and moral perversity’ championed by nineteenth-century Decadence.16 The strict, enduring structures of Balkan society were frequently contrasted to the processes of transition and decay afflicting the West and aroused a good deal of ethical reflection in British travelogues. Much of Durham’s fascination with highland Albania, for example, derives from her perception of a living continuum of European tradition utterly unsullied by the rot of European modernity. In the more anthropological sections of the book, particular significance is drawn from the ‘Canon of Lek’, a body of archaic Illyrian codes that dictated the village mores surrounding marriage, property and the protocol of blood vengeance. For Durham, the Canon forms the kind of primitive communal framework from which western history has diverged, and also creates a humane and simple virtue that has somehow been lost during the course of the western Enlightenment. While accepting the shortcomings of the feud, for instance, she pays continual homage to the rigid order, sacrifice and personal honour that derive from adherence to its tenets. At the same time, the kindliness and hospitality encoded within primitive law are pointedly distinguished from ‘the meannesses of what is called civilisation’ and lead her to ‘wonder [...] why people ever think they would like to be civilised’ (pp. 175, 255). In order to emphasise its spiritual and cultural value, Durham depicts the Canon through a host of biblical and classical allusions which, despite the notion of ‘fall’ innate within Greek and Christian thought, imbue Albania with a sense of stasis, coherence and continuity. ‘The wanderer from the West stands awestruck’, she proclaims, ‘filled with vague memories of the cradle of his race, saying, “This did I do some thousands of years ago; thus did I lie in wait for mine enemy; so thought I and so acted I in the beginning of Time”’ (p. 1). With the reckless acceleration of public and private time within Britain, it is an impression that brings spiritual consolation to the author:

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Only five years after those words were written, Britain found itself on the brink of the First World War. Although inaugurated by an upsurge in Balkan nationalism, the war would thrust Durham’s misgivings about the value of western transition into sharper focus. The brutal nature of the fighting across western Europe, combined with the Great Power machinations that lay at its source, exposed the very idea of civilisation as a hollow sham. ‘All that we call civilisation’, one American traveller in Albania claimed in 1922, ‘is like a tune heard yesterday, a little thing floating on the surface of our minds’.17 Amongst the western intelligentsia at least, the notions of progress, modernity and empire would never again find the widespread patronage they had achieved during the Victorian era. In terms of the Balkan travelogue, the First World War also produced a distinct yet subtle shift in the style of romantic portraiture. The post-war settlement had brought national sovereignty to all the south-east European countries and, within the consequent flurry of travelogues that appeared in the 1920s, Durham’s primitivist idealism was rarely repeated. It was as though a younger generation, after the carnage and savagery of the recent conflict, had seen enough of society’s untamed impulses, and, as Paul Fussell recounts, the Victorian’s desire for adventure passed to a craving for calm, restful experiences ‘entirely opposite to the trench scene in northern France and Belgium’.18 Paul Edmonds’s Albanian journal, To the Land of the Eagle (1927), demonstrates how the Balkans could accommodate the new craving, albeit with a certain modification of the landscape. Exchanging Durham’s route around the highlands for a tour of the south, Edmonds discovers a ‘delightful part of Europe’, a ‘romantic’ countryside ‘bright with wild flowers’ and ‘sunny mountains’, dotted with ‘pretty little towns’ and ‘villages of great charm’, and populated by ‘sturdy peasants’ in ‘picturesque costumes’.19 The scenery around Vlorë, where ‘[t]he tinkling of the sheep-bells makes pleasant music’ and ‘white-fezzed shepherds lie in the shade watching their flocks’, is

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the Romanticist’s vision of ‘paradise’: a prelapsarian community living harmoniously with a benevolent nature (pp. 129, 205). This reconstruction of the region continued to suggest an alternative to spiritual confusion and industrial malaise (what Edmonds terms ‘sordid existence […] in dreary manufacturing towns’ (p. 232)), yet rejected the ideals of primitivism in favour of pastoralism; a primitivism, that is, with the rough and uncomfortable edges removed. The new method of representing the Balkans was best illustrated by British travel writing on Romania. In contrast to much of Albania’s rocky fastnesses, the Romanian countryside formed a softer, more sympathetic landscape of agrarian and folk tradition which, in the eyes of the passing traveller, seemed to fit the latest desire for rustic idyllicism. That the landscape could also suggest simpler, happier ages by which to set off the contemporary West was shown by E.O. Hoppé’s In Gipsy Camp and Royal Palace (1924). Although travelling by train and car, the author’s depiction of a temporal journey into a bygone era of Chaucerian cottages, dashing landlords and fairy-tale castles conjures up both the pre-industrial charm of eighteenth-century England and the rigid social order of the Middle Ages. In his dealings with the peasantry, for example, Hoppé evokes a world of unblemished innocence, in which harvesters stand ‘like lilies of the field’, homesteads ‘are dotted with flowering shrubs’, ‘maidens sang [...] with wholehearted happiness’ and villagers show a marked ‘feudal humility’.20 At the other end of the social scale, the rural governing classes combine a cheerful vivacity with such ‘Lord of the Manner’ courtesy that Hoppé discerns an elementary version of the English aristocracy (p. 115). The impression of a venerable social order is heightened in his descriptions of Queen Marie, ‘a modern fairy queen’ with whom he has several encounters (p. 69). Marie’s strength of character, captivating beauty and, most of all, her sympathetic regard for the peasantry, inspire the most overt passages of medieval pastoralism in the book. ‘It is not surprising that she is beloved by her people,’ the author comments on a drive they take together, and I witnessed many proofs of their affection and regard for her on the journey. We stopped several times on the way, and she conversed freely with the peasants, on one occasion begging for a beautiful rose which grew in a cottager’s little garden. The people along the route

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Hoppé’s construction of feudal harmony, with its social unity and rustic pleasures, was a common feature of the Romanian travelogue of the period. Walter Starkie’s Raggle-Taggle (1933), Archibald Forman’s Rumania through a Windscreen (c.1938), Derek Patmore’s Invitation to Roumania (1939) and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s remembered landscape of Between the Woods and the Water (1986) all summon up that merry hierarchy of peasant, aristocrat and monarch central to romantic feudalism.21 Although reformulating the nature of the region’s pre-modernity, the revelations that such works drew from the medieval format were not dissimilar to those of the primitivist. The vibrancy of the region continued to arouse appreciation, with Fermor calling Romania a place ‘of comedy, adventure and delight’ and Starkie contrasting Balkan life to the ‘selfconscious mediocrity’ of western urban existence.22 Nor were the structures of medieval faith and simplicity lacking in ethical resonance for the travel writer. As much of the modernist fiction of the period illustrated, British society of the 1920s and 1930s had acquired a religious doubt and social aimlessness entirely opposed to the knowable universe that the travelogues evoked. From the humblest peasant up to the crowned monarch, the medieval design was one of duty, belief, regulation and an assurance in cosmic order which, as Hoppé’s rustics demonstrate, endowed the individual with a spiritedness remote in time and place from ‘the langueurs of a tired civilisation.’23 Such discoveries, of course, had little to do with Balkan reality. By the late 1920s, south-east Europe was fraught with the political afflictions common to post-colonial nations and with the economic effects of a slump in agricultural prices.24 To detect amid the resultant poverty and discontent a living golden age (referred to by British visitors as ‘Arcadian’, ‘paradisical’, ‘a tiny Garden of Eden’25) clearly involved a sweeping rearrangement of the contemporary landscape. Ironically, the travel writer’s invention of a natural paradise, while remaining moral in intent, duplicated two of the literary techniques by which Decadence had created its fictional worlds of artifice. The first is what Richard Le Gallienne termed the Decadent’s ‘expression of isolated observations’,26 the couching of a subject in a particularly selective form of commentary. In the case of Hoppé, Starkie and

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Fermor, this involved briefly admitting peasant hardship or rural injustice, before going on to counteract the allusion via an extended emphasis on sylvan imagery. The second technique was the unremitting elegance with which they approached their subject, a process captured in Le Gallienne’s phrase, ‘l’emploi de mots rares’.27 The ornate formality of Hoppé’s prose, for instance, combined with his preference for antediluvian diction – ‘beloved’, ‘cottager’ and ‘maiden’ are quoted above – invested his Romania with the kind of enchantment that Huysmans and Wilde projected onto synthetic beauty. A greater example was Fermor’s ‘decorative confection of brilliant language’, as the Spectator considered it.28 In a typical passage, the bewildering array of traditional costume found in Transylvania produces a flood of baroque terminology: ‘ribands, goffering, ruffs, sashes, caps, kerchiefs, coifs and plaits’, he writes on female attire: ‘There were bodices, flowing or panelled sleeves, embroidery, gold coins at brow or throat or both, aprons front and back, a varying number of petticoats and skirts jutting at the hips like farthingales’.29 The literary refinement builds up through his book to form a level of textual beauty by which Romania is coloured rather than revealed. A similar effect was produced by the travel writers’ usage of impressionistic techniques, a form of early modernism which rejected scientific realism, and its concern with the objective details of observed place, for an analysis of the fleeting effects of place on the mind and feelings of the observer.30 In his Roumanian Journey (1938), Sacheverell Sitwell’s description of a boat trip along the Danube Delta is typical in indicating emotional experience through a sustained focus on colour and light. As Sitwell’s boat moves from the river’s mouth into the Black Sea, he seems to leave the tangible world behind and pass into a realm of pure sensation: The sea stretches out into immensity, and numberless mirages play upon the horizon. It is not even possible to be certain of the horizon. Everything in sight trembles and glitters with the heat, which beats up again and rebounds from off the metal waters. […] And now come green islands, lifted but an inch or two above the tideless sea, like dairy meadows […] flattened into greenness by the sunlight. Far away, white cities gleamed and sparkled upon the horizon. It was the Orient of white domes and minarets; or it was the deception of a cool mirage in this reverberant heat. And then the truth came. Those were white pelicans, towns of white pelicans camped upon the islands.31

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The description is comprised almost exclusively of colour: green, white and grey (‘metal waters’) run through the passage, harmonising Sitwell’s portrait of unbounded space. Of the two corporeal entities mentioned, the pelicans are less a solid, material presence than a part of the broader mirage, and the islands, ‘flattened into greenness’, are merely the impression of land, as insubstantial as the waters around them. Rather than chart a geographical seascape, in short, Sitwell examines the feelings the seascape evokes: those of unreality, the scene being ‘ghostly and inexplicable’, and of solitude, his comment on one island that ‘[t]here was not a footprint on this green shore’ calling up Crusoe’s shipwrecked seclusion.32 As with Fermor’s listing of archaic coinages, this foregrounding of style produces a reported environment that is not a genuine living entity, tainted with the normal faults and failings, but an impeccable achievement of words. The literary techniques deployed by travel writers – including self-reflexivity, interior analysis and stream of consciousness – were influenced by the new currents in modernist fiction and poetry, many of which developed out of the period’s growing interest in psychology. Familiar with the writings of Sigmund Freud, modern writers exchanged an objectivist attention to the external world for a ‘focus on […] perspectivism and “point of view”’, regarding the workings ‘of dream, fantasy, and internal self-division, as innovative resources for new styles of expression.’33 In the above passage, as a straightforward example, Sitwell dramatises the temporal gap that can occur between the mind’s perception of an external stimulus (‘white cities gleamed’) and its interpretation (‘pelicans’), an impressionist technique known as ‘delayed decoding’.34 There were plenty of other connections to mainstream modernist fiction. The anthropological propensity of travel writers in an era of imperial decline is linked to what Michael Bell considers modernism’s ‘primitivist impulse’, defined as ‘a radical questioning of the present civilization along with the close study of tribal peoples’.35 At the same time, the belief in the infirmity of western assumption altered the style in which travel writers constructed themselves in their texts, exchanging the model of the imperial adventurer for that of literate, sensitive, esoteric and freethinking ‘scholar-gypsy’, who was not dissimilar in kind to the protagonists of modernist fiction. ‘The wanderer, the loner, the exile,’ James McFarlane writes on characterisation in the period, ‘were no longer the rejects of a self-confident society but rather those who,

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because they stood outside, were uniquely placed […] to speak with vision and authority.’36 In this way, the Balkan journey was not merely ‘a quest for renovation’, a ‘move to the fringes of Empire in search of a revitalizing lesson’, but also an inquiry into ‘versions of a deeper truth’.37 Such journeying emerged from the crisis of faith amongst early twentieth-century intellectuals, whose scepticism with the organised church and with traditional religious beliefs produced ‘a search for new forms of religious experience’, particularly the ‘visionary alternatives’ of theosophy, eastern spirituality and ‘primitive’ belief systems.38 The perceived pastoralism of south-east Europe, in other words, brought more than serenity to British travellers. Certainly, there were few writers who failed to comment on the unhurried tranquillity of the region and on the repose they achieved as a consequence. During the 1930s, as western Europe was hastening toward disaster, Sitwell’s discovery of an ‘indolence […] to be envied in a totalitarian world’ was reiterated by the ‘dreamy quietness’ that Philip Thornton finds in Albania, the ‘supernal peace’ that Henrietta Leslie attains in Bulgaria and the ‘utter peace and solitude’ that Nora Alexander experiences in Yugoslavia, where ‘the noisy world, with its worries and problems, slip[s] away into a forgotten background.’39 For many travellers, however, this emotional calm was only properly understood as a form of spiritual quietude. Indeed, the notion of the peninsula containing ‘grand solitudes where God was near’ and ‘holy places’ far from ‘materialism and greed’ became so widespread that journeying there assumed the flavour of pilgrimage.40 The approach is demonstrated in Oona Ball’s Dalmatia (1932), a memoir of travel along the southern Croatian coast. Although drawn to the romantic myths, legends and historical incidents that have accumulated in this part of Yugoslavia (so much so that the author ‘longs for the pen of a Stevenson or a Barrie’ to record them), Ball is most concerned with its religious qualities, its ability to make ‘dream […] a reality’.41 In contrast to the Victorian motifs of godlessness and depravity, her historical research unearths a nucleus of Catholic and Orthodox tradition, an age-old route for crusaders and pilgrims to the Holy Land and a frontline for the conflict between Christian Europe and the Islamic Middle East. In Dalmatia, she concludes, ‘[w]e are so much nearer to the cradle of Christendom than we were at home in England’ (p. 205). At the same time, the text is less interested in the physical actuality of this ‘land of

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sunlight’ than in the incorporeal truths that the landscape enshrines, defined as a sort of innate mysticism which, for the receptive visitor, will ‘induce […] just that state of mind’ (pp. 101, 202). In arguing that ‘it is by some occult power that the charm of Dalmatia not only strikes but holds the imagination’ (p. 201), Ball alludes both to the Romantic faculty of divine perception and to the modernist quest for revelation outside the constraints of organised religion. For ‘the traveller who enjoys taking his soul as well as his body for an airing’, Dalmatia offers ‘esoteric’ opportunities, and yet is ‘private, confidential’ and ‘meant for the initiated only’ (pp. 203-4, 202, 202, 202). Compounding its distance from nineteenth-century balkanism, Ball’s memoir goes on to view the Balkans as central, rather than marginal, to the wider European continent. Along the Yugoslavian seaboard, she writes, There is the charm, perhaps the most subtle of all charms, of feeling so very near to the heart of things […]. Imperfect as are most of our reactions to things spiritual, and we have no right to expect a higher standard than that which we bring with us, it does seem to some of us that we are nearer to Heaven in this singularly lovely country. (p. 205)

In describing Dalmatia as ‘recondite’ (p. 202), Ball refers not to the abstruseness or obfuscation projected onto the region by Victorian travellers, but to its aura of sacred mystery. In the same way, when Thornton refers to south-east Europe as ‘the most enigmatic place I have yet stayed in’, and to how ‘anything might happen in these surroundings’, he is talking not of perplexity or peril but of the spiritual ‘revelations of mysteries that have hitherto been unintelligible.’42 So associated did pre-modernity become with realisation and personal growth that a country like Yugoslavia was deemed to hold revelatory possibilities before the journey had even begun. ‘It was only two or three days distant,’ Rebecca West wrote with the approach of the Second World War in mind, ‘yet I had never troubled to go that short journey which might explain to me how I shall die, and why.’43 It was comments like this that encapsulated the period’s inversion of traditional Balkan alterity. The accusations of chaos, savagery, immorality and backwardness formerly levelled at the region were now being reconstituted as peculiarities of modern decadence. In turn, the unity, order, clarity and moral and spiritual righteousness central to the group-image of the Enlightened states

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were now considered unique to pre-modern society. If the Balkans were indeed the ‘other’ of the grand colonial West, then it was an otherness that redounded to the eternal credit of the tiny, and supposedly insignificant, states of south-east Europe. The idealisation of pre-modern society, and deployment of innovative literary techniques, made up for a lack of social realism by forging an unshakeable world of escape for writer and reader. In fact, as war looked increasingly likely during the late 1930s, and as bestselling travel books like Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery under Law (1939) and Graham Greene’s The Lawless Roads (1939) absorbed the pessimism of the times, the determination to wrestle a romantic refuge from the Balkans became more imperative than ever. Even in later memoirs of the 1939-45 conflict, such as Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches (1949), Julian Amery’s Sons of the Eagle (1948), H.W. Tilman’s Men and Mountains (1946) and the Serbo-Scottish Lena A. Yovitchitch’s Within Closed Frontiers (1956), the authors’ accounts of hardship and danger are interspersed with the familiar purple passages. Louisa Rayner’s Women in a Village (1957) is amongst the most important texts to emerge from the Second World War, not least for its distinctively modernist reliance on mythology to inform and shape textual representation. ‘Louisa Rayner’ was the nom-de-plume of Isobel Božić, an Englishwoman who graduated with a first-class degree in Classics from Cambridge. After taking up a teaching post in Serbia, she met and married a Bosnian fuel merchant, settling in Belgrade shortly before the war. The process of exchanging the role of tourist, a ‘connoisseur of views’, for that of resident, ‘a part of the view itself’,44 meant that when the German Army occupied Serbia and the Allies countered with an aerial bombardment of Belgrade, Rayner was obliged to join the exodus of townsfolk to the outlying villages, where she lived a life indistinguishable from that of the native community. Her ‘insider’ status in the village of Rušanj, however, and her closeness to the village women, does not prevent her from idealising rural existence. The household in which she lodges brings her ‘the most perfect and entire happiness I have ever known’ (p. 152), the Nikolić family’s traditional faiths and practices – of baking, spinning, washing, ploughing – calling to mind the ancient customs that she has read about in Virgil, Horace and Homer. It is with veneration that she describes how the smoke in the kitchen evokes ‘the portent scene in the Odyssey’, how the family kept warm on

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winter evenings by crouching around ‘the ashes of the hearth just like Odysseus’ and how Savka Nikolić, the family matriarch, sat on the wooden threshold of the cottage ‘as Penelope had sat on hers’ (pp. 51, 53, 53). Rayner takes particular pleasure in the harvesting of grapes, the most joyous event in the agricultural year when, despite ‘the civil war […] popping and banging among the hills’, families work together on the vintage and ‘[a] real Dionysiac charity prevailed’ (pp. 162-3). Hearing that it is customary for women to spend the night amongst the family vines, she joins Savka in ‘the realm of the nature god’, and the pair soon become intoxicated on the grapes like ‘two very respectable middle-aged Maenads’ (pp. 163-4). Although the custom has supposedly developed to protect the vines from theft, Rayner sources its origins elsewhere: Dionysus, the god of the vines, it was who demanded […] this vigil as an honour to himself from age to age. The soil never quite forgets. And as there was nothing reasonable about this rite, the villagers had invented a reason. It was, they said, to guard the grapes. And so, unwittingly, they gave honour to the god of the vines; and I with Savka that night unknowingly worshipped Dionysus. Many learned people have written books about the cult of Bacchus; but I have been a bacchante. (p. 164)

At moments like this, village rituals accord to ‘an old earth cult’, bringing Rayner ‘a frightening feeling of the past always ineradicably there’ (p. 47). Importantly, these pre-modern customs are not seen to enslave the villagers, but rather to offer psychological autonomy from formal rule, even that of military government. The Germans may control the capital, and bands of Partisans and Chetniks may occasionally turn up in Rušanj for food, but by and large the independent spirit of the village continues to thrive in its parallel world of pagan practices: ‘Their final allegiance they owed to Earth and Sky’, Rayner declares; ‘they would never be subjects’ (pp. 83, 81). Such allusions to classical mythology formed an alternative framework for structuring regional portraiture to the medievalism of Hoppé and Fermor, and was repeated – albeit in a lesser form – by a number of contemporaries. Elsewhere, one traveller spots Albanians ‘dancing like satyrs celebrating Dionysos under the vine’, a second finds Romanian peasants wearing sheepskin cloaks like ‘the Dacian shepherds wore […] in their winter struggles against the Romans’ and a third cites Gladstone’s opinion that the military achievements of the

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Montenegrins ‘“exceed the glory of Marathon, of Thermopylae”’.45 Meanwhile, other travellers were turning to Judaeo-Christian tradition for allusive material. In Yugoslavia, Horatio Brown traverses ‘a region of stony desolation’ that is ‘biblical […] in its bareness’, Lovett Fielding Edwards enters an Orthodox monastery that ‘recalled the earlier and simpler days of Christianity’ and Jan and Cora Gordan stumble upon cooking techniques that stretched back to ‘long before Moses’.46 Yet whether reference was to Christianity, antiquity or ‘life in the Middle Ages’, the encounter with south-east Europe always ‘touched some atavistic chord’ in inter-war travellers.47 The allegiance that Rayner felt towards Serbian folk culture would, in the work of other writers, assume a more polemical bent. The travellers’ fondness for custom and landscape was not as apolitical as may be supposed, but was entrenched in contemporary ideological currents, most obviously in the nationalism that had swept across central and eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. Since the French Revolution, national movements had been making steady progress in the peninsula, bolstered by developments in education, political administration and army infrastructure, with its cult of ‘military romanticism’.48 The inquiry into archaic cultural forms, which regional scholarship had inherited from the late eighteenthcentury Romantics, was associated with the verification of national origins. The local manifestations of linguistic practice and oral tradition, as well as folk costumes, village crafts and religious customs, were viewed as the direct expressions of ‘the uniqueness or peculiarity’ of an ethnic group, and were often constructed around a myth of a national ‘golden age’, defined by ‘heroes and saints and sagas’ and indicative of a ‘chosen people now to be reborn after its long sleep’ under foreign rule.49 In this sense, David Norris’s remark on Romanticism, that its ‘study of language and cultural forms was at the same time a search for the legitimation of the national community as an organic unity’,50 is as true for inter-war British travel writing. The style in which authors’ deployed regional folk motifs reiterated the south-east European states’ own self-representations during a formative era of nation building, as they were often fully aware. Grace Ellison, for example, realises that a nation ‘is his own propagandist, and the louder he “cries” his wares the better is he appreciated’, and admits to using her travelogue – a glowing account of the Yugoslav nation – to help its citizens ‘correct the errors that are so skilfully

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circulated about them’, a project that gains her the personal thanks of the Yugoslavian Prince Regent.51 A more involved example is George Sava’s Donkey Serenade (1940), which crystallises the way that pastoral imagery could be used for ideological ends. Set only a year before the outbreak of war, the narrative recounts a trek around the Bulgarian countryside with scant reference to the prospect of hostilities that would soon devastate the region. Instead, inspired by the tales of Robert Louis Stevenson and armed with the Scotsman’s Travels with a Donkey (1879), Sava details a quixotic and highly literary world of rustic villagers, comic brigands and medieval pilgrims: a ‘Stevensonian Odyssey’52 that appears remote from, but is nevertheless grounded in, European geopolitics. At the time of publication, Bulgaria was managing to retain a fragile neutrality in the face of Allied and Axis pressure, although its alliance with Germany in the First World War in the hope of territorial reward had not been forgotten by western diplomats. The task taken on by Sava, ‘an Englishman with a Bulgarian-Russian ancestry’ (p. 140), is the alleviation of any fears that may exist about Bulgaria’s military intentions, along with the advocacy of its continued sovereignty. Much of Sava’s information comes from his guide, Old Vasil, a story-teller and troubadour who wanders the villages reciting the epic ballads of the Bulgarian people. Although evoked as a comic figure, Vasil reveals to Sava – and hence to the reader – the full significance of these ‘spontaneous creations of the “folk mind”’: the ballads not only attest to a national character grounded in honour, morality and the ‘sheer joy of living’, but also, with their age and prevalence, indicate the imagined community essential for nationhood, a historically unified identity that Sava refers to as ‘the Bulgarian soul’.53 It is upon these indications of national integrity that the author builds his account of Bulgarian history, in which deficiencies are either consigned to the past (‘the bad old days’ (p. 233)) or blamed on external factors. For example, the country’s ‘secret societies, envies and hatreds’ have been caused by centuries of ‘impetuous invasions of colonizing plunderers’, a major instance being the Great Powers, who ‘from time immemorial’ have been ‘gambling with the peasants’ lives for the sake of political prestige [or] manoeuvre’ (p. 141). The Ottoman Empire, similarly, did great ‘damage to Bulgarian national life’, the inhabitants ‘liv[ing] for over four centuries in the darkness of spiritual and political oppression’

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(pp. 147, 115). Before the Ottoman invasion, medieval Bulgaria had experienced a ‘golden age of […] culture’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘reform’ and the dream of ‘a just and ordered society’, and since independence it has reconfirmed its commitment to such values, particularly to ‘equality, democracy, and a fair chance’ for all (pp. 144-5, 117). While conceding that its current loyalties remain uncertain, and while admitting King Boris has assumed ‘dictatorial powers’ under the influence of Nazi Germany, Sava insists that dictatorship ‘is a passing phenomenon’, that ‘Bulgaria’s small stream of democracy is advancing’ and that power politics is anyway an irrelevance for ‘the honest Bulgarian peasants’ (pp. 256, 270). Now that ‘[t]he dream of a Greater Bulgaria’ is over, his peroration continues, a ‘united Balkan Peninsula’ is possible, and it is even thinkable that these ‘small peoples […] will prove to be the leaders of a world renaissance and their example of unification may be followed by the whole of Europe’, the region thereby becoming ‘the foundation-stone of the United States of Europe’.54 Of all the revelations that the author accumulates during his Balkan ‘pilgrimage’ (p. 109), here was perhaps the greatest revelation of them all. One year after Donkey Serenade was published Bulgaria entered the Second World War on the side of Axis powers. The long years of conflict brought discontent and destitution to the peninsula, and, by the late 1940s, social unrest had resulted in communist takeover, deepening the breach between western and eastern Europe that had been developing since the eighteenth century. Yet despite the addition of anti-communist rhetoric to the canon of denigratory balkanism, the British travelogue stubbornly continued its discourse of romanticisation and revelation. In the words of several Cold War travellers, south-east Europe was still ‘fascinatingly picturesque’, full of the ‘atmosphere of […] bygone days’ and of ‘memorials of the past’ which have ‘all but vanished in the West’.55 Two female travellers went so far as to consider Ceauşescu’s Romania ‘a new Eden’ and Hoxha’s Albania ‘as beautiful as any romantic traveller could desire’.56 Once it had come to dominate balkanist discourse, Romanticism was proving difficult to dislodge. The approach was most conspicuous in the work of socialist commentators of various nationalities, whose Balkan journeys sustained the tradition of ‘left tourism’ to eastern Europe after 1917 and whose texts anxiously encouraged readers to be ‘wary of preconceptions’.57 For Andrew

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MacKenzie, William Ash and David Tornquist, the communist East is, lamentably, ‘regarded with […] suspicion’, being misconstrued through ‘the haze of the Cold War’ as a set of ‘brooding, mysterious’ lands inhabited by ‘strange and dour […] zealots’ whose political systems supposedly match ‘the usual ideas we have of dictatorship’.58 Arnold Haskell’s Heroes and Roses (1966), recounting a period of work and travel in Bulgaria, is typical in its attempt to demystify a chosen communist nation. While ‘committed to no political party’, Haskell has ‘come more and more to respect communism as an ideal’, believing that ‘the east has more often than not “been on the side of the angels”’ and deriving much of his information on Bulgaria from state-sponsored authors, historians, journalists and tourist agencies, not to mention government departments and the exhibits in revolutionary museums.59 One may deplore Haskell’s candid acceptance of the party line, or else give him credit for challenging the intolerant, divisive stereotypes that were circulating in the West. He writes against traditional balkanism, exchanging its notion of the ‘“Bulgarian people […] as savage and barbarous”’ for an emphasis on their ethnic tolerance, ‘glorious history and […] advanced culture’ (pp. 65, 2). He also denounces Cold War propaganda, with its ‘facile slogans “iron curtain” and “free world”’ (p. 3), insisting that the country is free of the spies, suspicions and oppressions of Cold War cliché. In short, the communist peoples ‘whom half the world regards […] as devils had ideals and a passionate sense of values’ that make this ‘“the most peaceful and peace-loving part of the world”’ (pp. 6, 39). One method that Haskell uses to encourage sympathy for Bulgaria is to ascribe to it the unthreatening rural idyllicism which had so beguiled the inter-war readership. During a car journey, for example, he comes across a ‘picturesque’ harvest scene composed of peasants ‘in national costume’ and ‘groups of attractive girls’: All along our route there were […] vast fields of sunflowers, climbing vines and hops, and the roads were bordered by plum and cherry trees which the passers-by left unmolested. At midday the workers sat under the trees eating hunks of bread with cheese or sausage. We passed carts laden with produce and […] patient donkeys, often carrying some old peasant in his Turkish-type costume of round fur hat […] and baggy trousers fastened at the waist with a broad sash. Some of the girls carried yokes (kobilitsa) over one shoulder, balancing rounded copper bowls (mentsi) of water. It was the custom, and maybe still is, for a suitor to announce his intentions by taking a

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sip from one of the bowls, the girls, if willing, then gives him the flower from her hair. (pp. 110-11)

Despite a brief reference to social transition in the final line (‘maybe still is’), which rather underestimates the extent to which industrialisation and urbanisation had been altering the Balkan landscape, Haskell relies on the Arcadian markers – of cherry trees, flowers, peasants, copper bowls – popularised by Sava’s generation. At the same time, and in uneasy conjunction with pastoralism, Heroes and Roses further encourages sympathy by extolling the genuine progress that the country has made under communism. In contrast to the nineteenth-century ‘tales of hardship and […] narrow escapes’, the author’s preferred focus is on the more touristic world of opera, ballet, fine hotels and beach resorts, where visitors can find both ceaseless sunshine and ‘such home comforts as a well-brewed cup of tea’ (p. 1). The point is confirmed when Haskell questions a group of British package tourists on their impressions of the nation and its people: ‘[m]ost of them had considered themselves as rather daring in visiting a communist country’, he records; ‘they had heard all sorts of disquieting stories and now they were reassured. “People just like ourselves, don’t you know, and a good deal more forthcoming”’ (p. 134). This notion of the similarity and kinship, rather than binary opposition, between democratic West and communist East was the revelation of so many Cold War travelogues. Contrary to ‘the Western media’s postwar distortions’, a sojourn in the region would reveal ‘the common cause of our humanity’, confirming the fact that ‘human nature is basically the same the world over’ and the way that ‘the artificial barriers of opposing political ideologies’ are easily dismantled through a recognition of our ‘common heritage’.60 Haskell’s national advocacy, which includes allusions to Mackenzie and Irby’s Travels,61 climaxes with a summary of his book as ‘the story of a love affair between a man and a country that has made the words “Bulgaria” and “the Balkans” of very special significance to me’.62 However sincere their expressions of cross-cultural attachment, travel writers would occasionally realise how specious their textual constructs actually were. Francesca Wilson’s sudden sense of entering a ‘true Balkans of the imagination’ in Serbia during the 1910s was repeated by many of her contemporaries. This was a ‘land of […] dreams’, travel writers admitted, with ‘fairy tale figures’, ‘comic

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operetta’ events and such ‘an air of the Arabian Nights’ that it was as if one had ‘been transferred by some enchanted genii […] into another world’.63 During the Cold War, Philip Glazebrook, journeying around the former Ottoman Empire in order to research a novel about Victorian travellers, recognises that his forerunners were ‘navigating by maps they carried in their [...] heads’, yet worries that extensive reading into nineteenth-century memoirs has undermined his own objectivity.64 As he puts it, ‘I travelled in a country mapped for me by many hands since ancient times, scrawled over with names in languages not my own’ and composed of ‘other voices [that] tell me what to think.’65 Stowers Johnson, during a tour of Serbia, meets an Englishman who, with his ‘Rolleiflex camera’ and ambition ‘to write a book on Yugoslavia’, appears to mirror Johnson himself, shocking the author into an awareness of the subjectivity of the many ‘Balkan philosophies’ which ‘trample around this [landscape], hammered out on the spot from the inspiration of students or venerable globetrotters.’66 The impact that these ‘philosophies’ or discourses can have on the perception of travellers is exemplified in Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Waters. While staying at the home of a Transylvanian scholar, who resides ‘alone with his books and his guns on the steep edge of the forest’, Fermor realises the extent to which previous depictions of these ‘“mysterious regions”’, with their ‘maze of forests’ and ‘presiding daemons’, have influenced his own judgement.67 This influence is exacerbated by the gothicism of the books he reads in his host’s library: All the castles were haunted, and earthly packs of wolves were reinforced after dark by solitary werewolves; vampires were on the move; witches stirred and soared; the legends and fairy stories of a dozen nations piled up […]. In the end, I stayed three nights, listening to stories of wolves and forests and reading in the library, and some of it must have found its way into the bloodstream. M. Herriot has left a consoling message for cases like this: ‘La culture, c’est ce qui reste quand on a tout oublié.68

This self-reflexive meditation on the workings of discourse fails to prevent the myths intruding upon Fermor’s own sketches of Romania. Indeed, despite the increasing awareness of the discursive nature of the travel genre during the twentieth century,69 its practitioners continued to submit their personal viewpoints as objective truth. As Sandes and West have illustrated, there were plenty of commentators

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who recognised, and refuted, the negative preconceptions of past travellers, but only to prove the validity of their own. Lovett Edwards considers Yugoslavia ‘more attractive than one might expect from travellers’ tales’, Johnson counters the stereotype ‘[t]hat the Bulgarians were savages’ by detailing how ‘the courtesy and grace of the people remains forever in one’s heart’, and Leslie Gardiner challenges Albania’s reputation for ‘feuding and fighting’ by claiming ‘harmonious co-existence has long been the rule’.70 Addressing another much maligned ethnicity, Peter O’Connor deplores his mental ‘picture of the Gypsy people, built up from books I had read and films I had seen’, and states that he ‘failed to find anything or anyone remotely fitting’.71 Eric Whelpton, taking a different line, seems to detail the nineteenth-century romanticisation of Montenegro purely in order to add interest to his own text. He recalls attending during his schooldays a number of lectures given by ‘some military-looking gentleman’ and typically ‘entitled “My Wanderings in Wildest Montenegro”, or “Rambles on the Roof of the Balkans”’, which offered a regional portrait suitable only for ‘the realms of fiction’: that of ‘a brave and courageous people’ dressed in ‘short coloured jackets braided with gold lace’ and ‘armed to the teeth, with pistols, long rakish-looking muskets, curved yataghans and daggers with finely inlaid scabbards.’72 In his record of a journey through a rapidly modernising Yugoslavia, however, Whelpton is able to retain an air of romance only through reference to these outmoded lectures and to ‘the rather faded photographs that I had seen in books of travel in my youth’.73 The period’s awareness of discursive frameworks also failed to diminish national advocacy. William Forwood throws his weight behind Romania’s ‘highly individualistic civilisation’, Dymphna Cusack records the ‘“glorious days”’ of Albanian’s struggle for freedom and Stowers Johnson expounds ‘the glory of Bulgaria’.74 Hallam Tennyson, in his Yugoslav travelogue Tito Lifts the Curtain (1955), offers a more ideologically nuanced mode of advocacy. Positioning Cold War balkanism in a long lineage of geo-political representations (‘[t]he Macedonian with his bomb and dagger preceded the bolshie, the bearded anarchist and even the yellow peril as a popular scarefier’), the author denounces past ‘cliché’ with a deliberate view to encouraging support for the country’s ‘benevolent […] Communism’.75

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Tennyson’s great-grandfather, the Victorian poet laureate, would have been appalled by the politics of Tito Lifts the Curtain. But he might well have appreciated the book’s wholesale advocacy of Yugoslav nationhood. In the 1870s, during the wave of popular revulsion towards Ottoman atrocities in the peninsula, Lord Alfred Tennyson was inspired by a conversation with Gladstone to write ‘Montenegro’, a poem he considered the ‘first among his sonnets’.76 Addressing the native struggle for independence, he praises the manner in which the ‘Chaste, frugal, savage’ Montenegrins have triumphantly maintained their ‘rough rock-throne / Of freedom’ against ‘the swarm / Of Turkish Islam’, proclaiming that, although the ‘smallest among people’, there has never been a ‘a race of mightier mountaineers.’77 The imagery is directly descended from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and presents a complimentary strain of representation which, shorn of its primitivism, would continue to inform balkanism until the latter years of the twentieth century. It is only in the contemporary age that such admiration is largely absent. The sweeping programmes of urban and industrial development pursued by the communist states finally created a landscape lacking that shock of difference by which western decadence had once been gauged. At the same time, the western traveller has seemed more and more unwilling, or unable, to praise the faiths and practices of foreign cultures. With the massive forces of corporation and state penetrating western society, and the increasingly cynical nature of individual existence that has resulted, the extravagant romanticism of writers like Durham, Hoppé and West is now seldom seen.

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NOTES 1

From a letter to his mother dated 22 June 1809, reprinted in Thomas Moore, ed., The Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1920), p. 89. 2 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, ed. by A. Hamilton Thompson, new edn (1812; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), p. 59, II, 43, lines 381-2; p. 58, II, 42, line 372; pp. 58-9, II, 42, lines 370-7. 3 Ibid., p. 57, II, 38, line 339; p. 60, II, 47, lines 422-3. 4 Franklin, Byron: A Literary Life (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 39. 5 Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, p. 5. 6 Henderson, ‘The Travel Writer and the Text: “My Giant Goes With Me Wherever I Go,”’ in Kowalewski, ed., Temperamental Journeys, p. 233. 7 John Clubbe and Ernest J. Lovell, Jr, English Romanticism: The Grounds of Belief (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), p. 85; T.J. Diffey, ‘The Roots of Imagination: The Philosophical Context’, in Stephen Prickett, ed., The Romantics (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 173. 8 Cocker, Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1994), p. 158. 9 Lovett F. Edwards, Introducing Yugoslavia (London: Methuen and Co., 1954), p. 172; Fermor, ‘Foreword’ to Sacheverell Sitwell, Roumanian Journey, new edn (1938; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. iii. 10 Trevor, Balkan Tour, p. 237. 11 Arnold, ‘From “On the Modern Element in Literature”’, in Matthew Arnold, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. by Miriam Allott (London: J.M. Dent, 1978), p. 151. 12 Peacock, Albania, p. 5. 13 Aubrey Herbert recalls telling an Albanian in 1912 that he would like to learn his language, and was ‘answered magnificently, ‘“[l]earn only the names of weapons and we can talk sufficiently”’ (Herbert, Ben Kendim: A Record of Eastern Travel (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1924), p. 199). 14 Durham, High Albania, p. 344. 15 Unnamed reviewer quoted in John Hodgson, ‘Introduction’ to Durham, High Albania, p. xiii. 16 Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, quoted in R.K.R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), p. 52. 17 Rose Wilder Lane, The Peaks of Shala: Being a Record of Certain Wanderings among the Hill-Tribes of Albania (London and Sydney: Chapman and Dodd, 1922), p. 53. 18 Fussell, Abroad, p. 5. 19 Edmonds, To the Land of the Eagle: Travels in Montenegro and Albania (London: George Routledge and Sons; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1927), pp. 287, 274, 129, 209, 203, 282, 232, 268. Similarly, Lane describes Albania as ‘a fragment of this great […] romantic world,’ with ‘fairy-tale’ towns and a ‘magic country’ of flowers, fruit-trees, waterfalls, gentle woodlands and mountain scenery the colour of ‘an American Beauty rose’ (Lane, Peaks of Shala, pp. 9, 12, 54, 35). 20 Hoppé, Gipsy Camp, pp. 80, 80, 81, 127. 21 For example, Patmore finds ‘dreamy, poetical landscapes’ full of ‘shy groups of peasant girls’ (Patmore, Invitation to Roumania, pp. 157, 94); Forman comes across ‘pastoral scene[s]’, such as those of ‘a young peasant girl in a beautifully-worked

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costume leading a pair of oxen’ and of ‘a shepherd […] playing a flute by his flock’ (Forman, Rumania through a Windscreen (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., c.1938), pp. 35, 49, 35); Fermor discerns in Romania’s fertile countryside such ‘a sleepy spell of growth and untroubled plenty’ that ‘[i]t might have been the backwoods of Arcadia or Paradise’ (Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates, new edn (1986; London: Guild Publishing, 1987), pp. 109, 190); and Starkie discovers ‘so entrancing a place’ that he believes a modern-day Shakespeare ‘would lay the scene of his Romantic Comedies here rather than in Italy’ (Starkie, RaggleTaggle, pp. 173, 281). 22 Fermor, Woods and the Water, p. 146; Starkie, Raggle-Taggle, p. 6. 23 Hoppé, Gipsy Camp, p. 43. 24 See Jelavich, History of the Balkans, pp. 184-5, and Pavlowitch, History of the Balkans, pp. 269-71. 25 Swire, King Zog’s Albania, p. 237; Geoffrey Rhodes, Dalmatia: The New Riviera (London: Stanley Paul, 1931), p. 18; Lovett Fielding Edwards, Danube Stream, new edn (1940; London: Travel Book Club, 1941), p. 72. 26 Le Gallienne, ‘Considerations Suggested by Mr. Churton Collins’ “Illustrations of Tennyson”’, quoted in Thornton, Decadent Dilemma, p. 46. 27 Ibid., p. 27. 28 Unsigned, ‘An Extravagance of Curiosity’, in Philip Marsden-Smedley and Jeffrey Klinke, eds, Views from Abroad: The Spectator Book of Travel Writing (London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1989), p. 28. 29 Fermor, Woods and the Water, p. 148. 30 Writing specifically on modern fiction, Perry Meisel outlines the early twentiethcentury shift from a fiction in which ‘the world predominates’ to one in which ‘the mind predominates’ (Meisel, ‘Psychology’, in David Bradshaw and Kevin J.H. Dettmar, eds, A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (Malden USA and Oxford UK: Blackwell, 2006), p. 85. 31 Sitwell, Roumanian Journey, p. 68. 32 Ibid., p. 68. 33 Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge UK and Malden USA: Polity Press, 2005), p. 90; Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 92. 34 Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980), p. 175. 35 Bell, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, in Michael Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 20. While accepting that literature of the period was in no way politically homogeneous, Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby are able ‘to locate in modernism a questioning of attitudes to the “other” and to colonialism’ (Booth and Rigby, ‘Introduction’ to Booth and Rigby, eds, Modernism and Empire (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 4). 36 McFarlane, ‘The Mind of Modernism’, in Malcolm Bradbury and McFarlane, eds, Modernism 1890-1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 82.

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37 Armstrong, Modernism, pp. 138-9. It is in this context that Armstrong finds relevance in the fact that ‘[t]he period of modernism falls uneasily between the climax of imperial competition in the late nineteenth-century and post-1945 decolonization’ (ibid., p. 135). 38 Pericles Lewis, ‘Religion’, in Bradshaw and Dettmar, eds, Companion to Modernist Literature, pp. 19, 26. 39 Sitwell, Roumanian Journey, p. 75; Thornton, Dead Puppets Dance (London: Collins, 1937), p. 17; Leslie, Where East is West, p. 139; Alexander, Wanderings in Yugoslavia (London: Skeffington and Son, 1936), pp. 182, 64. 40 Marie, Country That I Love, p. 50; Margaret R. Loughborough, Roumanian Pilgrimage (London: SPCK, 1939), pp. 142, 143. 41 Ball, Dalmatia (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), pp. 155, 62. 42 Thornton, Dead Puppets Dance, p. 321; Thornton, Ikons and Oxen, p. 57; Thornton, Dead Puppets Dance, p. 20. 43 West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, p. 22. 44 Rayner, Women in a Village: An Englishwoman’s Experiences and Impressions of Life in Yugoslavia under German Occupation (Melbourne, London and Toronto: William Heinemann, 1957), p. 2. 45 Nigel Heseltine, Scarred Background: A Journey through Albania (London: Lovat Dickson, 1938), p. 46; D.J. Hall, Romanian Furrow (London: Methuen and Co., 1933), p. 95; Anon, A Journey through Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Dalmatia (London: Chiswick Press, 1928), p. 69. 46 Walter Tyndale and Brown, Dalmatia (London: A. and C. Black, 1925), p. 113; Edwards, Profane Pilgrimage (London: Duckworth, 1938), p. 73; Gordon and Gordon, Two Vagabonds in Albania (London: John Lane The Bodley Head; New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1927), p. 134. In Durham’s account of her journeys through Albania, even her prose style – ‘[w]e toiled on to the edge of a mighty cleft, the valley of the Tsem, and saw below us the green torrent’ – includes Old Testament flourishes (Durham, High Albania, p. 71). 47 J.R. Colville, Fools’ Pleasure: A Leisurely Journey down the Danube, to the Black Sea, the Greek Islands and Dalmatia (London: Methuen and Co., 1935), p. 198; Julian Amery, Sons of the Eagle: A Study in Guerilla War (London: Macmillan and Co., 1948), p. 105. 48 Lampe, Balkans into Southeastern Europe, p. 30. For Eric Hobsbawm and Timothy Baycroft, it is the period 1870 to 1914 in which ‘nationalist movements multipl[ied] in regions where they had been previously unknown’ and in which ‘the masses gained national identities’ (Hobsbawm, ‘The Rise of Ethno-Linguistic Nationalisms’, in John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds, Nationalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 180; Baycroft, Nationalism in Europe, 1789-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 51). 49 Peter Alter, Nationalism, 2nd edn (1989; London: Edward Arnold, 1994), p. 3; Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 191; Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1991), p. 66. Ernest Gellner also writes of how the revolt against imperialist ‘high culture’ can be pursued ‘in the name of a putative folk culture’, with nationalist ‘symbolism […] drawn from the healthy, pristine, vigorous life of the peasants, of the

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Volk, the narod’ (Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 57). 50 Norris, Wake of the Balkan Myth, p. 18. Ross Poole, writing on ‘the birth of nationalism as self-conscious political project’ during the age of Romanticism, talks about how its emphasis on ‘feeling, poetry, mythology and oral tradition [...] permitted each nation to claim for itself a value which was in principle not available to others’ (Poole, Nation and Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 15). 51 Ellison, Yugoslavia, p. viii. The prince writes to her that he is ‘overjoyed to read the gracious words you have written about our country’ and hopes the book ‘will help your compatriots to understand Yugoslavia better’ (ibid., p. vi). 52 Sava, Donkey Serenade: Travels in Bulgaria, new edn (1940; London: The Travel Book Club, 1941), p. 16. 53 Ibid., pp. 52, 53, 184. On the construction of nation-states, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, new edn (1983; London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 6-7. For an interesting discussion of the centrality of oral traditions to romantic historiography in the Balkan context, see Maja Brkljačić, ‘Popular Culture and Communist Ideology: Folk Tales in Tito’s Yugoslavia’, in John R. Lampe and Mark Mazower, Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2004), pp. 180-4. 54 Ibid., p. 154. A similar national advocacy existed for other countries. Aubrey Herbert, for example, extols ‘“a strong and united Albania”’ (Herbert, Ben Kendim, p. 229), Loughborough praises the way that Romania ‘“has emerged, united and national-conscious and peace-loving to an extraordinary degree”’ (Loughborough, Romanian Pilgrimage, p. 97), and John Gibbons admires the fact that Yugoslavia ‘is one country now and not a lot of countries’ (Gibbons, London to Sarajevo (London: George Newnes, c.1931), p. 209). 55 Katherine Creon, London Istanbul without Even a Screwdriver: Through Tito’s Yugoslavia (London: Minerva, 1993), p. 50; Alan Ryalls, Bulgaria for Tourists (Havant, Hamps.: Kenneth Mason, 1971), p. 125; Brian W. Aldiss, Cities and Stones: A Traveller’s Jugoslavia (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 194; Andrew MacKenzie, Romanian Journey (London: Robert Hale, 1983), p. 202. 56 May Mackintosh, Rumania (London: Robert Hale, 1963), p. 92; Dymphna Cusack, Illyria Reborn (London: Heinemann, 1966), p. 4. 57 Peter and Andrea Dawson, Albania: A Guide and Illustrated Journal (Chalfont St. Peter, Bucks: Bradt, 1989), p. 4. 58 MacKenzie, Romanian Journey, p. 202; Ash, Pickaxe and Rifle (London: Howard Baker, 1974), pp. 255, 255, 255; Tornquist, Look East Look West: The Socialist Adventure in Yugoslavia (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1966), p. 279. Although non-socialist writers were also scornful of the supposed dangers of travelling ‘under the red flag’, there were a few that mocked complimentary representation (Dilke, Road to Dalmatia, p. 13). M. Philips Price, for example, says that ‘[a] great deal of rubbish used to be written between the wars about the beautiful life of the Balkan peasant’ and Eric Newby, on a group tour of Albania, ridicules an entry he finds in the visitors’ book of a communist museum: ‘“La groupe a été ravie de la visite dans ce musée de l’Athéisme.” One could only suppose that in order to be

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so ravished they must have been tight’ (Price, Through the Iron-Laced Curtain: A Record of a Journey through the Balkans in 1946 (London: Sampson Low, 1949), p. 24; Newby, Shores of the Mediterranean, p. 130). 59 Haskell, Heroes and Roses: A View of Bulgaria (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), pp. 2-3. 60 Harold Dennis-Jones, Where to Go in Romania, new edn (1991; London: Settle Press, 1992), p. 115; Portway, Double Circuit, p. 61; Guy Mountfort, Portrait of a River: The Wildlife of the Danube, from the Black Sea to Budapest (London: Hutchinson, 1962), p. 101. Lovett Edwards makes the point by quoting a Yugoslavian saying: ‘“Capitalism […] means the exploitation of man by man; socialism means the same thing, but the other way round”’ (Edwards, The Yugoslav Coast (London: B.T. Batsford, 1974), p. 269). Leslie Gardiner’s Curtain Calls was the most extended meditation on the theme: ‘human beings the world over are pretty much alike when you get to know them’, he says, and goes on to wonder ‘which is farthest from reality, our James Bond view of the east or your [the east’s] Dickensian view of the west. In the way people conduct their ordinary lives I see little to choose between us’ (Gardiner, Curtain Calls, pp. 7, 95). 61 Haskell not only mentions these ‘two remarkable women’ on the opening page of the text, but also uses part of their text as an epigraph (Haskell, Heroes and Roses, pp. 1, xii). 62 Ibid., p. 6. A similar reverence was shown by other travel writers during the Cold War. C.P. Snow announces that ‘I know the Slavs and love them’, June Emerson, after a journey to Albania, speaks about ‘the country I was beginning to love’, John Higgins mentions his addiction to ‘the Balkan drug, which is a fairly powerful narcotic’, and Anne Kindersley feels ‘at home’ in Serbia (Snow, ‘Foreword’ to William Forwood, Romanian Invitation (London: Garnstone Press, 1968), p. 5; Emerson, Albania: The Search for the Eagle’s Song (Studley, Warwickshire: Brewin Books, 1990), p. 22; Higgins, Travels in the Balkans, p. 1; Kindersley, The Mountains of Serbia: Travels through Inland Yugoslavia, new edn (1976; London: Readers Union, 1977), p. 254). 63 Wilson, Portraits and Sketches, p. 69; Malcolm Burr, Slouch Hat (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935), p. 42; West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, p. 44; Durham, Twenty Years, p. 44; David Footman, Balkan Holiday (London and Toronto: William Heinemann, 1935), p. 106; Trevor, Balkan Tour, p. 37. 64 Glazebrook, Journey to Kars, p. 63. 65 Ibid., p. 63. 66 Johnson, Yugoslav Summer (London: Robert Hale, 1967), p. 115. 67 Fermor, Woods and the Water, pp. 170-1. 68 Ibid., pp. 171-2. 69 The American Scott Malcomson is typical in claiming that ‘[n]either Europe nor Asia exist anywhere outside the imagination’ and that the West is a ‘place not visible on any map’ (Malcomson, Empire’s Edge, pp. 1-2). 70 Edwards, Yugoslav Coast, p. 151; Johnson, Gay Bulgaria (London: Robert Hale, 1964), pp. 47, 194; Gardiner, Curtain Calls, pp. 44-5. 71 O’Connor, Walking Good, p. 4. 72 Whelpton, Dalmatia (London: Robert Hale, 1954), p. 83. 73 Ibid., p. 90.

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74 Forwood, Romanian Invitation, p. 14; Cusack, Illyria Reborn, p. 13; Johnson, Gay Bulgaria, p. 109. Whelpton also recollects how schoolboy ‘hearts throbbed when we heard that the gallant Montenegrins had attacked the Turks […], and when peace came we rejoiced to hear that the small country that we had admired so much had succeeded in expanding her frontiers’ (Whelpton, Dalmatia, p. 83). 75 Tennyson, Tito Lifts the Curtain: The Story of Yugoslavia Today (London: Rider and Company, 1955), pp. 26, 30, 85. 76 Hallam Tennyson, quoted in Alfred Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. by Christopher Ricks (London and Harlow: Longmans, Green and Co., 1969), p. 1239. In Cetinje, the grandson finds himself asked to ‘declaim it aloud’, his audience ‘beaming most pleasantly while I did so’ (Tennyson, Tito Lifts the Curtain, p. 187). 77 Tennyson, ‘Montenegro’, in Tennyson, Poems of Tennyson, p. 1240, lines 3, 9-10, 10-11, 9, 14.

Chapter 8: Romantic Fiction Over and above Byron’s poetic sketches of Albania, it was the fiction of Sir Walter Scott that shaped the understanding of south-east Europe in the minds of so many British travel writers. A major figure of European Romanticism, Scott’s nostalgic portrait of the Scottish highlands presented a template for the Celticism of later poets and novelists, but also a model for representing any ancient culture on the verge of extinction. Stories like Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817) and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), with their chieftains, warrior traditions, clan loyalties and oral traditions of balladeering and story telling, originated such a powerful ‘constructive principle’, in David Norris’s words, that Victorian travellers often went on to view other geographical territories ‘through the prism of a fictional world invented some decades before.’1 As Norris mentions, south-east Europe has been a particularly lengthy recipient of Scott’s legacy.2 Byron himself helped to promote this legacy when describing in a letter of November 1809 how the Albanian court of Ali Paşa ‘brought to my recollection [...] Scott’s description of Branksome Castle in his Lay [of the Last Minstrel]’.3 Almost a century and a half later, the British traveller Stephen Graham would find similar resonances in southern Yugoslavia. In this ‘primeval […] corner of the world’, Graham wrote in 1939, the mountains ‘grand but vague as if just born out of chaos’, the ‘good-natured, fair-spoken, rugged’ men and the old women who, ‘with their ancient voices’, speak ‘about births, marriages, deaths, and the history of families’, all call to mind ‘the kind of scene[s] that Sir Walter Scott might have depicted for the opening of a romantic novel’.4 With Scott bearing such an influence on the travelogue, it is no surprise to find an even greater impact on the representational patterns of prose fiction. Although the novel has proved a less popular medium than travel writing for the literary imagining of south-east Europe, emerging as a notable branch of balkanism only in the late nineteenth

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century, it has still managed to compete for British readers, particularly between the 1910s and the 1930s, when publications and sales peaked, and during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Over the course of these one hundred years, there have been few balkanist novels unaffected by the romantic tradition. In the following survey of the genre I shall be using the term ‘romance’ in its widest definition: that is, to designate a literature that exchanges naturalism’s mimetic concern with documenting contemporary reality for more fanciful narrative modes centred around far-fetched plots, exotic characters and historical locations. Clara Reeve’s early definition in The Progress of Romance (1785), which contrasts the romance to the newfashioned realist ‘novel’ being developed by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding in the eighteenth century, is still commonly cited: The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things. The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language describes what never happened nor is likely to happen. The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves.5

As Jean Radford has pointed out, romance is ‘one of the oldest and most enduring of literary modes which survives today’ and has undergone countless ‘transformations of [...] generic form’.6 Its origins lie in the populist prose narratives of Ancient Greece and its later manifestations include the medieval quest, the Victorian gothic and the ‘seduction’ tales and imperial adventures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although such forms appear radically discontinuous in content and structure, a number of shared conventions can be discerned. Alongside Reeve’s notions of ‘elevated language’, ‘fabulous persons’ and events that ‘never happened’, there is, firstly, a desire to transcend material reality through entry into chimerical or incorporeal realms of superstition or dream, and secondly a tendency to structure narrative around the pursuit of some ideal, whether this be love, truth, divinity or conquest. The two motifs are encapsulated in the medieval and renaissance romances with which the genre is most closely associated. Tales such as ‘King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table’ typically find a chivalric hero either ‘questing for an ideal’ or living out the ‘belief that life could be lived by ideals rather than rules’, succumbing to ‘inflated feelings and

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impossible passions’ and traversing a portentous landscape of ‘enchanted castles, magicians [and] ogres’.7 In the early twentieth century, these core concerns and tropes, far from declining in popularity, were modernised and expanded for a vastly enlarged reading public. Increased literacy and the new availability of cheap, mass-produced paperbacks resulted in a boom in the publication of populist romances and in a diversification of the field into a range of concurrent sub-genres, a trend readily ‘supported by a well-organised, market-driven, commercially minded publishing and book-selling industry with a constant eye for fashion and fancy’.8 The multiplicity of formulae that exist today – adventure, horror, murder mysteries, spy thrillers, war novels, family sagas, love stories9 – may appear to defy a single classification, each bearing specific stratagems, registers and archetypes, yet all remain loyal to the fundamental motifs of quest and idealism. Admittedly, it took some time for twentieth-century scholarship to locate any purpose to the study of populist fiction. The initial response, grounded in a strict separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, was to view the genre as inferior and damaging, as a kind of debased Romanticism which retains traces of mythic travail and idealised love but imbues them with wish-fulfilment. Early criticism was unanimous in considering it inseparable from capitalism’s ‘phantasmagoria of passing shows and vicarious stimulations’, presenting ‘a mass, undiscriminating readership’ with a variety of ‘compensatory satisfactions [for] lives of drudgery and tedium’.10 More insidiously, the genre was embedded in the tarnished values of its society of origin, active in normalising hegemonic attitudes towards wealth, marriage, patriarchy and social hierarchy amongst an unsuspecting public. The formulaic literature of romance, John Cawelti writes, offers ‘the fulfilment of conventional expectations’ by concealing ‘the disorder, the ambiguity, the uncertainty and the limitations of our world of experience’ and constructing ‘an ideal world’ which ‘takes on the shape of our heart’s desire’.11 By the 1960s, however, the academic stance had begun to shift. The very fact that the genre was situated within mass culture, moulded by its conditions of production within a commercial publishing industry, suggested that its analysis might yield useful cultural insight. For Leo Lowenthal, commenting on the distinction between ‘art and commodity’, these ‘popular literary products can make no claim to insight and truth’, and lack all

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philosophical value, but their signifying practices ‘cannot be overestimated as diagnostic tools for studying man (sic) in contemporary society.’12 The growth of the criticism of popular fiction in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the rise of deconstructive approaches to the literary text. Bob Ashley, for example, has viewed popular literature not as a unified medium for the transmission of dominant ideologies, but as a divided, contradictory space in which reactionary discursive structures, constantly renegotiated and reshaped by authors, are frequently ‘occupied by oppositional social critiques’.13 Just as mass society is itself a site of dissension, so the popular narratives which emerge from that society prove heterogeneous and contingent, productive of consensus, but also productive of viewpoints which are subversive of consensus. The fusion of hegemonic and oppositional discourses is a key feature of fiction on south-east Europe, which, ever since its emergence, has been demonstrating a capacity to both support and subvert the established structures of balkanism. In the early days of the genre, the world of Scott’s Highlanders not only exerted a direct influence, but was also channelled and updated via the work of Anthony Hope. The latter’s fanciful swashbucklers set in imaginary European kingdoms did much to establish the codes and conventions of one of the period’s most significant romantic modes: ‘the escapist adventure set within an international political crisis.’14 For novelists turning their hand to the form, the competing territorial ambitions of the Great Powers in the wake of the Ottoman withdrawal from Europe was a natural crisis to address, and one for which Hope’s fiction suggested an answer. In The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), the first and most famous of a linked trilogy of novels, a young English aristocrat, Rudolf Rasendyll, is taking a leisurely tour of Ruritania where, due to his physical resemblance to their monarch, he is asked by a group of royalists to act as a temporary substitute for their king who has been kidnapped in a plot to dethrone him, a task Rudolf carries out with such aplomb that disaster is averted. As Vesna Goldsworthy argues, this fantasy of a ‘Byronic hero’ relieving an endangered European throne offered ‘a beguiling way out for those who, troubled by events in the Balkans, sought ready solutions’.15 Although Ruritania was not located in the peninsula, and was most likely inspired by Bohemia, now divided between Poland and the Czech Republic, Hope’s imperial monarchism was soon transferred there by a flurry of novelists eager

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to solve the Eastern Question. Not least of their borrowings was the strategy of concealing real sovereign nation-states behind exotic place names: amongst them, Herzoslovakia, Evarchia, Vuchinia, Kravonia, Carpathia, Romanzia, Slavonia and Silaria. While summoning up available kingdoms for British protagonists to govern, and enabling novelists to expound on the benefits of British rule, this did little to concretise for the readership a region comprehensively obscured by centuries of literary mythmaking. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s reading habits, introduced in chapter 7, captures the confusion of reality and myth. This self-proclaimed ‘old addict’ of Balkan romances describes how the region’s authentic toponyms – ‘Wallachia, Moldavia, Bessarabia’ – always turn his thoughts, not to the actual provinces themselves, but to the fantastical pages of fiction.16 Whenever the ‘geography of Austria-Hungary and its neighbours’ is mentioned, he writes, a score of imaginary kingdoms [...] leap into mind: plots, treachery, imprisoned heirs and palace factions abound and, along with them, fiendish monocled swordsmen, queens in lonely towers, toppling ranges, deep forests, plains full of half-wild horses, wandering tribes of Gypsies who steal children out of castles and dye them with walnut juice or lurk under battlements and melt the chatelaines’ hearts with their strings. There are mad noblemen and rioting jacqueries; robbers too, half-marauder and half-Robin Hood, straddling quite across the way with their grievous crab-tree cudgels. I had read about betyárs on the Alföld; now haidouks and pandours had begun to impinge. Furhatted and looped with pearls, the great boyars of the Rumanian principalities surged up the other side of the watershed; ghostly hospodars with their nearly mythical princesses trooped in tall branched crowns round the wall of fortress-monasteries in frescoed processions […].17

Fermor’s lavish prose, imitative of the stylistic extravagance of the romance-novelists, shows that the exoticisation of the region extended far beyond fanciful toponyms. With a customary focus on the peninsula’s ruling classes, the author’s mixture of old-fashioned diction (monocles, cudgels, chatelaines) and regional loan words (betyárs, hospodars) distances the Balkans from contemporary western realities, as does his usage of imagery (vampires, werewolves and haunted castles are later mentioned) drawn from gothic fiction, an important sub-strata of romance. The construction of the region through a highly artificial nomenclature, what Saki once referred to

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fondly as ‘“those familiar outlandish names and things and places”’,18 facilitated the preconditions for romance, offering protagonist, author and reader the chance to exchange everyday monotony for chivalry and idealism. It was a result of Hope’s influence that the major sub-genre during the early years of the Balkan romance was that of adventure, a form rooted in the masculinist quests of myth and legend in which incident and obstacle, trial and revelation, quickly accumulate. ‘The central fantasy of the adventure story’, as Cawelti relates, ‘is that of the hero – individual or group – overcoming obstacles and dangers and accomplishing some important and moral mission’.19 While adventure had always underpinned the journeys of Victorian travellers, their autobiographical records were at least partially constrained by the fear that later visitors would expose any inaccuracy or whimsy. Lady Mary Montagu was not alone in denouncing the ‘abundance of wonders’ with which her predecessors had misled their readers.20 In prose fiction, however, the fantasy of prestige and accomplishment was given full reign, with the hero becoming a catalyst for regional, as well as personal, transformation. In the imagined worlds of the Balkan romance, it is remarkable how effortlessly an Englishman or Englishwoman of no great social standing, and with no apparent aptitude, can gain a commanding role in regional affairs. In Hope’s Sophy of Kravonia (1906), a novel set unequivocally in the Balkans, a young Essex serving girl rises effortlessly into the ranks of the Kravonian aristocracy, finally marrying the king and leading the nation’s troops in battle.21 The English protagonist of John Finnemore’s Foray and Fight (1906) is an Oxford graduate who during a ramble through the southern Balkans is caught up in a native rebellion against Ottoman rule and establishes himself as one of the insurrection’s ‘three leaders’.22 Similarly, in Finnemore’s A Boy Scout in the Balkans (1913) a British schoolboy, vacationing on his father’s tobacco plantation near Adrianople, becomes a ‘redoubtable leader’ in the Bulgarian uprising and earns the ‘joyous acclamations of the villagers’ for his courage and ability.23 Tom Bevan’s The Insurgent Trail (c.1910) finds similar potential in the Sultan’s ‘reign of terror’ in early twentieth-century Macedonia.24 Here, a young Englishman, James Brown, is sent by the British government to gather information about the occupied province, ravaged by an escalating conflict in which Ottoman irregulars have

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regularly ‘robbed, pillaged [and] beat’ the inhabitants and the Macedonian insurgents, ‘a muscular, determined lot’, have reacted with dynamite outrages and guerrilla warfare (pp. 323, 89). Emphasising the origins of the romance in classical literature, Bevan draws early links between the novel’s ‘“honest and fearless”’ hero and the former masters of these antique lands (p. 13). Upon Brown’s arrival by ship at Thessalonica, the sight of ‘the mighty mass of Olympus’, the ‘home of the gods of ancient Greece’, reminds him that this is ‘the land of song and fable, the land of Homer and mighty Alexander’, and that his ‘feet would soon be treading soil that the feet of St. Paul has rendered for ever holy’ (pp. 7-8). Befitting such mythic identification, Brown immediately recognises the Sultan’s pillaging of this Christian country as a spur to action, joining a band of ‘committaji’, or insurgents, and taking part in their summer campaign against the Ottoman forces. Although Brown is a recent Oxford graduate, with no more qualification than a talent for shooting and a dose of ‘British bravado’, he performs so robustly in battle that he is elevated into a ‘“god [...] for committaji to worship”’ (pp. 103, 106). It is from such passages that one gleans the ideological leaning of the text. Although Brown’s military endeavours appear to subvert ‘the help that England’s government always gave to the Sultan’ (p. 95), and to censure British interference in the Near East, they actually dramatise the author’s enthusiasm for an intensification of imperial involvement. The argument is brought home to Brown by a Greek acquaintance who, early in the narrative, tells him that Britain needs to exchange its circuitous influence on the Porte for direct rule. Among the complex motivations for the shift in policy is the fact that ‘your nation sympathizes with any people struggling for freedom. And you must remember that you have stolen Egypt away from the Sultan’s empire. Turks travel along the Nile valley; they have seen the wonders you have worked there […]. Do you know that in more than one hiding-place in this city there are Union Jacks and people eager to run them up a flagstaff? I have heard many an honest Turk pray for British rule – even British annexation.’ (p. 16)

This archetypal fantasy of indigenous peoples calling for their own subjugation, so common in imperial fiction, deflects the past iniquity of British support for the Ottoman Empire and justifies intervention via the myth of metropolitan progress. The Greek’s argument is

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supported by many sections of the subsequent narrative. In one scene, when told that the only check on Ottoman aggression in Thessalonica is fear of the British fleet anchored off the coast, Brown immediately descants on ‘the security that lies in the shadow of the dear old Union Jack’ (p. 26). More dramatically, whenever the safety of his young Bulgarian guide is threatened by Ottoman officials in the Macedonian interior, the paternalist protection that Brown extends him – ‘“this poor fellow is my servant, and I cannot abandon him”’ (p. 223) – becomes metonymic of the potency and rectitude of British imperial authority. In the light of this, Brown’s stated desire for a ‘[w]ellgoverned Macedonia’, and for ‘a happy and prosperous country’, seems less a call for independence than a rallying cry for ‘British annexation’.25 While the masculinism of The Insurgent Trail is beyond dispute, the novel also illustrates the porousness of the gender boundaries governing the production and reception of populist genres. Into his stridently male adventure, that dangerous game between hero and villain, Bevan inserts the structures and concerns of the love story, a genre that frequently, though not exclusively, charts a female’s search for romantic fulfilment. In a study of popular fiction aimed at a female readership, Tania Modleski locates within its doctrines of patriarchy, monogamy and domesticity a number of ‘tensions’ which, though insufficient to ‘please modern feminists’, indicate ‘elements of protest and resistance underneath [the] highly “orthodox plots”’.26 In Bevan’s unconventional take on the genre, such ‘resistance’ involves the development of a cross-cultural amour at a time when most British fiction revealed anxiety about racial impurity and the pollution of the national stock. During Brown’s time with the guerrilla band, his attention is drawn to a ‘handsome and well-washed young insurgent’ (p. 115) who goes by the name of Marko, yet who turns out to be one Elena Marcovitch, a Bulgarian woman who, after Ottoman troops killed his sister, dressed as a man and joined the uprising. She is known as a fearless fighter, characterised by ‘a will of iron’, a ‘wild desire for revenge’ and a martial determination ‘“more untamable than two hundred men”’ (pp. 263, 273, 115). When told by an American volunteer that she would do well to ‘“go home and darn socks”’, her retort is a blunt assertion of female agency: ‘“The Turks war with women, and women must war with them”’ (p. 121). For Modleski, the female protagonists of pulp romances are typically marked by a desire

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for an ‘active life’ and by ‘longings for power and revenge’, features which ‘served as a covert expression of feminine anger at male power’.27 Accordingly, it is Elena who encourages Brown to take up arms and fight the Sultan’s troops, and not only rescues Brown when he is kidnapped by a band of thieves, but also, in one skirmish, saves his life by killing an Ottoman assailant. Even when Elena reveals a more conventional side to her femaleness, by washing Brown’s socks, the gesture is done on her own terms: ‘“to show you how good and domestic I am – when I am in the mood”’ (p. 153). Despite Brown wondering whether this is ‘“a brother, a sister, or a sort of mother”’, he soon consents to her advice and guidance, and finally seeks her hand in marriage, convinced that ‘“there are none braver, none greater of heart”’ (pp. 161, 279). If the central plot of the love story is, as Bridget Fowler suggest, ‘the quest of the lovers to overcome obstacles to marriage’, then Bevan’s tale is exemplary, convening representatives of two traditionally divided sections of the continent and uniting them in a permanent bond.28 Hope’s influence on subsequent fiction is even clearer in those turn-of-the-century novels that cast British characters into the world of south-east European monarchies. While continuing to exoticise the region, these tales simultaneously domesticated it in the way the intrigues and affairs of its kings, princesses and palace officials often mirrored those of the British court, a familiar enough subject of gossip in the national press. Indeed, as readers were aware, many of the peninsula’s monarchs – Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, for example, or King Carol I and Queen Marie of Romania – had originated from German or British royal families, while the throne of post-Ottoman Albania was offered to a number of western nobles and society figures, including the British cricketer, C.B. Fry. These royal romances, in other words, were less sensational than may be supposed. The first and most successful was Hilda Gregg’s An Uncrowned King (1896), published under the nom de plume of Sydney C. Grier, which follows the adventures of a young English aristocrat and parliamentarian, Lord Caerleon, after being offered the crown of the Balkan kingdom of Thracia. Loosely based on Bulgaria, the kingdom is suffering from the expansionist policies of a powerful neighbour, Scythia, which has gained such a grip on Thracian public life that the patriotic population has revolted and ousted the reigning king. After accepting the throne, Caerleon establishes his brother Cyril

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as adviser and sets about the business of stabilising the country, only to be thwarted by Scythia’s continual plotting, including a violent coup d’état that, at the novel’s close, drives the two Englishmen into exile. Although Caerleon’s final decision to resume a settled life in England intimates that Balkan adventuring is perhaps a suitable activity for youth, but hardly the stuff of adulthood, the narrative is broadly sympathetic to the Thracian/Bulgarian nation-state. Most obviously, Gregg’s Scythia is a thinly veiled portrait of Tsarist Russia, whose political machinations in late nineteenth-century Bulgaria had produced a disruptive round of military conspiracies, forced abdications and popular uprisings. At the same time, the population of Thracia is a broadly conservative mixture of ‘country gentlemen and their mountain clans’ that are no more barbarous or alien than Scott’s Celtic Highlanders.29 So popular did this romantic formula prove, that Gregg published three further instalments of the tale, A Crowned Queen (1898), The Kings of the East (1900) and The Prince of the Captivity (1902), and inspired a number of contemporary imitations. John Lawrence Lambe’s By Command of the Prince (1901) also addressed Russian intrigues in Bulgaria, while Nellie Blissett’s The Bindweed (1904) and Dorothea Gerard’s The Red-Hot Crown (1909) turn to dynastic rivalry in Serbia, specifically the assassination in 1903 of King Aleksandar Obrenović and the investiture of the pro-Russian Petar Karadjordjević. As fondly imagined as her Thracia is, however, Gregg’s positioning of an English monarch as its figurehead was enough to indicate what Martin Green has termed ‘a literature in subservient alliance with imperialism’.30 After the First World War, when the region’s monarchs were threatened by both right-wing dictatorship and communism, the fictional romances of Balkan royalty grew more prevalent. Whereas a character in a 1906 novel had commented enthusiastically on how ‘“there’s money to be made out of a few first-hand books on the subject’”, a character in a 1937 novel was already complaining that ‘[t]here had been far too many Ruritanian novels’.31 Due to the genre’s popularity, south-east Europe became defined for many readers, not by the reputed barbarity of peasants, but by the image of monarchical grandeur, even when little virtue was directly allotted to the royal houses or to the countries over which they reigned. In Marguerite Bryant and G.H. McAnally’s The Chronicles of a Great Prince (1925), an Englishman travels to Romanzia to take up the tutorship of

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the prince’s sons, initially feeling himself transported from a western ‘atmosphere [...] of reason and logic’ into a ‘hot-bed of romanticism’, although soon learning otherwise: ‘“I suppose you in England think of us as half barbarians,”’ the prince tells him, ‘“but we are not like that. We have our own customs and laws, but as a race we have a fair record”’.32 Similarly, Agatha Christie’s murder mystery, The Secret of Chimneys (1925) opens by presenting the fictional state of Herzoslovakia as the stereotypical realm of instability and violence: ‘It’s one of the Balkan States, isn’t it? Principal rivers, unknown. Principal mountains, also unknown, but fairly numerous. Capital, Ekarest. Population, chiefly brigands. Hobby, assassinating kings and having revolutions. Last king, Nicholas IV, assassinated about seven years ago. Since then it’s been a republic.’33

The passage may satirise the format of the school geography primer, its simplistic categories and bland summations inadequate for regional complexity, but the novel proceeds to evoke Herzoslovakia solely through the formal, courteous practises of its indigenous ruling classes. More specifically, Christie is concerned less with reiterating derogatory clichés than with addressing the primary concern of interwar fiction on south-east Europe: the maintenance of stable government. This was further illustrated by Cecil Roberts’s Victoria Four-Thirty (1937), an exemplar of what Goldsworthy terms ‘the Orient Express novel’.34 Like Christie’s murder mysteries, this was a sub-category of the adventure novel, one that developed out of the route’s growing popularity in the 1930s, when the genre acquired its own conventions, stylistic devices and plot structures. One such convention, epitomised in Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train (1932) and Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins (1936), was to establish the ThessalonikaTrieste line as the section of the route where ‘the unexpected always happens and the train and its passengers are at their most vulnerable.’35 Roberts’s novel, however, was more representative of the romantic approach. The text’s multiple narratives describe the personal experiences of an unrelated collection of passengers, comprising various nationalities and professions (including novelists, doctors, generals, businessmen, aristocrats), all of whom are ‘struck by a romanticism’ and ‘a sensation of great adventure’ during their journey.36 Amongst them is Prince Paul, heir to the throne of Slavonia,

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a shy, civil, ‘dark-eyed little boy’ of thirteen (p. 53), whose studies at an English preparatory school are interrupted by the assassination of his father in a student bomb plot, an event which obliges him to return home to ascend the throne. Although the prince is poor in comparison to the English boarders, his country is consistently portrayed through the emblems of monarchy: royal arms, summer palaces, uniformed officers and guards of honour, as well as ‘beautiful […] tree-lined promenades and bright villas set amid luxurious gardens’ (p. 236). On the journey there, he not only shares a train with other European passengers (symbolic of the Balkans taking its rightful place in Europe), but is also elevated above their social boundaries, an object of their deference and respect. Moreover, the prince is ‘popular’ amongst his subjects (‘“[t]he whole country loves you”’, he is informed by an aide), and with his character grounded in morality and education there is little doubt that, while ‘“anything can happen in the Balkans”’, Slavonia will now enjoy enlightened leadership (pp. 134, 234, 134). Indeed, in the polarised political landscape of the text, torn between Bolshevism and ‘Nazi thuggery’ and troubled by ‘modern political experiments’, it is only dynastic rule that seems to offer security and peace (pp. 226, 144). Roberts’s fear of totalitarianism and fondness for the Balkan royal houses were repeated in the spy thriller, an adventure formula in which, during its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘the Balkans was the area of greatest intrigue’.37 This was largely the achievement of John Buchan, the Scottish-born novelist, barrister, soldier, colonial governor and member of parliament, whose The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) not only established the region as a staple location for spy thrillers, but also did much to originate espionage fiction as a literary genre.38 Buchan’s prefatory comments to the novel reveal his fondness for romantic literature: although its ‘incidents defy the probabilities’, he writes, it remains the most suitable genre for a period of history ‘when the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the facts.’39 In the famous tale, the imperialist hero, Richard Hannay, stumbles upon a German plot to assassinate the Greek Prime Minister on British soil, an outrage which would ‘set the Balkans by the ears’ (p. 84) and also facilitate the German invasion of Britain by revitalising Great Power rivalry over south-east Europe. The significant point here is that the threat to western security comes not from the peninsula – the Greek premier, who ‘play[s] a straight

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game’ and stands ‘between Europe and Armageddon’, is a symbol of virtue (pp. 13-14) – but from the expansionist ambitions of Vienna and Berlin. Buchan’s political allegiances became clearer in the novel’s wartime sequel, Greenmantle (1916), where Hannay travels across south-east Europe to Turkey in order to foil a second German conspiracy, this time to gain control of the Middle East by nurturing Islamic extremism and directing it against the Allied forces. When Hannay arrives in Belgrade and sees at first hand how the Central Powers ‘munitioned their Balkan campaign’ and regulated all local supply routes and foodstuffs, he ponders these ‘gallant people whose capital this had been’ and determines to obstruct Germany’s ‘monstrous bloody Juggernaut that was crushing the life out of the little heroic nations.’40 This notion of the Balkans as a fundamentally decent region beset by foreign antagonists recurred in Buchan’s The House of the Four Winds (1925) and Castle Gay (1929). Blending elements of royal romance and espionage fiction, the novels form a linked narrative detailing the experiences of Dickson McCunn – a young Scottish adventurer in the Hannay mould – in the troubled republic of Evallonia.41 In Castle Gay, chronologically the earlier instalment, a rich Scottish newspaper magnate, Thomas Carlyle Craw, is convinced that only the restoration of the monarchy can resolve Evallonia’s political and economic crises, a stance that elevates him in the eyes of Evallonian monarchists into what ‘Palmerston was once to Italy and Gladstone to Bulgaria’.42 When a delegation of royalists arrives in Scotland to seek Craw’s assistance with the investiture of their figurehead, Prince John, they are harried by a group of Evallonian communists who have ‘“sinister relations with Moscow”’ and who seek in their country ‘“an imitation of the Soviet regime”’ (p. 176). In contrast to these fanatics, ‘whose natural habitat [is] the cave and the jungle’, Prince John is ‘“an exemplary young man, with great personal charm and a high sense of public duty”’ (pp. 267, 176). The narrative’s ideological bias is repeated in The House of the Four Winds. Here, Evallonia’s political crisis is compounded by a power struggle between the communists and a right-wing nationalist movement known as ‘Juventus’, whose desire to establish a military dictatorship is gaining support amongst the youth, drawn to its fascistic symbolism (blood oaths, woodland songs, green shirts and ‘badge[s] like Hitler’s swastika’43). For Dickson and his team, however, only the royalists have either the general support of the

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Evallonian people – who feel ‘“a tenderness for the old line”’ – or the ‘“brains [and] experience”’ to form ‘“good government”’ (pp. 169, 90, 90). With this in mind, they devise a plan to restore the monarchy by drawing Juventus into an alliance with Prince John and marginalising the communists (‘the most dangerous underground force in Europe’ (p. 54)). Their success culminates in the prince’s coronation, described as ‘one long blaze of triumph’ in which ‘rapturous’ crowds rained upon him ‘garlands of flowers’ (p. 226). The British, the prince tells Dickson, have ‘“given back to Evallonia her soul”’ (p. 206). The progress of Buchan’s political parables from The ThirtyNine Steps to The House of the Four Winds dramatises his evolving responses to contemporary history, from the clear military allegiances of the First World War to the uncertain diplomatic manoeuvring of the 1920s, an era in which the Central Powers and Soviet Russia were always the primary adversaries. In Greenmantle, when one character remarks, ominously, that ‘[t]here is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark’,44 it is not the Balkans that Britain need fear. Despite moments of condescension, Buchan’s south-east Europe is composed of the same nostalgic pastoralism as his imagined Scotland in such pieces as Grey Weather (1899) and Huntingtower (1922), which were themselves inheritors of Scott’s Waverley. Indeed, in Castle Gay Dickson becomes convinced that Prince John has the same blood as Bonnie Prince Charlie and, at the end of the novel, smuggles him out of Britain disguised in a highland costume. It may be the case that in the rapidly modernising world of the 1920s such narratives were ‘somewhat outdated’, as Goldsworthy has argued.45 Yet Buchan’s work shows the enduring power of the royal romance, which only lost its centrality to balkanist fiction in the later years of the Cold War. In the 1970s, Robert Tyler Stevens continued to write love stories – Flight from Bucharest (1977) and Appointment in Sarajevo (1978) – set during the First World War and populated by characters from the Romanian royal house and the Austrian aristocracy. In Flight from Bucharest, an English officer stationed in occupied Romania during the closing months of the war is tasked with smuggling out Princess Irene of Moldavia, ‘“a woman of intelligence and spirit”’46 whose pro-German sympathies have attracted the hostility of the Romanian socialists. The couple’s increasing attraction and ultimate marriage echoes Bevan’s utopian vision of an equal alliance between the two poles of a divided

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continent, particularly when it transpires that the ‘bravely beautiful’ Romanian is, like the English officer, ‘“a commoner”’, a stand-in for the real princess.47 A similar pattern of motifs is found in Bridget Brophy’s Palace without Chairs (1978), although it was here that the royal romance found its terminal expression. The fictional country of Evarchia is ‘the most precariously placed national state in Europe’,48 positioned between Greece and Bulgaria, the ‘Free World’ and the Soviet Bloc, and weakened by a decadent, impoverished monarchy unable to withstand the growing forces of left- and right-wing extremism. Palace without Chairs displays the same nostalgia for a dynastic Europe as Flight from Bucharest, and even repeats Stevens’s pan-continental idealism in a lesbian affair between an Evarchian princess and an English governess. Nevertheless, the novel is imbued with irony, a comic portrait of a superannuated political system of no relevance to either British readers or Balkan populations (whose monarchs had long been exiled). As Cawelti points out, modes of romance which ‘seem too distant either in time or in space tend to drop out of the current catalogue of adventure formulas’;49 accordingly, the royal romance was soon overshadowed by the thriller, with Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler and Eric Williams becoming far more pertinent to a Cold War readership intrigued by eastern Europe.50 ‘“It’s all spy stories”’, a character in Palace without Chairs complains: ‘“They seem to be all you can get nowadays”’.51 The focus on Balkan royal houses was not the only feature of early twentieth-century fiction to persist during the Cold War. In the 1910s and 1920s, the nationalist uprisings in the southern Balkans and the wartime allegiance between Britain and Serbia had been widely exonerated by commentators, whose growing fondness for these ‘little heroic nations’ would have a lasting effect on both fiction and travel writing. Their approach was crystallised in two fictional sketches by Saki, the nom de plume of Hector Hugh Munro, who had worked as the Morning Post’s foreign correspondent in south-east Europe from 1902 to 1903, before producing the string of novels and short stories which would make his name. In ‘The Purple of Balkan Kings’ (1923), composed during the First Balkan War, Luitpold Wolkenstein, an aged financier and self-styled ‘diplomat’,52 sits in a Viennese café and contemplates the latest news from the frontlines, where the combined armies of Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro are driving the Ottoman troops back to Constantinople. All his life he has felt ‘unsparing

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contempt’ for ‘the ambitions of the Balkan kinglets and their peoples’, content to see the Great Powers ‘dictating, adjusting, restoring, settling things’ in the peninsula and worried that ‘a people who has tasted victory will not let itself be driven back again within its former limits’ (pp. 526, 526, 527, 528). Like the decayed Habsburg Empire of which he is a citizen, Wolkenstein finds that his ‘pompous, imposing, dictating world […] had suddenly rolled up into narrower dimensions’ (p. 528). The same support for regional self-government is seen, with one important qualification, in ‘The Cupboard of the Yesterdays’ (1923), also written in 1912. The story comprises a dialogue between a Wanderer and a Merchant, allegorical representatives of romance and pragmatism, who consider the prospects of Balkan independence. Although the Merchant describes the Ottoman departure from Europe as ‘“a gain to the cause of good government”’, the Wanderer is more concerned with the impact that closer ties with the West will have upon this ‘“magical region”’.53 The peninsula offers ‘“the last remaining glimpse of a vanishing period of European history”’, he explains, and ‘“the last surviving shred of happy hunting-ground for the adventurous”’, a place whose age-old capacity ‘“to thrill and enliven […] our imagination”’ is now threatened by ‘“an intrusion of civilised monotony”’.54 The sentiment is a common one in British balkanism, in which each generation has regretted the passing of the region’s peasant landscape before it has been properly lost. The recurrence of Saki’s brand of pastoralism and political sympathy is seen in a number of inter-war novels. An example is Ellen Chivers Davies’s children’s novel, When I Was a Boy in Serbia (1920), which draws upon, and partly imitates, the styles and concerns of the medieval peasant tale, an important ancestor of romantic fiction.55 Davies had lived in Serbia during 1915 and 1916, when she worked as a volunteer nurse in a British medical unit, experiencing both the bombardment of Belgrade and the initial stages of the Great Retreat. In her memoir of service, A Farmer in Serbia (1916), she is quick to express ‘love [for] the life here’, finding amid wartime hostilities a ‘delightfully pastoral’ country populated by ‘innate gentlemen’, who display a ‘primitive chivalry’, ‘a courage worthy of their best traditions’ and ‘a swagger gait like our own Highlanders’.56 This transnational allegiance is recreated in fictional form in When I Was a Boy. The narrative follows the reminiscences of a Serbian exile, Milosav Stoyanovitch, who recalls scenes from his childhood in a

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small village towards the north of Serbia, a society and culture from which, now that he has grown up and spent time in Britain, he feels himself distanced. While mentioning Serbia’s progress in modernising its state institutions, Stoyanovitch is more interested in detailing the pre-modern customs, traditional faiths and unsullied landscapes of this ‘delightful country’.57 For instance, his favourite childhood pastime was to listen to oral recitations of national legends and fairy tales, which were so common that ‘I knew all the history of my country in the most delightful way long before I went to school (p. 34): For many centuries poor Serbia had been under the heel of the Turks, and her cruel masters had tried their best to stamp out all memories of the great days when Serbia had been a mighty empire. There were scarcely any books, and few of the people could even read, so the only way in which the Serbian people could ever hear about the great heroes of old Serbian history was through the stories which were told to them by their bards. These bards were old men, often blind, who were led about the country from place to place, singing in the different villages the old, old songs which told the stories of the great days of the Serbian kings. (pp. 31-2)

In the best tradition of bardic performance, these ‘beautiful poems […] filled the Serbs with courage, and made them fight harder than before’, while also inspiring the village children with ‘the great deeds done by their ancestors’ (pp. 33, 32). It is from remarks like these that one senses Davies’s relationship to her young British readers. With Stoyanovitch’s first-person narrative being addressed directly to them (‘come to Serbia to see me’, he urges) and with the heroic legends being cited throughout the text, it appears to be British children whom these tales are meant to impress, teaching them how the Serbs ‘suffered so much in the Great War’ as they fought for ‘the liberation of their country’ and for the ‘cherished dream of a Southern Slav federation’.58 In short, Davies’s intention is not only to stimulate the reader’s imagination, but also to use that stimulation to forge sympathy for the Serbian cause. This propagandistic mixture was repeated in other children’s fiction from the early twentieth century, most obviously that of American novelists John Finnemore, Claire W. Hayes and Elizabeth Cleveland Miller, in their writings on Macedonia, Serbia and Albania respectively, as well as in British travel writings aimed at a younger audience. Roy Trevor’s Montenegro (1913), Lena Yovitchitch’s Yugoslavia (1928), Hebe

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Spaull’s Rumania (1930) and Bernard Newman’s Albanian Journey (c.1938) each combines a beguilingly adventurous narrative with overt propaganda.59 It is perhaps the clear alliances and unambiguous moral choices which pertained during the First World War that also encouraged a number of later romance-novelists to deploy the conflict as a time-frame and backdrop for their balkanist tales. In the 1930s, Stephen Graham published Balkan Monastery (1936), a story about Serbian children during the Great Retreat, and St Vitus Dance (1930), addressing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. During the Cold War, Alan Burgess offered a fictionalised treatment of Flora Sandes’s wartime service in The Lovely Sergeant (1963) and Stevens’s aforementioned Appointment in Sarajevo recounted a love affair between an English engineer and Austrian baroness in pre-war Sarajevo and Vienna. Even in more recent times, Starling Lawrence’s historical novel Montenegro (1998), focusing on the years leading up to the 1914-18 conflict, recaptures the flavour of classic balkanist adventure imbued with ‘“the shade of Homer”’.60 Although Davies’s combination of romance and propaganda was the most obvious link with inter-war travel writing, several novels from the 1920s and 1930s also discerned spiritual potential in southeast Europe. The most successful was Ann Bridge’s Illyrian Spring (1935), a family saga and love story set on the Dalmatian coast which went through ten impressions during the 1930s and 1940s. The novel’s popularity should not disguise its literary calibre: impressionism, perspectivism, interior analysis, a fascination with psychology and a concern for female emancipation are among the features it shares with canonical modernism.61 In the story, Lady Grace Kilmichael is a successful painter in her early forties, the wife of a rich though adulterous economist and the mother of an estranged daughter. Realising that for half her life she has sacrificed her artistic career to family duty, Grace decides to travel alone to Dalmatia, ‘which no one had ever heard of and where no one ever went’, in order to reflect upon whether she should leave her family for good.62 Initially, her thoughts centre on ‘the moral and intellectual subordination of women to their husbands’, a tradition which, despite the development of property rights and improved education, continues to be ‘subtly imposed by the husbands; tacitly and often unconsciously acquiesced in by the wives’ (pp. 47, 48). As the journey progresses, however, Grace begins to realise that her difficulties are partly caused

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by personal insecurities, as manifest in her attempts to prevent her debutante daughter leaving home. At this point, she meets a young Englishman, Nicholas Humphries, who is on a painting tour of the Yugoslav coast. As the two begin to bond through their common interests in art and music, Grace not only gains useful insight into the younger generation’s need for independence but also, as physical attraction develops between them, starts to view herself, not as mother or wife, but as an individual with private needs and desires. The ending of the novel, which sees Grace return to her husband and resume married life, may appear to reject her earlier feminism, but is predicted on a new determination to retain authority and liberty, as well as on a conviction that facing circumstances ‘without fear or distaste [...] was to find freedom’ (p. 251). Significantly, the restoration of family unity, a common format for the magical resolutions of romantic fiction,63 is achieved through the act of foreign travel. Grace’s wish to escape the ‘accustomed world’ and her notion that ‘freedom at home was almost inconceivable’ are both typical of a literary period which believed that psychological autonomy was attainable through physical departure (pp. 17, 47). Yet it is also the more specific prospect of south-east Europe that facilitates insight and personal growth. There are many points in the novel when the journey taken by Bridge’s protagonist resembles a fictional version of the pilgrimages of inter-war travel writers, those ‘intellectual tourists with whom the Balkans were coming into fashion’.64 In Britain, when Grace first realises ‘that there was something she must do about herself’, it is a geographical, rather than a metaphysical, destination which first comes to mind: ‘she had begun to get an idea, not of what the answer was, but [...] in what country the answer might be looked for’ (p. 46). When her journey begins, Grace’s first sighting of the Orient Express in France, with its indication plates bearing ‘names which led the mind right across Europe – Milan, Trieste, Beograd, Istanbul’, brings her a ‘little thrilled sense of space and travel’ (p. 6). Her eventual sojourn in Yugoslavia surpasses all expectation. The Dalmatia littoral is ‘a perpetually renewed enchantment’, with a ‘noble and splendid’ architecture, a society ‘as delicate and ardent as that to be found in any civilisation’ and a ‘clear pastoral landscape’ in which her relationship with Nicholas develops with ‘the tranquil naturalness of some Greek story’ (pp. 104, 77, 215, 116, 116). The enchantment begins as soon as

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Grace arrives by ship from Italy. Approaching the Dalmatian port of Split, she sees a few lights twinkling in the darkness ahead and then, suddenly, ‘a miracle happened’: From above their heads the ship’s searchlight sprang out, and drew up out of the darkness before them a picture of a town, as if some vast creative hand had raised up a great painted canvas from the floor of the night. There was a quay, thronged with people – behind it a white square, a white church, a tall white campanile with a red spire, and white houses running up the hill behind. An immense plane-tree stood at one side of the square, throwing its shadow across the ivory whiteness of the houses and rich façade of the church. In the strong white light the whole scene was beautiful with a strange theatrical beauty [...]. (p. 71)

The aestheticised townscape, an ‘incredible picture, framed in the surrounding darkness’, achieves the harmonious balance between foreground and background, and unity of colour, light and tone, that defined William Gilpin’s concept of the picturesque, where the observer ‘culls from nature the most beautiful parts [...] and remov[es] every thing offensive’.65 With a viewpoint as fastidious as this, it is little wonder that Grace goes on to behold divinity in Yugoslavia. When she refers to a local village as ‘a divine place to stay’, or remarks upon the ‘heavenly completion’ to be attained along ‘this magic shore’ (pp. 156-7, 130, 109), one senses the kind of sublime transports which marked eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romanticism. A number of Bridge’s contemporaries found similar inspiration in the peninsula. Most extravagantly, there was Queen Marie’s The Voice on the Mountain (1924), the bizarre, barely readable account of a Romanian faith healer, a ‘white-clad’ and ‘mystical goddess’, whose esoteric wisdom leads countless pilgrims ‘towards mysteries which they had never dared face’.66 Cecil Roberts’s Romania is more restrained but still ‘out of the world’, its isolated mountain convents preserving a spirituality that elsewhere in Europe has been eroded by ‘organized evil and intolerance’.67 Similarly, Elizabeth Miller’s two love stories set in highland Albania, Children of the Mountain Eagle (1928) and Pran of Albania (1929), evoke a backwater of ancient religious custom and moral law, and F.O.H. Nash’s Kattie of the Balkans (1931), a royal romance written for children, sees a fictionalised Bulgaria plagued by lawlessness until its republican government is terminated by the investiture of a

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Christian queen. Even David Footman’s cynical tales of diplomatic service in Tsernigrad, the ‘ramshackle’ and ‘second rate Balkan capital’ of a thinly disguised Serbia, have moments of transcendence.68 Although the narrator of his Pig and Pepper (1936), a lowly consular official, fails to achieve in Vuchinia the ‘big spiritual adventure’ he had desired, the country offers ‘vivid emotional experiences’, including ‘perfect happiness’ and ‘perfect harmony with the universe’, with any sighting of the Orient Express after his time there tending to induce ‘a romantic thrill’.69 Nevertheless, the significant point about Footman’s work of the 1930s and 1940s, and that of many other novelists of the period, was the gradual loss of agency experienced by their protagonists. As the Balkan states developed into increasingly sophisticated political and economic entities, the self-aggrandising tales of Bevan, Buchan and Gregg, in which chivalric Britons intervened to safeguard whole nations, seemed too fantastical for even the romantic genre to countenance. In Pig and Pepper, the narrator’s consular service offers neither omnipotence nor influence amongst the local citizenry, merely a life of ineffectual tedium temporarily broken by his involvement with a British ex-major at risk of arrest for embezzlement. Footman’s later Pemberton (1943) sees the same character recalled to Tsernigrad in the early years of the Second World War, only to find the legation evacuated in the wake of German invasion. Even when he throws in his lot with a British commission agent who has joined the communist underground, he promptly gives up when the agent is shot by the invading army. This sense of the protagonist as a victim, rather than instigator, of Balkan affairs continued after 1945. In John Appleby’s Tin Trumpet at Dawn (1950), set in the early years of the Cold War, the republic of Slovaria is shaken by a nationalist uprising, led by a right-wing demagogue who appropriates the British consulate to direct operations, confining the small English colony within. He is fearless of reprisal from western European governments for whom Slovaria is ‘“a far-off country of which they know little”’.70 Although the British Army eventually sends a rescue party, and the British Consul General gains the ear of the post-revolution leadership, the expatriate community is largely rendered powerless. In the same way, the central characters of Eric Ambler’s Judgement on Deltchev (1951) and David Dodge’s The Lights of Skaro (1954), both seasoned foreign correspondents, are too preoccupied with evading the authorities of

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the unnamed communist regimes on which they report to affect any gallant interventionism. ‘I do not have heroic impulses’, Ambler’s newspaperman admits: ‘[t]he spirit of romantic derring-do runs somewhat thinly in my veins.’71 The spy fiction to which Ambler’s work is closely related may be concerned with ‘the saving of the nation’, as one critic defines its principal trope,72 but on occasion its protagonists barely manage to save themselves. As Cold War fiction is the subject of the next chapter, it is sufficient to say here that only Ann Quinton’s The Ragusa Theme (1986), a love story cum thriller centred around an Anglo-American orchestra on tour of Yugoslavia, contrives to locate ‘romance and beauty’ in the peninsula.73 In other words, it was not only a loss of western agency that defined late twentieth-century fiction on the Balkans, but also an increasingly disparaging treatment of the region itself. The condemnation in Cold War novels of corrupt and brutal state systems was broadened after 1989 to include the populations themselves, who became as far removed from Scott’s highlanders as it was possible to get. For British and American authors, Romania resembles a ‘sort of prison’, its people ‘gaunt and ill [...] like walking skeletons’, Albania is ‘openly ruled by warlord gangs’, Serbia displays ‘terrible, primitive [...] fascism’ and Macedonia and Bosnia suffer from ‘violent lawlessness’, ‘local corruption’, ‘abject terror’ and ‘unbelievable brutality’.74 With such perceived depravity, masculinist adventure has naturally become the romantic genre of choice, although the question of what heroic object a protagonist should seek in the region – the key motif of the form – is proving a tricky one to answer.75 The rather feeble solution for some western authors is a resuscitation of an old motif of imperial fiction: the rescuing of native women and children from the evils of native men. The hero of Ray Drayton’s Escape from Bosnia (2004) participates in covert operations taking orphaned children away from the male-orientated violence of Albania and Bosnia (‘[w]e are the shining light at the end of a very long dark tunnel’) and the protagonist of Jon Evans’s The Blood Price (2005) smuggles out the wife of a Croatian paramilitary leader who regularly tortures her, thereby doing his bit to counter the ‘bloodcurdling hatred and bigotry that lay beneath Bosnia’s unconvincing veneer of civilisation’.76 An extended take on the theme is found in Gerald Seymour’s thriller The Heart of Danger (1995), centred around the early years of the Yugoslav Wars. William Penn, a British secret

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service operative turned private detective, is employed to investigate the death of a young British woman, Dorothy Mowat, who has been tortured and killed while engaged in humanitarian work in a Serb-held sector of northern Croatia. Although Dorothy’s mother has employed Penn, she has nothing but contempt for her daughter, who she considers ‘a moody and awkward and bloody-minded horror story’.77 As Penn begins the investigation in Croatia, however, uncovering evidence of the aid worker’s remarkable bravery and compassion, he decides to use his report to convince the mother of Dorothy’s worth, thereby rescuing, not the life of a Yugoslav woman, but the reputation of a British resident in the region. Indeed, Dorothy’s benevolence so impresses Penn that he determines ‘to earn his own pride’ by tracking down Dorothy’s killer,78 a Serb paramilitary commander, and bringing him to trial in the West. Unfortunately, British Intelligence hears about Penn’s activities and, worried about their likely effect on UN cease-fire negotiations with Belgrade, kill him before the mission is accomplished. Seymour’s protagonist may ‘perish in pursuit of some belief or imagined ideal’, as Derek Longhurst has commented, but it is an ideal that neither western nor eastern Europe is prepared to accommodate.79 The portrait of the Balkans that one finds in novels like The Heart of Danger is often suffused with a sense of loss. The journey across the imagined civilisational frontier that runs through the centre of Europe, and that has animated a hundred years of British populist fiction, no longer appears able to inspire the romantic imagination. Indeed, Louis de Bernières’s central character in A Partisan’s Daughter (2008), a travelling salesman eking out a dreary existence in Thatcherite Britain, even fails to enter south-east Europe during the narrative, and is restricted to listening to the apocryphal anecdotes of a Yugoslav migrant, a form of armchair travel that delivers neither physical nor sexual adventure. The loss of idealism is exemplified by the demise of that century-old tradition, inaugurated by Anthony Hope, of allocating exotic place names to the Balkan countries. The gulf separating contemporary fiction and the old Ruritanian romance can be gauged by a moment in Dan Fesperman’s The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (2003) when a Serbian general, gazing over the Bosnian countryside at night, suddenly perceives it as an ‘enchanted [...] place where mere farmers and peasants slipped their skins by night to become ogres and knights, gliding into the trees to joust and

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thrust in secret, writing new chapters in the lore of the forbidden’.80 The fairy-tale motifs only serve to highlight the unseemly, prosaic, degraded societies that Fesperman and his contemporaries dwell upon in their novels. For critics and students of popular fiction, however, there is clearly much to learn here about the current shape of western culture. If John Sutherland is correct in supposing that ‘such culturally embedded works’ are useful for what they reveal about ‘the reading public and society generally at the time they have done well’,81 then recent balkanist fiction speaks volumes about the cynicism, animosity and culturalist racism at large in post-Cold War Europe.

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NOTES 1

Norris, Wake of the Balkan Myth, pp. 26, 27. Interestingly, Scott revealed a simultaneous interest in the oral traditions of the two regions, compiling The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3) and translating from German to English a number of Serbian folk songs (see ibid., p. 19). 3 Byron, reprinted in Moore, ed., Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, p. 96 (italics have been added). 4 Graham, The Moving Tent: Adventures with a Tent and Fishing-Rod in Southern Jugoslavia (London: Cassell, 1939), pp. 72, 245, 191, 206, 195. 5 Reeve, The Progress of Romance, new edn (1785; New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1930), p. 111. 6 Radford, ‘Introduction’ to Radford, ed., The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 8, 9. 7 Steven Bygrave, ‘Introduction’ to Bygrave, ed., Romantic Writings, 2nd edn (London: Routledge/The Open University, 1996), pp. vii, vii; Aiden Day, Romanticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 79, 79. 8 Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular British Fiction since 1900 (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 86, 14. Leslie Fiedler has termed the populist novel ‘a commodity […] to be hefted and bought and sold’ (Fiedler, ‘Towards a Definition of Popular Literature’, quoted in Bob Ashley, ‘Introduction’ to Ashley, ed., The Study of Popular Fiction: A Source Book (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989), p. 12). 9 Derek Longhurst argues against ‘a self-evident disjuncture’ between these subgenres: thrillers, for example, ‘are deeply imbued with romance, and even are a mode of romance’ (Longhurst, ‘They Gotta Do What They Gotta Do: Interrogating the Contradictions and Lasting Pleasures of Masculine Romance’, in Lynne Pearce and Gina Wisker, eds, Fatal Attractions: Rescripting Romance in Contemporary Literature and Film (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 206). 10 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, new edn (1957; London: Penguin, 1992), p. 246; Bob Ashley, ‘Introduction: The Reading of Popular Texts: Some Initial Problems’, in Ashley, ed., Popular Fiction, p. 3; Bridget Fowler, The Alienated Reader: Woman and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 32. 11 Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 1. For Q.D. Leavis, famously, popular novels ‘get in the way of genuine feeling and responsible thinking by creating cheap mechanical responses’ and for Theodor Adorno they are part of a ‘culture industry’ that fetter consciousness and reduce the reader to ‘an appendage of the machine’ (Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1939), p. 74; Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. by J.M. Bernstein (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 99). 12 Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture and Society (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1961), p. xii. 13 Ashley, ‘Ideology, Readers, Pleasure: Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction’, in Ashley, ed., Popular Fiction, p. 141. See also Martin Jordin, ‘Contemporary Futures: The Analysis of Science Fiction’, in Christopher Pawling, ed., Popular Fiction and Social Change (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), p. 72. 2

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Bloom, Bestsellers, p. 113. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, p. 45. The other volumes in the series are The Heart of Princess Osra (1896) and Rupert of Hentzau (1898). 16 Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water, pp. 171, 170. 17 Ibid., pp. 170-1. 18 Saki, ‘The Cupboard of the Yesterdays’, in Saki, The Complete Short Stories, new edn (1976; London: Penguin, 2000), p. 531. 19 Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, p. 39. 20 Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, p. 44. 21 The presence of a female protagonist is rare in early twentieth-century balkanist fiction. Another example comes from the Greek-American author, Demetra Vaka Brown, whose In the Shadow of Islam (1911) has a rich Bostonian woman travel to the Ottoman Empire to attempt to improve the lot of its female population, only to get caught up in the Albanian rejoinder to the Young Turk revolution. 22 Finnemore, Foray and Fight: Being the Story of the Remarkable Adventures of an Englishman and an American in Macedonia (London and Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1906), p. 282. 23 Finnemore, A Boy Scout in the Balkans (London and Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1913), pp. 371, 379. This idealisation of British participants by the indigenous population is a common feature of balkanist fiction. In Foray and Fight, the protagonist is viewed by locals as ‘“an Englishman, and therefore a lover of liberty’”, and is begged by a villager ‘“to aid fellow-Christians struggling against their Turkish oppressors”’ (Finnemore, Foray and Fight, pp. 16-17). 24 Bevan, The Insurgent Trail: A Story of the Balkans (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, c.1910), p. 214. 25 Ibid., p. 272. This is also suggested by fact that, though supportive of insurrection, he is not always supportive of the insurrectionists, which he refers to at one point as a ‘mixed crowd of the lower orders seething around us’ (ibid., p. 46). He is also critical of the way that indigenous factions ‘are watching the death-bed of the “Sick Man” at Constantinople’ and plotting ‘to get a fat share of his lands’ (ibid., p. 206). 26 Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, new edn (1982; New York and London: Routledge, 1996), p. 25. 27 Ibid., p. 24. 28 Fowler, Alienated Reader, p. 8. Bevan’s narrative also accords to the model proposed by Gary Kelly: ‘The romance journey often takes the form of a departure from home, an excursion into the public, social and historical planes of experience, and a return to home, often with a new wife or husband’ (Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1839 (London and New York: Longman, 1989), p. 144). 29 Gregg, An Uncrowned King: A Romance of High Politics (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1896), p. 403. 30 Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 42. 31 Bevan, Insurgent Trail, pp. 214-15; Cecil Roberts, Victoria Four-Thirty, new edn (1937; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1952), p. 63. 32 Bryant and McNally, The Chronicles of a Great Prince (London: Duckworth, 1925), pp. 24, 20. 33 Christie, The Secret of Chimneys, new edn (1925; London: Pan Books, 1956), p. 11. 15

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Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, p. 104. Ibid., p. 104. The novels tended to reduce the region to a set of key symbols: soldiers, snow drifts, ‘half-frozen mud’, ‘uncomfortable carriage[s]’, ‘“delays [and] annoyances”’ (Greene, Stamboul Train, new edn (1932; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 129; White, The Lady Vanishes (The Wheel Spins), new edn (1936; London: Fontana Books, 1962), p. 43; Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, new edn (1934; London: Fontana Books, 1959), p. 38). A remnant of the Orient Express novel is found in Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love (1959), in which Bond’s experiences of south-east Europe amount to ‘a few drab officials’, ‘a chattering horde of peasants’ and ‘an eight hours’ delay’ (Fleming, From Russia with Love, new edn (1957; London: Pan Books, 1959), pp. 161, 161 172). 36 Roberts, Victoria Four-Thirty, pp. 233, 231. 37 John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenberg, The Spy Story (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 56-7. 38 See Bloom, Bestsellers, p. 112. 39 Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, new edn (1915; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1926), p. 7. 40 Buchan, Greenmantle, new edn (1916; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), pp. 104, 120. 41 Although the fictional Evallonia borders on Germany, and thus suggests the mitteleuropa of Hope’s Ruritania, the country is associated in Castle Gay with ‘the south and east of Europe’ and in The House of the Four Winds with lands ‘“pretty far east”’ (Buchan, Castle Gay, new edn (1929; Thirsk: House of Stratus, 2001), p. 27; Buchan, The House of the Four Winds, new edn (1925; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), p. 31). 42 Buchan, Castle Gay, p. 27. 43 Buchan, House of the Four Winds, pp. 46, 71. 44 Buchan, Greenmantle, p. 17. 45 Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, p. 93. It was perhaps due to the same sentiment that Compton Mackenzie’s Sylvia and Michael (1919), a radical departure from the inter-war model of balkanist fiction, offered both a naturalist depiction of wartime Romania and a satire on romantic travel in south-east Europe. 46 Stevens, Flight from Bucharest, new edn (1977; London: Fontana Books, 1978), p. 12. 47 Ibid., pp. 203, 24. 48 Brophy, Palace without Chairs (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), p. 29. 49 Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, pp. 40-1. 50 Ian Fleming’s portrait of ‘these damn Balkans’ is illustrative of the thriller’s highly unromantic style of representation: during Bond’s sojourn in Belgrade, the city is pictured as a kind of absence, marked only by ‘battered taxis’, ‘dull modern buildings’ and ‘wide, empty streets’, and suffused with ‘the smell of the Balkans – the smell of very old sweat and cigarette smoke and cabbage’ (Fleming, Russia with Love, pp.1734). 51 Brophy, Palace without Chairs, p. 57. 52 Saki, ‘The Purple of the Balkan Kings’, in Saki, Complete Short Stories, p. 525. 53 Saki, ‘Cupboard’, p. 529. 35

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54 Ibid., pp. 529, 529, 531, 528. Elsewhere, Saki was more condescending towards the region and occasionally pursued a form of representation influenced by gothicism. In The Unbearable Bassington (1912), a character who has wandered extensively through the Near East is described as ‘“a man that wolves had sniffed at”’, and in ‘The Cupboard of the Yesterdays’ the Wanderer even finds significance in ‘the sinister but engaging name of the Black Sea’ (Saki, The Unbearable Bassington, new edn (1912; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947), p. 71; Saki, ‘Cupboard’, p. 529). 55 See Fowler, Alienated Reader, pp. 11-15, and Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. xii-xiii. 56 Davies, Farmer in Serbia, pp. 142, 19, 93, 93, 244, 15. 57 Davies, When I Was a Boy in Serbia (London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1920), p. 5. 58 Ibid., pp. 122, 100; Davies, Farmer in Serbia, pp. 232, 226. Davies’s advocacy of the Serbian national cause is also sensed in her collection of folk stories for children, Tales of Serbian Life (1919). 59 As examples of this propaganda, Newman insists that ‘Albanian is rapidly becoming civilised’ under the administration of King Zog, Yovitchitch writes a ‘history of Serbia [that] is full of stirring events’, Trevor argues that Montenegro should become ‘a nation honoured among nations, with settled frontiers extended a hundredfold’, and Spaull hopes that independent Romania can ‘look forward to an era of prosperity and happiness such as she has never known before’ (Newman, Albanian Journey (London: Pitman, c.1938), p. 89; Yovitchitch, Yugoslavia (London: A. and C. Black, 1928), p. 6; Trevor, Montenegro (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1913), p. 87; Spaull, Rumania (London: A. and C. Black, 1930), p. 19). 60 Lawrence, Montenegro, p. 30. 61 Illyrian Spring is perhaps closest to E.M. Forster’s fiction, particularly novels such as A Room with a View (1908) which symbolically oppose a repressed England to a romantically vibrant Mediterranean country. Forster was no stranger to balkanist composition, having written a Romanian travel sketch, ‘The Eyes of Sibiu’, an unperformed play, ‘The Heart of Bosnia’, and an unpublished short story, ‘What Does It Matter? A Morality’, set in the fictional Balkan country of Pottibakia (see Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania,, pp. 126-31). 62 Bridge, Illyrian Spring, new edn (1935; London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), p. 4. 63 See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), pp. 65-9. 64 David Footman, Pemberton (London: The Cresset Press, 1943), p. 21. 65 Bridge, Illyrian Spring, p. 72; Gilpin, quoted in George G. Dekker, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 36. 66 Marie, The Voice on the Mountain (London: Duckworth, 1924), pp. 29, 131, 221. 67 Roberts, Victoria Four-Thirty, pp. 95, 246. 68 Footman, ‘Introduction’ to Footman, Half-Way East (London and Toronto: William Heinemann, 1935), p. ix; Footman, Pemberton, p. 34. 69 Footman, Pig and Pepper, 2nd edn (1936; London: Derek Verschoyle, 1954), pp. 278, 19, 187, 188, 123. 70 Appleby, Tin Trumpet at Dawn (London: Werner Laurie, 1950), p. 89.

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71 Ambler, Judgement on Deltchev, new edn (1951; London: Pan Books, 1961), pp. 127-8. 72 Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, p. 40. 73 Quinton, The Ragusa Theme (London: Piatkus, 1986), p. 7. 74 Pullein-Thompson, Long Search, pp. 88, 98; Jon Evans, The Blood Price (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2005), p. 147; Barbara Taylor Bradford, Where You Belong, new edn (2000; London: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 437; Sarah May, The Internationals (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003), p. 143; Dan Fesperman, Lie in the Dark (Harpenden, Herts.: No Exit Press, 1999), p. 7; Jonathan Rabb, The Book of Q (London: Halban, 2007), p. 12; Tim Sebastian, War Dance, new edn (1995; London: Orion, 1996), p. 165. These were characteristics, to borrow one novelist’s phrase, that ‘screamed Balkan with a capital B’ (Fesperman, Small Boat of Great Sorrows, p. 362). 75 The protagonist of one recent adventure expects to achieve ‘heroic action’ in the Balkans, having been fed on romantic ‘books and bedtime stories’, yet upon arrival realises that there is ‘no course of action, no heroic sacrifice, that would put things right’ (Lawrence, Montenegro, p. 286). 76 Drayton, Escape from Bosnia (London: Athena Press, 2004), p. 116; Evans, Blood Price, p. 43. A single scene of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s Where You Belong (2000) is set in war-torn Kosovo, yet the photojournalist-narrator still manages to save a local child caught in shell fire: ‘I sped over [...] and threw myself on top of him, all of my instincts compelling me to protect him no matter what’ (Bradford, Where You Belong, p. 12). The tendency within children’s fiction on the former Yugoslavia has been to base the narrative on young native protagonists – uncorrupted as yet by their social milieu – and to follow their attempts to maintain moral lives amidst ethnic hostility and political turmoil. Sally Trench’s Fran’s War (1999), Stewart Ross’s Only a Matter of Time (2001) and Alice Mead’s Girl of Kosovo (2001) are examples in kind. Christine Pullein-Thompson’s Across the Frontier (1990) and The Long Search (1991) reveal similar story-lines in the setting of post-Ceauşescu Romania. 77 Seymour, The Heart of Danger, new edn (1995; London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 39. 78 Ibid., p. 255. 79 Longhurst, ‘“They Gotta Do”’, p. 207. 80 Fesperman, Small Boat of Great Sorrows, p. 15. 81 Sutherland, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 5.

Chapter 9: The Red Threat It is becoming increasingly common in academic study to view propaganda as a central instrument of western Cold War strategy. While diplomatic and military action against the communist world has long been analysed, awareness is growing of the dependence of that action on the large-scale control of opinion through the manipulation of language and imagery in the public sphere. ‘A Cold War is,’ as Martin Medhurst defines it, ‘a rhetorical war, a war fought with words, speeches, pamphlets, public information (or disinformation), campaigns, slogans, gestures [and] symbolic actions’.1 With the spoils of Cold War victory being no less than global dominance, the intensity of the rhetoric was understandable. The Soviet Union had become a formidable power in post-1945 geo-politics, constituting as much an ideological as a military challenge to the West, and the western response was to inaugurate ‘a battle for hearts and minds’,2 a striving for the maintenance of political loyalty at home – through keeping domestic populations convinced of the integrity of democratic values – and for the subversion of such loyalty in populations throughout the Eastern Bloc. As the Cold War developed, the weapons in this psychological battle were professionalised and the persuasion of public opinion was extended into all areas of cultural life, into film, television, art and literature, as well as into sporting events and the space race. Within such fields, a distinct rhetorical tradition of conceptualising self and other began to emerge, strengthen and gain its own inevitable momentum. The most powerful manifestations of western Cold War rhetoric are found, naturally, in the cultural production and political statement of the United States. After being drawn into the rebuilding of western Europe after the war, the US began to realise its role as a global power, determining to act as bulwark to the Soviet Union and to assist any region imperilled by what it viewed as the menace of Soviet expansionism. In the late 1940s, via such influential documents as

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George Kennan’s ‘long telegram’, the Truman Doctrine and a string of National Security statements, not only was post-war American foreign policy formulated, but a discursive framework was evolved for interpreting the communist other (what one critic termed an ‘interpretative straightjacket’3) that would remain supportive of national interests for the next forty years. The Truman Doctrine, a presidential address to Congress on 12 March 1947, demonstrated the kind of simple binarism by which the US distinguished American and Soviet ‘ways of life’: One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of personal liberty, freedom of speech and religion and freedom from political repression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and repression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedom.4

The tone of discussion was rarely this phlegmatic. In the telegram that Kennan, the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, sent the Truman administration in February 1946, which profoundly effected the latter’s policy of ‘containment’, the Soviet Union was denounced as despotic and fanatical, a ‘dictatorship’ sunk in ‘cruelties’ and ‘conspiracy’, whose imperialist tendencies, being informed by a ‘truculent and intolerant’ dogma and being ‘impervious to the logic of reason’, had become ‘more dangerous [...] than ever before’.5 His vehemence would set the tone for the hysteria of McCarthyism, for the crises of the Kennedy era (when Sovietism was a ‘ruthless, godless tyranny’, ‘unceasing in its drive for world domination’6), and above all for the belligerence of the Carter and Reagan presidencies. In Reagan’s oratory, for example, the moral righteousness that informed American Cold War binarism reached a peak. In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in March 1983, he famously termed his superpower adversary an ‘evil Empire’, a ‘totalitarian darkness’ cut off from ‘the joy of knowing God’, and urged his audience to renew the ‘struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.’7 Through such religious dichotomy, the Eastern Bloc became the medium through which the US could construct a sense of its own goodness and sanctity, with Reagan conceiving America as a nation engaged in a wholly virtuous crusade against iniquity. Indeed,

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the rhetoric of the 1980s became so messianic that Anders Stephanson locates its roots in seventeenth-century Protestantism: ‘It is’, he summarises, ‘a language of evil plots, sins and sinners, demons and saviors, corruption and redemption, dramatic choices in the name of humanity by anointed leaders on the edge of the abyss.’8 In Britain, the rhetoric was altogether more restrained. The widespread influence of left-progressive politics, prevalent in the socalled ‘pink decade’ of the 1930s and leading to a Labour Party victory in the elections of 1945, even produced a governmental policy that initially sought concord with Stalinist Russia.9 A suspicion of Soviet aims, however, would soon develop. As Britain moved closer to its American ally, and as Stalin wielded evermore power over his European satellites, there surfaced the same fears of Soviet aggression, the same dire warnings in diplomatic dispatches and the same chilling imagery in political statement.10 The most famous instance of the latter was Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech of March 1946, delivered at Truman’s invitation in Fulton, Missouri. Here, after depicting the ‘shadow’ that had descended across eastern Europe, he turned to address the monstrous growth of communism in the West: In front of the iron curtain which lies across Europe are other causes for anxiety [...]. [I]n a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist centre. Except in the British Commonwealth and the United States, where Communism is still in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilisation.11

The speech might have been unpopular with the British left, but it endorsed the anti-communism that was growing in official American circles and gave the Cold War one of its most evocative images. Soon, a British propaganda machine would be attempting to widen Churchill’s conservatism into a broad anti-communist consensus. In 1946 and 1948, the Foreign Office set up the Russia Committee and the Information Research Department, whose aim was to counter Soviet influence within Britain, and later to ‘roll back’ communism in eastern Europe through covert activities and propaganda offensives.12 As Tony Shaw has argued with regard to post-war cinema,13 Whitehall proceeded to have a significant impact on mass culture, using the media of film, television and radio to disseminate anti-Soviet

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sentiment and to mould a more faithful, consensual public opinion. With the emergence of such propaganda so soon after World War Two, it was inevitable that its constructions of the Eastern Bloc bore a resemblance to wartime representations of Nazi Germany. The predominant image in popular culture was of cold, cruel and ruthlessly cunning antagonists who, being ‘shrewd plotters’ and endowed ‘with a considerable amount of psychological insight,’ were ‘capable of obtaining supreme suppression and absolute control.’14 On occasion, such imagery entered the discourse of diplomats and politicians, and could even match American rhetoric in intensity. Margaret Thatcher might have been quoting Reagan when, in 1983, she denounced the Soviet Union as ‘a modern version of the early tyrannies of history – its creed barren of conscience, immune to promptings of good and evil.’15 It was this anti-Sovietism that profoundly influenced the way that the Balkans were conceptualised in British discourse after 1945. Once absorbed into the Eastern Bloc, the region became viewed through the interpretative schemata developed for the wider geopolitical object, assimilating its manichean evaluations and even comprising, in Hoxha’s Albania and Ceauşescu’s Romania, two of its most potent symbols of communist alterity. This chapter will examine the phenomenon in the context of the British novel, exploring how official representations, with their underlying fears and anxieties, found reflection in the literary imaginings of the period. As part of this examination, however, I shall be arguing that Cold War balkanism was not an unmodified replication of anti-communist rhetoric. The new ideological approach was at all times coloured by older conceptual traditions: specifically, the classic stereotypes of the savage Balkans, that imagined maelstrom of violence, discord and backwardness. As I have argued in chapter 4, these stereotypes were intimately connected to the imperial discourses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and with British colonialism, like Nazism, holding such contiguity to the Cold War period, the continuation of its representational patterns after 1945 is to be expected. William Pietz, for example, discerning the orientalist flavour of much anti-Soviet propaganda, suggests that the ready acceptance of governmental rhetoric by the American public after 1945 is to be ‘explained in part by its appropriation of ideologically familiar elements from the earlier discourse of Western colonialism’.16 His most convincing example is

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Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’, where the chargé d’affaires represents the Russian government as part of a ‘Russian-Asiatic world’ sunk in an ‘atmosphere of oriental secretiveness and conspiracy’.17 In the context of British writings on south-east Europe, it was inevitable that these earlier discourses could not be maintained in full. As Barbara Jelavich points out, unlike previous periods of war and revolution in the Balkans, through which traditional social structures had persisted, the ‘social advancement and economic modernization’ pursued by the communist regimes meant the ‘destruction of patterns of life that had held for centuries.’18 It was Cold War rhetoric that supplied the images, motifs and evaluations capable of interpreting and denouncing Balkan modernity for the western audience; but behind this rhetoric the old balkanist images nestled, always ready to surface in literary texts. In order to explore this mixture of traditional balkanism and anti-communist rhetoric, I shall look at the work of four major British novelists, all of whom had experience of the region in various capacities and who, in their styles of representation, came to participate, consciously or unconsciously, in the power structures and language games of Cold War politics. It was traditional balkanism that dominated one of the most important literary treatments of the crises affecting mid-twentiethcentury Europe, Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy (1960-65). The work explores the relationship of Guy and Harriet Pringle (the former a lecturer at the University of Bucharest) who eke out a precarious existence in south-east Europe during the early years of the Second World War, a narrative through which Manning pursues a series of meditations on marriage, gender, expatriotism and the effects of the conflict on a generation of English people. The work was inspired by the author’s own life in the Balkans, when she was married to a British Council lecturer who held posts in Bucharest and Athens. In fact, the two volumes in the trilogy that emerge from her stay in Romania, which lasted from August 1939 to October 1940, during the German partition and eventual occupation of the country, draw so heavily on the political and social milieux of the times that they are often read as ‘thinly disguised autobiography.’19 Nevertheless, the trilogy has a range of creative qualities, not least the form and substance of Manning’s Bucharest. Within the tangled web of the narrative, the Romanian capital emerges as one of the major protagonists, a diseased and ‘disintegrating’ presence,20 whose

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wretched streets are rife with poverty, corruption and political violence, and whose atmosphere of sexual menace puts an intense strain on Harriet’s marriage. Crucially, the social landscape of the city, along with the untamed country around, is often depicted as ‘eastern’, as somehow non-European. This is a ‘strange, half-Oriental capital’, Manning writes, ‘primitive, bug-ridden and brutal’, where a lethargic, brutish peasantry is governed by an aristocracy given over to the worst forms of decadence and vice.21 It is the behaviour of the peasants, forced into the capital by the destitution sweeping the countryside and commonly found begging from expatriate communities, that Harriet finds particularly alienating, bewailing their ‘“cruelty and stupidity”’ and berating them for ‘“the understanding of beasts.’”22 The latter pejorative is amended when she sees ‘a peasant slashing his horse across the eyes for some slip of the foot’, and Harriet is ‘so shaken she could have murdered the man’: Before she left England, she had read books written by travellers in Rumania who had given a picture of a rollicking, open-hearted, happy, healthy peasantry, full of music and generous hospitality. They were, it was true, mad about music [...]. As for the rest, she had seen nothing of it. The peasants in this city were starved, frightened figures, scrawny with pellagra, wandering about in a search for work or making a half-hearted attempt to beg. The situation would have been simplified for her could she, like Guy, have seen the peasants not only as victims, but as blameless victims. The truth was, the more she learnt about them, the more she was inclined to share Doamna Drucker’s loathing of them; but she would not call them beasts. They had not the beauty or dignity of beasts. They treated their animals and their women with the simple brutality of savages.23

Although Manning’s portrait of this ‘“barbarous country’”24 focuses on the pre-1945 period, its publication during the 1960s not only helped to reinstall the traditionalist modes of balkanism during the Cold War period, but also – with the ongoing popularity of the work – to maintain those modes in circulation right up until the end of the 1980s.25 An outdated representational paradigm, in other words, was being reactivated in the British imagination for usage on the communist object. This is not to say, of course, that the work lacked direct engagement with Cold War politics: the text is littered with references to the Red Army’s gradual encroachment on Romania, the implications of which a contemporary readership would not have

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missed. In the second volume of the trilogy, as Russia seizes Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which had been Romanian territories since 1918, the native population of the capital become fearful that their ‘arch-enemy’ is bent on ‘devouring the Balkans’, and it is not long before ‘the Communists with their ungodly Marxist creed’ are ‘more dreaded [...] than the Nazis.’26 With the same fear also hanging over the English characters,27 Soviet communism is already being imagined as a very present threat to western security. The full nature of that threat was elaborated in another, slightly earlier trilogy about the 1939-45 conflict, Evelyn Waugh’s The Sword of Honour (1952-61), a work that many consider his finest achievement.28 In this, Guy Crouchback, the final scion of an ancient Catholic family, is a man for whom the declaration of war in 1939 comes as a personal salvation, viewing the British stand against the Russian-German alliance as a clear matter of right pitted against wrong,29 and as one that offers him the chance to exchange his empty existence for noble, manly action. Yet during his years of training and combat, Guy feels increasing disillusionment with the opportunism of his military colleagues and with the materialistic, valueless entity that modern England has become. The feeling is exacerbated by Britain’s eventual alliance with certain left-wing eastern European regimes, as Guy comes to witness during a period of service in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia. The section was based on Waugh’s own tour of duty in the country, where, from September 1944 to the spring of 1945, he was attached to the British military mission to the Partisans, whose task it was to urge and assist General Tito’s forces against the Germans. For the English novelist, a staunch Tory with a fondness for the aristocracy, there was little to admire about Tito’s brand of communism. From his diaries, we know that Waugh considered Yugoslavia a ‘savage’ land, full of a ‘dour’ and ‘treacherous’ people, increasingly adorned by ‘[h]ammers, sickles and Communist slogans’ and rapidly succumbing to the Partisan’s ‘regime of suspicion’.30 His consequent assistance to non-communist sections of the population, and particularly to the Catholic Church in Croatia, which had had links with the region’s pro-fascist administration earlier in the war, finally encouraged the authorities to expel him from the country. Waugh’s brusque treatment of Yugoslavia is found in the final constituent volume of the trilogy, Unconditional Surrender (1961). Here, after two frustrating years in a desk job at a military

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headquarters, Guy’s transference to a Special Operations team based in war-torn northern Croatia seems to provide proper scope for his quest for heroism. Yet his task of passing on military and logistical reports from the Partisans to Operations HQ is far from the exalted role he had envisaged, especially considering the nature of the Yugoslav ‘allies’. He finds something uncongenial, even ominous about the Partisans, with their ‘flat faces and round, cropped heads’, their political leaders with ‘hooded eyes’ and their masculinist gangs of women ‘swaggering’ around with ‘medals and girdles of handgrenades’.31 For the allied forces, the Partisans prove uncooperative and exasperating; for Yugoslavians, these ‘Balkan terrorists’ are catastrophic (p. 141). Along with subjecting the population to a wave of looting, imprisonment and execution, they put the Church under close surveillance and mistreat ethnic minorities, tasks they pursue with fanatical discipline. This is no longer the old disorderly barbarism of the Balkans, the text articulates, but the emergence of a modern, efficient totalitarianism. The full threat of communist ascendancy becomes apparent in Tito’s developing alliance with Moscow – the hand of Sovietism ‘lurked invisibly’ in Partisan camps (p. 172) – and in the growing left-wingism that Guy discovers amongst the British military staff. In the face of such creeping malignancy, his hopes for positive political progress to result from the war appear to be in vain. As a consequence, he turns from the public to the personal sphere, determining to assist a group of Jews suffering from the anti-Semitism of the Partisans, although it is through his contact with their spokesperson, a Mme Kanyi, that he finally realises the extent of the ‘hate and waste’ abroad in Europe (p. 192). As she asks him: ‘Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians – not very many perhaps – who felt this. Were there none in England?’ (p. 232)

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Guy’s heartfelt response to Mme Kanji’s query (“‘God forgive me, [...] I was one of them’” (p. 232)) compounds her speech’s subversion of East-West binarism, implicating the Englishman – and by extension the wider Allied cause – in the evils that he had intended to oppose. Yet an equal allocation of blame between the sides is never fully achieved. Firstly, the West’s iniquity is never dramatised as thoroughly as that of the East, with no aspect of Waugh’s portrait of western decadence appearing to match the Partisans’ overt barbarity. Secondly, the small glimmer of hope that is offered in the novel is still derived from the western sphere: to be precise, from Guy’s charitable work with the Jews, an ‘unselfish action’ that emerges from his mixture of Catholicism and aristocratic Englishness and that not only offers Guy personal redemption but also helps to ‘redeem the times’ (pp. 151, 192). The fact that this is achieved by an Englishman in the face of communist persecution reinstalls the image of a dichotomous continent, the West standing for ‘Christian civilisation’, as Churchill termed it, and eastern European dictatorship standing for everything which might extinguish that civilisation.32 Perhaps the greatest instance of the British literary denigration of the ‘actual existing socialism’ that emerged in the Balkans after the war is found in the work of Lawrence Durrell. In 1949, Durrell had become the press attaché of the British Embassy in Belgrade, and during three years of residency he encountered a Yugoslavia that was recovering from the ravages of war, while also living in fear of invasion by the Soviet Union, incensed at the independent line that Tito had begun to pursue. Yet towards the tribulations of the new regime, Durrell had even less sympathy than Waugh. His letters refer to an ‘inert and ghastly police state’ and condemn what he terms ‘its censored press, its long marching columns of political prisoners guarded by tommy guns’ and its ruinous impact on ‘wretched people who are starved and terrorized almost to death.’33 Despite such comments, it was not merely the political system that Durrell abhorred; as with Manning and Waugh, he could be just as acerbic about the general landscape and population. Belgrade, for example, is described as a ‘filthy dank capital’ marked by ‘dirty streets’ and ‘damnably dirty [...] rivers’, and crowded by ‘shaggy’ and ‘cloddish inhabitants’.34 Nevertheless, the conclusion drawn from such sights remains stridently political: communist Yugoslavia marks ‘the blank dead end which labour leads towards’, and the shock of witnessing it –

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he tells one correspondent – ‘has turned me firmly reactionary and Tory’.35 Durrell’s experiences produced a number of fictional works, including the ‘Antrobus series’: three compilations of humorous sketches about life in the diplomatic service. These dramatise the writer’s aversion to Serbia, thinly disguised as the eastern European state of Vulgaria, ‘an unspeakable place full of unspeakable people’ where to be ‘frightened out of one’s wits’ is all ‘part of the [...] Way of Life.’36 The novel in which Durrell displayed the most sustained engagement with the Balkans is White Eagles over Serbia (1957), a rare foray for this ‘quintessentially modernist’37 writer into the adventure genre. The story concerns the exploits of Colonel Methuen, an experienced Secret Service operative sent into Yugoslavia to look into the death of a British military attaché who has been killed while investigating troop movements in the hills of southern Serbia. Using the British Embassy in Belgrade as his base, Methuen smuggles himself into this restricted mountainous zone and uncovers a band of royalists, the eponymous ‘White Eagles’, engaged in transporting stolen gold reserves out of the country with the aim of building up an anti-communist movement in exile. It is via this Buchanesque narrative that Durrell elaborates the horrors of modern communism, a theme which begins as soon as the hero arrives by train at Zagreb station. Here, the ‘sleepy Methuen’, who has memories of what the country was like before the war, sees ‘a platform seething with ragged serfs’ and the full extent of the changes wrought by the new regime emerge like a nightmare: Huge socialist-realist posters stabbed the ill-lit gloom with their invocations to the God of Marxist progress. Everywhere too were slogans written in dazzling capitals on the walls, and picture upon picture of Tito, flanked by Stalin and Lenin, or flanked by members of his own inner cabinet, the Politburo. The contrast between the promises held out by those flaring posters and the bitter reality of life under Communism seemed fantastic to the sleepy watcher at the window. It was as if he were entering a new country, so little did these scenes correspond to his own memories of a joyous, confused but essentially happy country [...]. These ragged creatures [the ‘serfs’] seemed to have lost all self-respect in the struggle to make ends meet. They had become submerged in the rising tide of an anonymous, faceless, characterless mass. It was rather frightening. And everywhere, walking with authority and arrogance, he saw the officials of the ruling caste – either blue-clad militia or the ubiquitous

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gentlemen in leather overcoats whose function was to hold the ring for the Communist party.38

This core description, typical in novels of the period, is more an ideological symbol than a genuine evocation of place. Erasing all the normal markers of urban space (of colour, commodity, social contrast), Durrell’s communist Zagreb is reduced to the primary elements of archetypal communist tyranny: a callous police, a tyrannised crowd and an omniscient Soviet-led dictatorship. The details of the country that Durrell later fills in merely expand upon this central trope. Considered a system that is ‘unjust, cruel and dedicated to death’ (p. 80), Yugoslav society is exactly the eastern European dystopia of arrests, trials, brutality, oppression, of secret police in shadows, of whispered conversations and terrorised populations, that produced such a frisson of horror for Cold War readerships of popular fiction. There is only one feature of Durrell’s ideological cartography that may seem unusual. The royalists opposed to the regime, with whom Methuen becomes entangled in the Serbian mountains, are not the civilised, value-loving dissidents so often lauded in western discourse of the era, but a rag-bag of crude peasants who constitute as much a threat to Methuen’s person as the communists. Their characteristics are, in fact, those of classic Balkan brigands: these are ‘savage’ and ‘singularly wild-looking ruffians’ led by a ‘bearish’ Chetnik with ‘cruel dark eyes’, whose monarchism is a ‘wretched [...] cause’ that would certainly be a ‘disappointment if [...] it should triumph’ (pp. 138, 138, 155, 139, 80, 80). The final failure of the royalists, and the consequent maintenance of Yugoslav totalitarianism, creates a strange inertia at the heart of Durrell’s narrative, a sort of stasis or non-progression that mirrors the wider stasis of the Cold War, in which all possibility of final victory was precluded by the eternal, frozen immobility of the superpower stand-off. The lack of political resolution, however, does not mean that Durrell’s text is without political preference. As it transpires, the true opposition to the Yugoslav system is both an imagined England, a world of green fields, gentlemen’s clubs and ‘“liberty and decency”’, and an idealised Englishness, encapsulated in the character of Methuen, who in opposing the dangers ‘which beset the stability of British policy’ displays all the proper codes of patriotism, duty, diligence and manliness.39 As with Waugh’s trilogy, such imaginings reveal ‘a wistfulness [...] for a lost hierarchical England,’ in the words of G.S.

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Fraser, ‘an England of them and us [...], of plain right and wrong’ that harks back to the self-imaginings of nineteenth-century colonial discourse.40 During the 1950s, it was a message that the Russia Committee and the Information Research Department would have enthusiastically endorsed. As mentioned, the binarism of Durrell’s White Eagles over Serbia was repeated by the many populist thrillers of the period, as was its absence of political optimism. Eric Williams’s Dragoman Pass (1959), one of the most effective of these, is the story of Roger and Kate Searle, an ordinary British couple who, when Khrushchev succeeds Stalin, use the subsequent thaw in East-West relations to take an independent motor tour of the Eastern Bloc. As they travel through Hungary into Romania, ‘the transatlantic infection of panic’ that they caught even before leaving home begins to deepen.41 Williams’s Romania is again the generic landscape of Cold War adventure: blaring loudspeakers, labour camps, armed soldiers, out-moded technology, dreary ill-lit towns, ‘totalitarian architecture’ and a ‘suspicious, almost hostile’ citizenry with ‘shadowed alien faces’ (pp. 127, 20, 20). The Searles’ paranoia climaxes when they stumble upon an Englishman, Professor Burt Carter, held captive by the Romanian state. A former member of the British Communist Party, Carter had been invited by the Romanian regime to excavate an archaeological site discovered during the construction of the Danube-Black Sea canal, but, after complaining about the forced labour he witnessed there, was placed under house arrest, unable to return to Britain. With Kate appalled by his plight, the Searles take the decision to smuggle Carter out of the country. Throughout the journey across Romania and Bulgaria to the Turkish border, Roger yearns for ‘the sanity of Western Europe’, whose ‘“precious [...] democratic system”’ is overseen, not by a vicious secret police, but by ‘the old-fashioned British bobby’ (pp. 32, 201-2, 25). Williams’s dichotomisation of the continent was duplicated in novels about other Balkan regimes. In Christopher Portway’s The Tirana Assignment (1974), Britain offers both the ‘blessed obscurity of free citizenship’ and ‘the comforts all humans crave for’, whilst communist Albania – this ‘despised country’, as he puts it elsewhere – is an ‘overgrown morgue where everyone’s frightened of everyone else’.42 It was not uncommon for this dread of the East to tip over into fears for western security. Anthony Grey’s The Bulgarian Exclusive (1976) is a thriller about a

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London journalist with ‘“an almost psychotic hatred of everything communist”’ who stumbles upon a Soviet plot to crush pro-western factions within the Bulgarian government, the first stage in a wider plan ‘“to shift the frontiers of Communism across western Europe”’.43 There was little sense in these novels that a ‘third way’ politics might emerge from either the democratic or communist ideological traditions. The narrator of Eric Ambler’s Judgement on Deltchev (1951), centred around the show trial of a Bulgarian oppositional leader, is typical in his view that dissident movements are composed of ‘the dedicated, the romantic and the mentally ill-adjusted’ who are bereft of ‘planning ability and political skill’.44 According to the bipolar logic of British thrillers (and that of American thrillers like David Dodge’s The Lights of Skaro (1954), Joe Poyer’s The Balkan Assignment (1972) and Sidney Sheldon’s Windmills of the Gods (1987)), characters had no choice but to support their own side. ‘“Nobody’s neutral these days”’, says the narrator of Williams’s Dragoman Pass: ‘“It’s all either East or West.”’45 While the presence of Cold War denigration in the British thriller is predictable, it may come as a surprise to find the same presentational modes informing postmodernist fiction of the late 1970s and 1980s. Here, a sophisticated generation of novelists, influenced by the aesthetic upheavals of the 1960s and prone to an increasing scepticism towards all forms of ideology and representational practice, still proceeded to reinstall some of the era’s most predictable cultural narratives. Angela Carter’s ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ (1979), for example, seems initially to envisage a union of East and West, being a tale of a Romanian vampiress and a young Englishman who meet by chance at the former’s village on the eve of World War One and who dissolve their opposing natures in a moment of tenderness and understanding. Nevertheless, the Balkans is still conceived as a world of stasis, superstition and death: as a ‘timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is as it has been and will be’.46 Whereas Carter deploys the more traditional balkanist tropes, Julian Barnes works within the modern framework of anti-communism. In a short story, ‘One of a Kind’ (1982), his portrait of Romania revolves around the conceit that the country can only ever produce one major figure in any artistic field, and which, set in part amongst the émigré community, consequently evokes cultural impoverishment and political suppression. In the later novella, The

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Porcupine (1992), discussed in chapter 3, he shifts focus onto a thinlydisguised Bulgaria, identifying both communism and postcommunism as periods of drabness, oppression and fear, when corruption and poverty are endemic. In true postmodern fashion, neither Barnes nor Carter display any overt loyalty to the West; for Carter, the West is symbolised by the mass carnage of the First World War, and for Barnes by American venture capitalism, with the US envisaged as ‘invading’ post-Cold War Bulgaria and ‘buying it all up.’47 Yet there is no western failing dramatised in these texts that competes with the imagined awfulness of south-east Europe. Another example of the contemporary approach is Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange (1983), which draws on a number of lecture tours that the author took in communist Bulgaria. Although the text ostensibly explores the postmodernist concerns of language, image-making and the cultural embeddedness of human experience,48 it is more obviously engaged in taking an amused dig at the Eastern Bloc. Angus Petworth, the archetypal innocent abroad, is a linguistics expert sent to the Balkan state of Slaka by the British Council to lecture on the English language. On the surface, his temporary move from the West offers a prospective liberation, Britain being described as a ‘fancy plural fiction,’49 a place of soulless consumption, empty spectacle, disorientating plurality and, as Petworth’s own pitiable existence shows, the attendant trials of vacuity and depression. Yet the lecture tour to Slaka soon reveals that there are worse afflictions than postmodern despair. Despite receiving his share of romantic attention, Petworth runs the gamut of spies, arrests, betrayals, anti-government demonstrations, government crack-downs and martial law, not to mention a plot to use him to smuggle out an unlawful typescript, all set against a grim backdrop of ‘grey and khaki’ crowds, ubiquitous militias and ‘great stylized photo-portraits’ of revolutionary heroes in public places (pp. 205, 81). The only difference to Durrell’s Yugoslavia, significantly, is the inconsequence of the Slakan state. Although the novel is set in an era of growing tension between the superpowers, and was published in the same year as Reagan’s ‘evil Empire’ speech, the Balkans are less a place of danger than of abject failure. The factories, collective farms and housing projects, these ‘triumphs of proletarian endeavour’ (p. 4), all bespeak defeat and dejection, as illustrated by the developments around the capital, glimpsed by Petworth en route from the airport:

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To the left the big power station stands up, with its vast metal chimneys; webs of power line thread away from it in every direction across glinting marshes. There are low factories at the roadside, surrounded by high fences and barred gates, each one having a board outside with a list of figures on it, topped with hammer and sickle [...]. [B]eyond the factories, huge blocks of pre-fabricated apartment buildings, thirty or forty stories high, rise up above scoured and naked earth [...]. Petworth looks out at the apartments, which look duller from the ground than from the air. Dust blows between the blocks; there is the Eastern European spectacle of much vacant open space. Few cars are parked here, few people walk, no children play; no shops are visible, and on the ends of the apartments are great maps of the complex for the guidance of the residents. (p. 76)

As so often in the Cold War novel, the Eastern Bloc is a space defined by negatives. With the landscape once again reduced to a few strategic motifs, the writer dwells on the absence of that plenitude (of leisure, commerce and consumer wealth) which characterises the ‘postscarcity’ West, an absence here perceived as inimical to human life. This is not ‘the model of the desirable future’, in other words, but ‘the bleak end of things’ (p. 37), not successful modernisation, but a modernity which, being impinged upon by ‘scoured [...] earth’ and ‘glinting marshes’, is quickly returning to the natural world that it has never fully escaped. This evocation of deficiency is especially marked in the realm of consumption, where, ‘concealing rather than revealing the goods they offer to sell’, the Slakan shops display no more than ‘small stacks of one thing, or a single object’ or ‘a notional vegetable or two’ (pp. 247, 110-11). The consumerism of the West may be criticised, and set up as a mirror to the shortcomings of communism, but it is still the norm against which south-east Europe is perceived, gauged and finally found wanting. Indeed, the kind of amusement that British writers derived from the eventual failures of modernisation in the Balkans reflects the amused contempt that earlier, imperial generations had shown towards the region’s pre-modernity. So it is, for example, that Bradbury mocks such peasant absurdities as the verges at Slaka airport being mown for hay, Slakan air passengers carrying beetroot, Slakan coffee being made out of acorns and the smells of modern Slaka always mingling with ‘rustic odour of rot and dung’ (p. 70). With such an emphasis on the primitive, it comes as no surprise to find the author deploying other balkanist tropes in the text: discord, sloth, moral iniquity, obfuscation and, most of all, cultural

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impoverishment each makes an appearance. The last is exemplified by the inchoate and ludicrous nature of the Slakan language, as seen in phrases like ‘passipotti’, ‘lupi lupi’ and noki roki’, in towns called ‘Plupno’ and ‘Nogod’, and in a state tourist board called ‘Cosmoplot’. In a similar way, the Slakans’ use of English, their usual mode around Petworth, is so childlike that even the native academics appear ineffably foolish. It is no doubt the thematic centrality of language to Bradbury’s textual representation that occasionally leads him to acknowledge the spuriousness of his absurdist eastern Europe. Although moments of self-reflexivity are not enough to offset the impression of an archetypal communist dystopia, he openly admits to his narrative echoing ‘the stories [...] of frontiers and guardposts, spies and imprisonments, beatings and treacheries, that we delight ourselves with’.50 In foregrounding the rhetorical features of the literary production and political statement of the Cold War, I do not wish to suggest that the conflict was composed solely of language games. In its particular signifying practices, to return to my opening point, western political discourse participated in very real structures of power in the global sphere, the language of Cold War being, as Robert Ivie puts it, a form of ‘symbolic action’ that at all times ‘serv[ed] strategic ends’, not least the goal of both superpowers ‘to fulfil their national aspirations’.51 And those aspirations resulted in some of the most atrocious instances of western neo-imperialism in the modern age. As revisionist history has shown, the West’s waging of the Cold War was marked by persistent militarisation and international aggression, with the US financing guerrilla movements, coups and right-wing dictatorships throughout the Americas and south-east Asia, and establishing intelligence networks and economic controls throughout much of the world. Despite the appellation ‘cold’, there was rarely a year in which the West was not planning, financing or fighting some foreign war, an engagement which – in Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the other Cold War crises – resulted in some 16 million dead.52 For these people, the Cold War was not ‘cold’, it was simply war. Indeed, it is almost exclusively in the West that there was a sufficiently low level of hostility for the superpower rivalry to be designated a ‘cold war’, a fact that suggests our understanding of the era remains based on a terminology that is itself an ideological product of that era, one that subordinates non-western

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experiences and subjectivities, and elides western interventionism in the Third World. If this is the power of Cold War rhetoric even now, how much more so during the actual conflict. The rhetoric that demonised the Eastern Bloc ‘as an expansionist Other that requires deterring’ helped to construct the spread of western power as a necessary struggle against communism and to triumphantly vindicate western interventionism and its concomitant arms escalations.53 In their deployment of particular ideological modes of cultural representation, the novelists with which this chapter has been concerned inevitably colluded with this wider discursive practice. This was most subtly achieved in the way that they recreated from their autobiographical experiences in south-east Europe protagonists whose decency and pluck worked to champion England and Englishness. When Waugh reinvents himself textually as a defiant humanitarian, for example, or Durrell as a romantic, dashing hero, what one witnesses is not only personal self-fulfilment, but also the creation of an ideal type of Englishman, metonymic of Britain as a whole, whose moral commitment (like that of the nation) is uncowered by the malevolent forces of communism. Alongside this collusion with the nation’s wretched geopolitical strategies, the novelists’ absorption of Cold War manicheanism served an important political purpose at home. Mary Kaldor, in The Imaginary War (1990), argues persuasively that Cold War discourse was, in Foucauldian terminology, a ‘disciplinary mechanism’,54 a form of power-knowledge which aimed through symbolic practice to cohere and control the modern population. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the emergence of an ideological other within eastern Europe presented a new danger against which the institutions of state could be seen to guarantee the continuance of national life. Such danger was not only composed of Soviet expansionism, but also the threat of nuclear catastrophe, which created for western populations ‘the permanent anxiety of war’ and a dependence on ‘the forms of organization and control that are characteristic of war.’55 In other words, the evocation of a communist adversary inspired loyalty to the military and political structures that opposed that adversary, structures which, not uncoincidentally, were undergoing massive expansion in the period. It was during the Cold War that security services, bureaucracies, policing networks, military institutions and media systems began to subject mass society to ever-

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increasing forms of physical and psychological control. By rousing the spectre of communist fifth columns, the state even encouraged obedience to certain core practices within individual and community life through self-assessment and self-surveillance. With similar disciplinary mechanisms also operating in the Eastern Bloc, Kaldor considers the superpower relationship ‘a fortuitous complementarity’,56 a symbiotic alliance by which both East and West exaggerated the threat of the other in order to regulate their respective populations. To conclude, it may seem a long way from Bradbury’s gentle satires or Durrell’s boyish adventures to the horrors of Cold War politics. Yet the manner in which political rhetoric entered and shaped the literary imagination, sustaining western self-valorisation in high cultural production and denying any virtue or value to the eastern European antagonist, helped to normalise the tropes, imagery and evaluations of western hegemonic discourse. In partaking in this discourse, novelists like Bradbury and Durrell themselves became protagonists in the wider narrative of the Cold War, developing its myths and legends and upholding its structures of power. And it was not only the Eastern Bloc as a whole that was effected by their participation. The manner in which the British novel maintained the image of the Balkans as a place of discord and barbarity, at a time when such denigration was in decline in other prose genres, meant that the region was never allowed to lose the aura of infamy which had accrued around it during the colonial nineteenth century. The Cold War novel was, in this sense, a genre in which the old balkanist tropes were kept resolutely alive, waiting for their resurgence in all forms of cultural production after 1989.

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NOTES 1

Medhurst, ‘Introduction’ to Medhurst, et al., Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. xiv. John Lewis Gaddis writes in a similar vein that ‘[t]he great antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union has become encrusted, over the years, with successive layers of routine, custom, tradition, myth, and legend’ (Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, new edn (1987; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 20). 2 W. Scott Lucas, ‘Beyond Diplomacy: Propaganda and the History of the Cold War’, in Gary D. Rawnsley, ed., Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 11. 3 Charles E. Nathanson, ‘The Social Construction of the Soviet Threat: A Study in the Politics of Representation’, Alternatives, Vol. 13 (1988), p. 455. 4 Quoted in Philip M. Taylor, ‘Through a Glass Darkly? The Psychological Climate and Psychological Warfare of the Cold War’, in Rawnsley, ed., Cold-War Propaganda, p. 231. 5 Kennan, quoted in Sean Greenwood, ‘Frank Roberts and the “Other” Long Telegram: The View from the British Embassy in Moscow, March 1946’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1990), pp. 107-8. 6 John F. Kennedy, quoted in Martin Walker, The Cold War and the Making of the Modern World, new edn (1993; London: Vintage, 1994), p. 132. 7 Reagan, quoted in Bradley Lightbody, The Cold War (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 107. For a fuller analysis of Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric, see Helena Hilmari, ‘Dividing the World: The Dichotomous Rhetoric of Ronald Reagan’, Multilingua, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1993), pp. 143-76. Brett Silverstein mentions the Reagan era’s image of ‘the Soviets as inhumane, vicious torturers who enjoy inflicting pain and murdering children’ (Silverstein, ‘The Psychology of U.S. Attitudes and Cognitions Regarding the Soviet Union’, American Psychologist, Vol. 44, No. 6 (June 1989), p. 904). 8 Stephanson, ‘Liberty or Death: The Cold War as US Ideology’, in Odd Arne Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretation, Theory (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 84. It is this kind of religious edge to the rhetoric that leads S.J. Ball to liken many Cold Warriors to ‘zealots in a confessional struggle’ (Ball, The Cold War: An International History, 1947-1991 (London and New York: Arnold, 1998), p. 246). Similarly, Noam Chomsky once located ‘something truly religious in the fervor’ of much American Cold War rhetoric (Chomsky, ‘Intellectuals and the State’, in Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There (London: Sinclair Browne, 1982), p. 74). 9 For an introduction to positive images of the Soviet Union, see Anthony G. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature from the Sixteenth Century to 1980: An Introductory Survey and a Bibliography (Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1985), pp. 183, and F.S. Northedge and Audrey Wells, Britain and Soviet Communism: The Impact of a Revolution (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 137-80. The two works also form useful guides to the pre-1939 history of Russophobia. 10 For British military concerns, see Donald C. Watt, ‘British Military Perceptions of the Soviet Union as a Strategic Threat, 1945-1950, in Josef Becker and Franz Knipping, eds, Power in Europe? Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany in a

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Postwar World, 1945-1950 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), pp. 32536. For a discussion of British diplomatic concerns, see Greenwood, ‘Frank Roberts’, pp. 103-22. 11 Churchill, ‘Iron Curtain’, reprinted in Young Hum Kim, ed., Twenty Years of Crisis: The Cold War Era (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1968), p. 17. 12 See W. Scott Lucas and C.J. Morris, ‘A Very British Crusade: The Information Research Department and the Beginning of the Cold War’, in Richard J. Aldrich, ed., British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 85-110. 13 See Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2001), p. 3. 14 Spiering, Englishness, p. 155. 15 Quoted in Peter Jenkins, Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), p. 288. 16 Pietz, ‘The “Post-Colonialism” of Cold War Discourse’, Social Text, Vol. 19/20 (Fall 1988), p. 55. 17 Ibid., p. 59. Martin Walker comments on the West’s ‘attempts to portray the Soviet Union as a semi-Asian state’ and quotes a passage from the memoirs of Dean Acheson, American Secretary of State under Truman, which compared the communist ‘threat to Western Europe’ to ‘that which Islam had posed centuries before, with its combination of ideological zeal and fighting power’ (Walker, Cold War, pp. 4-5). 18 Jelavich, History of the Balkans, p. 444. For a concise summary of post-war modernisation in the Balkans, see Okey, Eastern Europe, pp. 218-21. 19 Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, p. 186. Goldsworthy, to whom I am indebted for the facts about Manning’s time in south-east Europe, also acknowledges the imaginative achievements of the trilogy. Harry J. Mooney is typical, however, in emphasising the novel’s attempt ‘to recreate for us the urgent history of the time’ (Mooney, ‘Olivia Manning: Witness to History’, in Thomas F. Staley, ed., TwentiethCentury Women Novelists (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), p. 42). 20 Olivia Manning, The Spoilt City, new edn (1962; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 10. 21 Ibid., p. 21; Manning, The Great Fortune, new edn (1960; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 122. At one point, a British character is ‘delighted to observe’ that his landlady, forever reclined on her bed, ‘did everything a woman of Oriental character was reputed to do. She ate Turkish delight; she drank Turkish coffee; she smoked Turkish cigarettes; and she was for ever laying out a pack of frowsy, oddfaced cards, by which she predicted events from hour to hour’ (Manning, Great Fortune, p. 202). 22 Manning, Spoilt City, p. 231; Manning, Great Fortune, p. 224. 23 Manning, Great Fortune, p. 123. 24 Ibid., p. 30. 25 Walter Allen was over-optimistic to claim, in 1964, that the trilogy ‘promises to be one of the major works of the sixties’ (Allen, Tradition and Dream: A Critical Survey of British and American Fiction from the 1920s to the Present Day, new edn (1964; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 282). Nevertheless, it has been constantly in print since its publication, and is often very favourably reviewed: Anthony Burgess, for example, considered it ‘one of the finest records we have of the impact of [...] war on

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Europe’ (Burgess, The Novel Now: A Student’s Guide to Contemporary Fiction, new edn (1967; London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 95). In 1987, at the height of Ceausescu’s notoriety in the West, there was an all-star television version of the story produced, along with a number of series-related editions of the book. 26 Manning, Spoilt City, pp. 101, 16, 10. 27 This is despite the effusive left-wingism of Harriet’s husband, a ‘man of the Left’ who invests his faith in the Soviet Union and believes that a humanity ‘united under left-wing socialism’ can instigate ‘the regeneration of the world’ (Manning, Great Fortune, p. 98; Manning, Spoilt City, pp. 110, 286). 28 Malcolm Bradbury deems it ‘the most important of his postwar works’ and also ‘the most important novel about the Second World War to appear in England’ (Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, new edn (1993; London: Penguin, 1994), p. 285; Bradbury, Evelyn Waugh (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), p. 114). 29 Guy’s antipathy to both communism and fascism is encapsulated in his response to news of the Russo-German alliance of 1939: ‘now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle’ (Waugh, Men at Arms, new edn (1952; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 12). 30 Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), pp. 574, 590, 587, 571, 595. In a letter to his wife, Laura Waugh, he spoke of ‘the bloodiness of the partisans’ (quoted in David Wykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 146). 31 Waugh, Unconditional Surrender, new edn (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 182, 182, 178, 178. 32 An elaboration of Waugh’s attitudes towards south-east European communism can be found in his ‘Scott-King’s Modern Europe’ (1946), a short satire on modern totalitarianism which several commentators argue is partly inspired by Waugh’s perceptions of Yugoslavia (see Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Collins, 1975), pp. 298-9, and James F. Carens, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1966), pp. viii, 150). The story details the absurdities and terrors of Neutralia, a ‘turbulent modern state’ which is ‘governed by a single party, acclaiming a dominant Marshal [and] supporting a vast ill-paid bureaucracy whose work is tempered and humanized by corruption’ (Waugh, ‘Scott-King’s Modern Europe’, in Waugh, Work Suspended and Other Stories, new edn (1946; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 198-9). 33 From a selection of letters in Durrell, Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel, ed. by Alan G. Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 100, 101, 104. 34 Ibid., pp. 103, 107, 100, 107, 103. 35 Ibid., p. 101. 36 Durrell, ‘La Valise’, in Durrell, Stiff Upper Lip, new edn (1958; London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 72; Durrell, ‘The Ghost Train’, in Durrell, Esprit de Corps: Sketches from Diplomatic Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), pp. 19, 19. Much of Durrell’s writing in these volumes evokes the Balkans as barbarous and backward. For example, with the local men being ‘hirsute [...] peasants with greasy elf-locks and hands like shovels’, and the women being similar (‘eyebrows meeting in the middle, heavy moustaches’), Serbia/Vulgaria is the kind of ‘Communist country [where] the

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Corps finds itself cut off from every human contact’ (Durrell, ‘Frying the Flag’, in Durrell, Esprit de Corps, p. 29; Durrell, ‘Seraglios and Imbroglios’, in Durrell, Sauve Qui Peut, new edn (1966; London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 42; Durrell, ‘La Valise’, p. 72). 37 Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘Lawrence Durrell and the Modes of Modernism’, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter 1987), p. 519. 38 Durrell, White Eagles over Serbia, new edn (1957; London: Faber and Faber, 1962), pp. 38-9. In contrast to such passages, Methuen’s response to the Serbian countryside, particularly when empty of inhabitants, is ecstatic: see the description of his arrival in the southern hills in ibid., pp. 89-92. 39 Ibid., pp. 12, 62. Unusually for a post-war hero, Methuen even says his prayers before retiring: ‘“Always have done it since I was a child”’, he tells a suspicious colleague, who catches him at it: ‘“I never sleep well if I don’t”’ (ibid., p. 64). 40 Fraser, Lawrence Durrell: A Study, new edn (1973; London: Faber and Faber, 1973), p. 113. Durrell’s upbringing in India and his furtherance of British diplomatic objectives during his employment in the consular service influenced his understanding of abroad: see Stefan Herbrechter, Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 239-302. 41 Williams, Dragoman Pass (London: Collins, 1959), p. 10. 42 Portway, The Tirana Assignment (London: Robert Hale, 1974), pp. 163, 11; Portway, Double Circuit, p. 39; Portway, Tirana Assignment, p. 97. 43 Grey, The Bulgarian Exclusive, new edn (1976; London: Sphere Books, 1978), pp. 12, 131. While characterising the Soviet Union as unified and powerful, Grey disparages Bulgaria as Moscow’s ‘“soft Balkan underbelly”’: Sofia’s main square is ‘a tiny, Toytown copy of Red Square’, Bulgarian soldiers wear ‘comic-opera Balkan uniforms’ and the Bulgarian state is weakened by a population in whom ‘“local loyalties still run stronger than anything else”’, a regional disharmony which, we are told helpfully, is ‘“what ‘Balkanisation’ really means’ (ibid., pp. 128, 112, 110, 166, 166). 44 Ambler, Judgement on Deltchev, p. 19. Williams’s narrator in Dragoman Pass is unusual in expressing faith in oppositional groups: ‘Every book I’d ever read about the Balkans had been spiced with the activities of the bandits, the haidouks, the bashibazouks and the comitadijis – a romantic mixture of guerrillas and out-and-out highwaymen. It was possible, probable even, that they had their successors’ (Williams, Dragoman Pass, p. 164). 45 Williams, Dragoman Pass, p. 188. 46 Carter, ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, in Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, new edn (1979; London: Vintage, 1995), p. 97. 47 Barnes, Porcupine, p. 19. 48 See Robert A. Morace, The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 86-108. 49 Bradbury, Rates of Exchange (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983), p. 26. 50 Ibid., p. 53. On the Slakan language, see also Bradbury’s Why Come to Slaka? (1986), a mock phrasebook and travel guide to the fictional country. 51 Ivie, ‘The Prospects of Cold War Criticism’, in Medhurst, et al., Cold War Rhetoric, p. 203.

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52 Fred Inglis, The Cruel Peace: Everyday Life in the Cold War (London: Aurum Press, 1992), pp. 426-7. 53 Simon Dalby, ‘Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union as Other’, Alternatives, Vol. 13 (1988), p. 422. As David Painter also notes: ‘Anti-communism became a guiding principle of US foreign policy and a significant force in US domestic politics. It provided an explanation for what was wrong in the world; a prescription for what to do about it; and an ideological justification for US actions’ (Painter, The Cold War: An International History (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 19). That justification becomes even more dubious if one accepts, as Nathanson argues, that there is little proof that the Soviet Union was ever an expansionist power (see Nathanson, ‘Social Construction of the Soviet Threat’, pp. 466-7). 54 Kaldor, The Imaginary War: Understanding the East-West Conflict (Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1990), p. 4. 55 Ibid., p. 4. 56 Ibid., p. 5.

Chapter 10: Humanitarian Intervention At the opening of this book, I mentioned that the last two hundred years have seen little evolution in the manner that south-east Europe is presented in literary and political discourse. Despite the profound disruption caused by the First World War, which led to an alternative representational paradigm during the 1920s and 1930s, balkanism has remained a circular, non-evolutionary narrative that returns in our supposed more liberal and questioning age to the crude, denigratory motifs of the imperial nineteenth century. This is not to suggest that the British concept of the Balkans is ever pure or homogeneous. The previous chapters have attempted to show that conceptualisation has not only undergone diachronic transformation in the twentieth century but has also exhibited synchronic variance. In fiction, journalism and travel writing, balkanism has interacted with a range of competing ideologies – romanticism, empiricism, imperialism, nationalism, communism – and has been split between generic styles, most obviously the empirical, the gothic and the pastoral. It remains the case, however, that the most widespread and durable form of the discourse has centred around the essentialist tropes of discord, barbarism, backwardness and obfuscation. In order to further illustrate the phenomenon, I shall turn in this final chapter to the genre in which circularity is most conspicuous, the memoirs of British humanitarians. Here, one would expect the belief in the international alleviation of suffering to produce a more sympathetic form of cross-cultural representation, although so often one finds animosity, ethnocentrism and culturalist racism. In the western tradition, humanitarianism has its roots in the Christian concepts of charity and compassion, with the burden of care for the sick and wounded once placed on members of religious orders, who viewed service to the less fortunate as a moral obligation. In the nineteenth century, religious duty began to give way to the more secular conviction that the giving and receiving of humanitarian

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assistance in times of natural calamity or man-made disaster were fundamental human rights and that the victims of crisis had an equal claim to the basic human requirements of food, clothing, shelter and medicine. Amongst contemporary aid agencies there remains a widespread belief that ‘[h]umanitarian action is more than a technical exercise aimed at nourishing or healing a population defined as “in need”; it is a moral endeavor based on solidarity with other members of humanity’.1 Such persuasive idealism goes some way to explaining the rapid expansion of humanitarianism in recent times. In the first 15 years following the Cold War, the number of non-governmental organisations rocketed to two and a half thousand and foreign aid levels rose dramatically from $2.1 billion to over $10 billion.2 So powerful and ubiquitous has the humanitarian industry become that one might legitimately ask why the plight of the world’s poor has not improved. Almost two and a half billion people continue to lack access to basic sanitation, over a billion people are subsisting on less than a dollar a day, 840 million people are lacking adequate food and over 25,000 children are dying daily from want of basic food and medicine. For David Rieff, it seems inexplicable that, after the Geneva Conventions, ‘the murderous twentieth century remained just as murderous’ and that much of Asia, Africa and South America still formed ‘a vast, teeming dystopia of war and want whose future no decent and properly informed person should be able to contemplate without sadness, outrage, and fear’.3 The answer lies partly in the inevitable failure of a humanitarian programme that responds to disaster only after the disaster has occurred, allowing any infrastructural weaknesses in the afflicted country to worsen beyond the capacity of organisations to rectify them. Behind ‘so much wellmeaning compassion’, in short, lies a tragic cycle of ‘idealism, high expectations, disappointing results, cynical backlash’.4 The gap between expectation and outcome has come under scrutiny in recent years, with organisations deliberating at length over what constitutes good practice in aid management. Among the common dilemmas of the profession are the choices to be made between emergency relief and reconstruction, between sustainable development and western models of development, and between the empowerment of local organisations and the retention of western organisational control. The impossibility of these choices is illustrated by the formal guidelines which charities have drawn up for humanitarian action. The

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most influential is the code of conduct produced in the 1960s by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which attempted an ideological framework based around seven core principals, the most important being impartiality, neutrality and independence. Based on the Geneva Conventions, and adopted in the manifestos of many other NGOs, these aim to ensure that assistance is offered without bias towards any caste, religion, ethnicity or nationality, that detachment is maintained from any local military or political conflict, and that operations remain free from external influence, including the economic or political wishes of donor countries. The concept of participation without prejudice, however, has often proved questionable, if not unrealisable, in practice. Apart from the fact that flows of aid inevitably privilege some sections of a population over others, relief organisations have rarely been without pressure from domestic governments. During the Cold War, American NGOs commonly accepted their policy remit directly from political administrations and structured relief missions around the pursuit of privatisation and democratic reform. This ‘extension of the state into charitable activity’ was so pervasive that, during wars in South America and south-east Asia, political and military leaders ‘regarded aid agencies as their allies – with special responsibility for “hearts and minds”’.5 In the post-Cold War era, the US model has come to predominate, as an international coalition of western governments, unconstrained by fear of Soviet retaliation, has seized the humanitarian initiative from the voluntary sector. In Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the international coalition has not only effected the initial entrance, but has also ensured that aid funding is largely channelled through official bodies and that the movement and security of NGOs are overseen by UN forces.6 On the one hand, this state-led humanitarianism has contributed to the burgeoning of the global aid budget, the proliferation and enhanced public profile of aid agencies and the expansion of their remit from immediate relief work to long-term development. On the other hand, an operational reliance on a US-led coalition has reduced many NGOs to emissaries of the world’s sole superpower. The dilemma is compounded by the state’s appropriation of the term ‘humanitarian’ to describe its foreign interventions, which crystallises the current transference of responsibility for disaster management from aid agencies to politicians. To label an event a ‘humanitarian crisis’ not

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only muddles and obscures the multiple origins of crises, but also divests each crisis of political causation, creating the impression that western involvement has no political motivation – indeed, is not acting upon political concerns – and merely intends to promote wellbeing. An armed intervention that entails civilian injury or death, Peter Baehr points out, ‘is by no means more “humanitarian” than shooting a person at close range or launching a ballistic missile [but] has the advantage of sounding nice’.7 Moreover, military humanitarianism conceals wide-ranging foreign policy objectives in the post-Cold War era and converges with hazy concepts of national security during an ongoing ‘war on terror’.8 The realisation that ‘humanitarianism’ is being used as an instrument of political strategy has caused a good deal of moral disquiet amongst relief workers, many of whom chose their vocation out of an abhorrence of western militarism and its consequences. Indeed, the marriage of altruism and armed force has reminded many of the ‘civilising missions’ of the nineteenth century, in which the ostensibly philanthropic goals of fighting tyranny, poverty or disease were used to justify imperial occupation and in which philanthropists – doctors, nurses, missionaries – worked alongside their nation’s militaries. Reflecting on western interventions past and present, Rieff finds an identical ‘combination of high moral intent, military force, the imposition of good government, and benign tutelage’.9 Similarly, William Easterly locates in the latter half of the twentieth century ‘an abrupt transition from colonialism to [...] benevolent military intervention’, the two united in their perception of ‘the Rest as a blank slate – without any meaningful history or institutions of its own – upon which the West could inscribe its superior ideals’.10 The continuum of power and prestige has been cloaked during the postCold War era in a carefully reformed vocabulary, with governments shifting the discursive emphasis from barbarism to ‘underdevelopment’, tyrannies to ‘failed states’, invasion to ‘regime change’, war to ‘peace enforcement’ and colonialism to ‘nationbuilding’. The rhetoric fails to conceal the twin effects of this new imperialism: an undermining of the sovereignty of nations and a compounding of the crises it claims the authority to solve. In the face of this, organisations such as Médecins sans Frontières have determined to combine relief work with a more left-liberal humanitarian agenda grounded in testimony, advocacy, human rights

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campaigns and the lobbying of western governments. Yet the fact that their work still privileges western decision-making on social and political issues in developing regions repeats the international community’s disregard for the authority of regional government. As Vanessa Pupavac argues, the work of NGOs so often ‘bypasses the developing state’ and continues ‘to legitimize the erosion of equality among sovereign states and the reassertion of international inequalities’.11 The controversies surrounding the aims and effects of relief work have a special relevance to eastern Europe. Historically, western charities have had a long and involved interest in the region, with each of the major phases in the development of humanitarianism having had some connection with local crises. In the nineteenth century, the Crimean War helped to inspire the widening of women’s medical service abroad, while the Eastern Crisis produced, in Britain, one of the first nationwide matrices of donors, publicists, lobbyists and voluntary agencies. In the twentieth century, an early version of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees emerged in the wake of the Russian Revolution, the Oxfam Committee for Famine Relief was established in response to the Allied blockade of occupied Greek Macedonia during the Second World War, and the flourishing of volunteerism in the post-Cold War era was initiated by the public response to the highly publicised plight of Romanian orphans. At the same time, it was in the Balkans that the concepts of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and robust peacekeeping were not only developed as strategies of the post-1989 ‘New World Order’,12 but were also first endorsed by relief agencies. Both Oxfam and MSF, for example, lobbied for a military response to Serbian aggression in Bosnia, and Save the Children – no doubt inspired by the success of NATO airstrikes in Bosnia in 1995 – called for military intervention to end the later conflict in Kosovo. It was also in the former Yugoslavia that perhaps the most fundamental dilemma of post-Cold War humanitarianism was first clarified. While the presence of international peacekeepers improved the delivery of aid and the security of aid workers, the image of useful action that peacekeeping propagated simultaneously created an excuse for non-action on the military front: a palliative for the western conscience, in short, that did nothing to end the slaughter. This is what Fiona Terry calls ‘the paradox of humanitarian action’, the ability of relief work to

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‘contradict its fundamental purpose by prolonging the suffering it intends to alleviate’.13 The following discussion of the dilemmas of international relief work will focus on British charitable activity in south-east Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on the memoirs of practitioners, my focus will be on the frequent disjunction between the ideals of humanitarian work, as expressed in the burgeoning scholarship on the subject, and the reported actions of humanitarians in the field. Such analysis of the slippage between theory and practice is commonly neglected as a tool for deconstructing cross-cultural discourse. A good percentage of British writings on foreign regions have been produced by individuals who enter those regions in professional capacities (military, educational, diplomatic, journalistic, commercial) and as such are bound or led by a particular ethic of good practice. While one could turn to any professional code for illustrative material, the case of humanitarianism, with its grounding in Christian duty and humanism, is particularly instructive. My primary argument is that many relief workers have not just failed to live up to the ideals of their vocation, but have failed to even recognise the dilemmas integral to that vocation. Secondly, I aim to show that ‘good-will imperialism,’14 as Harry Scherman terms charity work, tends to eschew cross-cultural co-operation in favour of personal or organisational power, a form of self-aggrandisement that is supported by a textual denigration that counters the humanist ideal of global solidarity. The origins of British humanitarian engagement in the Balkans are found, interestingly enough, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the summer of 1875, years of poor harvests and rising taxation had led to an uprising of the Christian population and, after the brutality of the Ottoman response, to a tide of refugees entering Austrian-held Dalmatia and Croatia. As mentioned previously, insurrection soon spread to Bulgaria where, during the spring of that year, Ottoman militias conducted a vicious campaign against revolutionary cells and civilians. In her work for the Bulgarian Peasant Relief Fund, Emily Strangford came into contact with the survivors of the massacre and was not unusual in writing emotively of the ‘suffering, sorrowstricken, crushed-down creatures in this country’.15 During late 1876 and early 1877, over 3,000 such articles on the atrocities appeared in western European newspapers, rousing heated public debate.16 In

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Britain, Dorothy Anderson records, ‘the great Bulgarian atrocities agitation swept the country in a flurry of public meetings, public declarations, high emotional fervour and generous giving’.17 The excitement was compounded by Serbia and Montenegro declaring war on the Porte in July 1876, animated by a quixotic desire to liberate their oppressed Slavic neighbours and by a more pragmatic desire for full independence. With the Serbian cause feted by a section of the British press – the Daily News calling them ‘a brave, warlike and generous people’ – hundreds of British supporters travelled to the region ‘ready to fight, to nurse, to report, and just to see’.18 This apparent divergence from the disdain and denigration of much nineteenth-century balkanism was qualified by the visitors’ imperious attitudes towards the Serbian nation-state and by their mistrust of Serbia’s allegiance to Russia. The treatment of such issues by British relief workers, moreover, presents clear evidence that ‘[h]umanitarianism, like poverty and underdevelopment, is political.’19 An example is found in Emma Pearson and Louisa McLaughlin’s voluntary work with the Red Cross in northern and central Serbia during the latter half of 1876. Their memoir of the period, written by Pearson and entitled Service in Serbia (1877), is vehement about local shortcomings: ‘It is a great mistake of the wellwishers of these lands,’ Pearson proclaims, ‘to use enthusiastic terms in praising this people.’20 Their reservations are partly based on the perceived material deficiencies of the country. In this ‘halfcivilised land’, the capital is ‘barren and dreary’, houses lack ‘cleanliness and decency’, food is ‘something too atrocious’ and agricultural land suffers from an absence of an ‘enterprising government’ and from a ‘bigoted reluctance to go forward in the path of progress’ (pp. 125, 68, 188, 95, 80, 145). Pearson’s depiction of Donji, a small town on the Danube, is characteristically negative: ‘In this town of 2000 inhabitants there was no decent inn, no library, no place of public resort, no means of instruction or amusement, no books, no newspapers’ (p. 164). More significant than material lack is what Pearson regards as the moral deficiency of the inhabitants. The Serbians ‘dislike hard work’, ‘can rarely be roused into [...] mental activity’ and easily succumb to ‘envy, jealousy and malice’ (pp. 25, 25, 63). At the same time, she mocks the British media’s enthusiasm for the supposed ‘“war-like disposition of Servia”’, insisting that this is ‘a quiet and timid race’ which is ‘not strong either in character or

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constitution’ and has ‘no idea of how terrible war [is], nor what endurance, discipline and courage, are required from those who are involved in it’ (pp. 46, 82, 47, 46). This sense of a nation unfit for military activity is part of Pearson’s wider contention that Serbia has no business engaging in geo-political ventures. Although the two Englishwomen work alongside the Serbian Army, and indeed are technically beholden to the Serbian branch of the Red Cross, they are not only scathing of the nation’s ‘confidence in ultimate victory’ but also actively opposed to that victory (p. 61). While agreeing with Serbian sovereignty, they condemn Belgrade’s declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire as ‘an evil moment, actuated by ambition’, urging the nation to ‘shake off Russian influence’ and, in order to ‘take a respectable place among the smaller European powers’, to stick to ‘cultivating her natural wealth, and improving her simplehearted people’.21 Clearly, the Red Cross’s principal of political impartiality, of volunteers ‘act[ing] strictly as neutrals’ (p. 55), is not one that Pearson shares. The authors’ underlying assumption that only the Great Powers are authorised to arrange continental affairs is repeated, in microcosm, by their view that Serbia should leave all medical arrangements to British humanitarians. The argument emerges via two main points of contrast established between the indigenes and the ‘internationals’. Firstly, Pearson’s claim that the Serbs ‘are not a courageous or heroic race’ is made in direct opposition to her assertion that the British ‘are, by nature, a fighting race’, the correspondents and medical volunteers in Serbia animated by ‘daring’ and ‘endurance’, and by a desire to work at the frontlines that ‘was the wonder of the Servians, whose proclivities lay in exactly the opposite direction’ (pp. 25, 81, 84, 84, 62). Secondly, the Serbians’ penchant for gossip and envy, which ‘“poisoned the springs of truth, charity and goodwill”’, is distinguished from the ‘pleasant manners’ and ‘open way of speaking’ which characterise all British volunteers engaged in ‘noble service’ to Serbia (pp. 63, 53, 53, 53). This unique blend of human decency and fighting spirit, a kind of martial humanism, suggests that philanthropy, and the capacity to put philanthropy into practice, is the sole preserve of the British. This is confirmed by the arrogance and will-to-power which Pearson and McLaughlin demonstrate in their relief work. During their first inspection of a military hospital, they are adamant that conditions are ‘not up to our ideas of what an hospital should be’,

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denouncing the standards of sanitation and patient care and condemning the Serbian nurses, who ‘were not only ignorant, but careless and indifferent, and paid more attention to the surgeons and dressers than to the patients’ (pp. 69, 70). When their wish ‘to take charge of the hospital’ is thwarted by the local superintendent, a rebuff they consider ‘insulting’, they waste no time in filing a complaint with the War Office (pp. 74, 75). A similar scenario occurs when they view a second hospital, a temporary dispensary erected in a farmyard, comprising a two-storey grain store and a few tents. Here, the superintendent feels the full force of Pearson’s wrath: I pointed out that the want of air and light in the upper gallery was a fatal objection to its being used as a ward; that the heat was far too great for the tents, and the means of ventilation and cleanliness deficient; that there were not enough attendants for so many patients; that their diets were scanty, ill-prepared, and not well chosen; that to mix sick and wounded together was a great mistake, and that I saw no possibility of remedying this defect here. (pp. 120-1)

Discovering that the indigenous staff ‘resented these remarks’ (p. 121), Pearson submits a second complaint to the Serbian military, which closes the dispensary down three days later. The humanitarian principle of working co-operatively with local people is clearly alien to Pearson and McLaughlin, who actively seek their disempowerment.22 This is nowhere more evident than at a third hospital, situated in Donji, where they are finally allowed to take systematic control of the wards. Firstly, they abolish the native administration by sacking the current orderlies, ‘the most dirty, helpless creatures imaginable’, and by demanding that all patients, initially under the authority of a Serbian surgeon, are ‘given over to us’ (pp. 170-1, 175). Secondly, they establish the rules and regulations of a specifically ‘English hospital’ by employing a ‘very teachable’ native administration ‘who adopted and enforced our ways’ (pp. 177, 178). Lastly, they maintain control of the building by insisting that ‘no man might leave the place without permission, and no one enter it, expect on business’.23 These three phases of conquest – of subduing, instructing and policing a population – are driven by an ambition that is less medical than moral. Their programme of cleanliness and nutrition are, first and foremost, a ‘tuition in civilisation’, one whose

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methodical application guarantees that the patients will ‘never [...] relapse into semi-barbarism’.24 Needless to say, Pearson and McLaughlin spend little time reflecting upon their practice and even less time contemplating the difficulties that cause so much soul-searching amongst contemporary humanitarians. So strong is their sense of moral conviction, in fact, that they fail to notice the many professional dilemmas which beset them. An example is Pearson’s treatment of the Russian medical volunteers then flooding Serbia, who she finds drunken and uncivil, as well as prone to ‘treat[ing] the poor Serbs with a mixture of arrogance and contempt’ (p. 252). Ignoring one of the major tenets of the profession, that ‘peace among aid workers is an issue for all who aspire to humanitarianism’,25 Pearson insists that service in the Russian hospitals would be impossible for an ‘Englishwoman with any notion of self-respect’ and entreats her readers to resist the appeals for funding being issued by the Russian Red Cross: ‘Is it right’, she asks, ‘to send assistance to such savages?’ (pp. 320, 321). This presumed authority to countenance or withhold material assistance extends, more worryingly, to the civilian population, whom she downgrades in her hierarchy of European suffering. In one remarkable passage, Pearson begins to doubt that the refugees who have sought sanctuary in Serbia from Ottoman atrocities in Bosnia and Bulgaria are deserving of material assistance. Noticing that they show few ‘signs of poverty or distress’, she surmises that it is little hardship for Balkan peasants, unfamiliar with ‘real European comfort’, ‘to pack up a very small cartload of goods [...] and leave a house worth about 30s. of English money’, and contrasts them with the more affluent victims of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, who had to cope not only with ‘ruined houses’ but also with ‘wrecked farmyards’ and ‘destroyed furniture and clothes’.26 Pearson and McLaughlin are finally powerless to stem the flow of British donations to civilians, but they do achieve wide-ranging control over the wounded soldiers in their hospital, from whom they withhold the quinine necessary for treating fever and dysentery. In its early years, the policy of the British Red Cross towards wounded combatants was strictly charitable, accepting the duty to heal them but leaving aside the thorny question of whether combatants should then return to battle. Pearson chooses to act otherwise: ‘I could not feel that it was a rightful part of Red Cross work to keep soldiers well; only to tend them when sick, and cure

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them if possible; but to keep soldiers in health is to add to the fighting power of an army, and is not either a neutral or charitable work’ (p. 110). The argument may appear absurd (curing soldiers but not keeping them ‘in health’), but it informs their professional conduct and soon leads to tragedy. On the eve of a Serbian reconnaissance into Ottoman-held territory, Pearson is asked to be present at the frontline in the event of casualties, yet declines, convinced that the foray ‘“is only undertaken for the benefit of [British] correspondents”’ in need of a story. Deplorably, one Serb is badly injured and, after weeks of suffering, dies in such ‘exquisite pain’ that even Pearson ‘regretted not having been there’ (pp. 115, 118). The contrition does not last long. Alongside the authors’ belief that ‘our intentions were honest and unselfish – to do the greatest possible good’ (p. 127) – lies a conviction that British humanitarians always know best: Those who had to work in hunger and cold, trying to save the lives so wasted in this unequal contest, prizing every drop of wine, looking on every egg as a treasure, that might help to strengthen some weak frame; those who passed days and nights on the battlefield, gallant unselfish fellows, who had put aside every dream of home comforts for the sake of the wounded out there, ay, even those who bore hardship cheerfully, that the truth might reach England in the newspapers – these men, and these alone, know what Servia is, and what that war was. (p. 130)

The portrait is offered for the benefit of the ‘many English tourists’ on the Serbian battlefields, who despite proving ‘utterly useless’ presented themselves after ‘three days’ adventures in that out-of-theway land [...] as authorities on all that concerned it’ (pp. 128, 129, 129). It does not strike Pearson and McLaughlin as significant that their own residency in the country lasted only a few months, a period in which they refused to live ‘like the Easterns’ and declined to study the local language because it was ‘very difficult to learn, and very harsh to listen to’ (pp. 91, 165). Many of the failings exhibited by mid-Victorian relief workers were continued during the conflict of 1914 to 1918, the period of ‘[h]umanitarianism’s next great leap forward’.27 On the battlefields of France, Belgium, Serbia and Russia, voluntary work became a respected form of war service, as nurses, doctors and ambulance drivers based at front-line hospitals were put in as much danger of injury and death as military personnel. During the latter half of 1914,

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the intense public concern at developments along the Eastern Front produced a flurry of new charities, among them the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service and the Serbian Relief Fund. For the historian Monica Krippner, the volunteers who served in them revealed ‘an unwavering faith in something larger than themselves’ and, whether this faith was in God or in ‘peace, justice and humanity’, they ‘all shared a strong feeling of duty towards their fellows’.28 There is no doubt that these humanist principles were partly responsible for the divergence in wartime writings from the worst excesses of Victorian balkanism. As detailed in chapter 6, the military alliance between Britain and Serbia, and the close relations that developed between the medical and military staff of the two countries, resulted in an appreciative, even effusive, style of regional portraiture. Although these were once ‘barbarians [that] we had been wont to sneer at’, one volunteer wrote, the Serbians show such an aptitude for ‘sacrifice and glory’ and such a ‘miracle of human determination’ that ‘with quickened pulse and a thrilling heart [we must] acknowledge them for all time as among the salt of the earth’.29 Behind the motifs of wartime alliance, however, was an authoritarian humanitarian practice that betrayed what one former USAID official calls ‘the connection between the desire to enlighten, to do development work, and the desire to rule.’30 The connection is illustrated in the memoirs of Mabel St Clair Stobart, a veteran aid worker who led the Women’s Convoy Corps in Bulgaria during the First Balkan War and a hospital unit of the Serbian Relief Fund in the First World War. In the latter conflict, Stobart was instrumental in setting up a hospital for war wounded at Kragujevac, quickly expanding its remit to accommodate civilian patients and later establishing further clinics in central Serbia to better facilitate civilian treatment and food distribution. As with other British organisations, the Serbian Relief Fund was nominally under the control of the Serbian Medical Department: its members are ‘adjuncts of the Serbian Army’, Stobart writes, and as such are ‘glad to perform service in whichever way was to the Serbian authorities most serviceable’.31 As fighting intensifies, however, Stobart is asked to take charge of a mobile field hospital on the frontline, a position that entails commanding material, equipment and staff, both British and Serbian, all ‘without supervision of Serbian officers’ (p. 115). This is the first appointment of a female medical ‘commander’ in Serbian

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military history and, when the post commences, Stobart uses it to challenge ‘Turkish traditions’ by demonstrating ‘qualities of authority and power not hitherto associated with women’ (pp. 115, 124). This is emphasised in her relationship to the civilian assistants and army personnel attached to her unit, over whom she exerts a form of command that recalls Flora Sandes’s transition from aid worker to military officer. During her service on the Bulgarian and Northern Fronts, Stobart’s duties extend from securing accommodation and provisions for her men, to disciplining them for any unsoldierly displays of ‘inaction, inanity, indolence and indifference’ (p. 252). In one scene, Stobart has ordered her unit to rise at four in the morning in order to prepare for breaking camp, but finds the men asleep and the wagons and horses unprepared: I saw that the occasion required an exhibition of a little majorly wrath. So I sent for all the men, and, through the interpreter Vooitch, made them understand that a command must be obeyed. When I began speaking, I was not genuinely angry, and I only gave them the external fierce eye and a firm voice; but feelings quickly adapt themselves to contortions of the muscles, and I soon found that I was giving them the real thing, with excellent results. I had not the rifle butt or stick to back me up, but the men understood. (pp. 138-9)

It does not take long for Stobart to incorporate the use of physical punishment. In a second scene, the discovery of a ‘kitchen boy’ playing cards with three soldiers while on duty offers her the chance to teach non-commissioned officers, who should be maintaining order amongst the frontline troops, that ‘obedience was essential’ (p. 196). Not bothering to run through the ‘abstract reasons for the necessity of discipline’, she hands a whip to the sergeant on duty – who needs to learn ‘a little elementary discipline’ himself – and makes sure he ‘belaboured all four’ (pp. 196, 197, 197). One’s impression here of an unphilanthropic authoritarianism is supported by the response of the Serbians, who ‘yielded to their woman commander [...] a willing obedience and a loyalty which never failed’ (p. 292). This ready assumption of power is displayed by many other female volunteers in Serbia. One member of Stobart’s unit at Kragujevatz, Mabel Dearmer, complains in her memoir that the British staff were initially ‘overworked’, but solves the problem by getting the Serbian convalescents and Austrian prisoners ‘to do the hard work’, particularly digging latrines and ‘lift[ing] heavy packages and

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crates’.32 Similarly, Ellen Chivers Davies, an English nurse stationed in Belgrade during the Austrian siege, is exasperated by the Serbian orderlies, who are ‘not of the highest intelligence’, but arranges a schedule by which ‘the worst are kept busy chopping wood’ and ‘the best are kept for house boys’.33 As Davies’s comments illustrate, the disparagement of a Balkan population was an inevitable corollary of its subordination to British relief agencies. The point is further evidenced by Sir James Berry’s Anglo-Serbian Hospital Unit, a voluntary organisation connected to the British Red Cross which ran a field hospital at Vrnjačka Banja between 1915 and 1916. The organisation’s collective record of their experiences, written by Berry and four members of his team, places a continual emphasis on British autonomy from local officialdom. Despite expecting ‘the conventions of London society [...] to be swept ruthlessly aside’ by the Serbian authorities, the team is pleased to report that ‘the sanction of the Serbian medical officer in charge’ soon proves ‘a dead-letter’ and that they are able to proceed without ‘any meddlesome interference’.34 Thereafter, the process of establishing the English hospital, which is situated in converted village school and spa complex, entails the same territorialism, the same process of marking out and policing a British sphere of influence, as that of Pearson and McLaughlin. Their work produces, in little more than a week, ‘as good a hospital building as could be found in Serbia’, one which ‘excited the envy of all our visitors’.35 In the running of the hospital, Berry’s team are assisted by the fact that the Serbians – both patients and assistants – are ‘almost always docile’, and therefore eminently ‘teachable’, and also by its ability to pick personal servants from amongst the Austrians prisoners, each of whom shows ‘the fidelity and devotion of a Newfoundland dog’.36 The British think of the Austrians as ‘our prisoners’ and, with almost a hundred of them at the hospital, start to feel as though they ‘were in the Southern States of America before the abolition of slavery’, or else were ‘feudal lords, with retainers who were forced to give their service’.37 In another link to Pearson and McLaughlin, their particular form of governance extends into the realm of morality, with instruction ‘in habits of decency’ being just as important as medical treatment.38 For example, when the British build dry-earth latrines in the grounds of the hospital they expend a good deal of ‘patience and perseverance’ in training each individual Serbian to use them ‘in a decent and proper manner’:

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You must see for yourself that he does it, and go on telling him and correcting him until he understands that you are in earnest and mean to be obeyed. After that you must still keep an eye upon him, lest he lapse into evil ways [...]. Soon both Austrians and Serbs, when they had learnt that we were not to be trifled with, themselves took pains to maintain order, and it was the Serb soldier who instructed the newcomers. On one occasion, when a large batch of newly-arrived convalescents was admitted to the school, things began to go wrong. ‘Look here,’ said they to the new-comers, ‘we cannot allow this sort of thing in our nice clean latrines. We won’t stand for it, and you must remember that you are not now in a Serb but in an English hospital.39

Berry’s language, revolving around importunity and obedience, is a mixture of the public school and the chapel. The deployment of the same bourgeois idiom by the soldiers (‘Look here’, ‘We won’t stand for it’) expresses a fantasy on the writer’s part that the natives have successfully absorbed imperial culture, especially with their purported acceptance of English dominion in the last line. Throughout the text, the notion that the British exert a beneficial influence on indigenous identity is predicated on a binaristic opposition between British initiative and Serbian deficiency. Amongst the Serbians’ many ‘disadvantages of race’, to borrow a phrase from Berry’s wife, are a tendency ‘to evade and postpone’, ‘a want of zeal and thoroughness’, ‘an indifference to dirt’ and a lack of ‘[f]oresight, preparation, and anxiety to prevent the loss of life’.40 The impression that the Serbians need to be nurtured along the civilisation scale with ‘supervision and prodding’ transforms them into ‘passive dependents on the competence of outsiders’ – to cite humanitarian commentary – or into ‘raw material for the organising skills of philanthropists’.41 There are few relief workers who resist the temptation to infantilise the beneficiaries of their aid. Caroline Matthews, a member of the Scottish Women’s Unit who became a prisoner of war after the Austrian invasion, views the local population as helplessly reliant. Whereas British people facing an emergency are able to ‘think for themselves’ and show ‘common sense’, the Serbs are ‘slow-witted’ and ‘primitive’, responding to crisis with ‘laziness’, ‘stubbornness’ and ‘callous indifference’.42 Lady Paget, head of the Serbian Relief Fund in Macedonia, claims that even the Axis forces learn lessons in civilisation from the British. After the Bulgarian Army has taken Skopje, her decision to remain in the town has ‘a most desirable effect on the attitude of the Bulgarians and Austrians’, whose behaviour

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there is ‘free from such cruelty as is reported to have occurred elsewhere’.43 Like their Victorian forebears, British aid workers during the First World War were largely free of moral quandary, convinced that their activities offered an indispensable model for indigenous development. Ellen Chivers Davies is no doubt correct in her guess that Serbians ‘must subconsciously accept their ideas of the British from our behaviour and characteristics’, but is certainly unusual in claiming that they did not ‘always have the highest culture to select their impressions from’.44 Although Davies fails to expand on the point, she may well be referring to the many illegalities and indiscretions which her colleagues committed in the region. Davies herself confesses that her unit looted ‘a consignment of Stobart luggage’ which arrived at a railway station in the Serbian Relief Fund’s absence, and Berry’s team admit to making ‘acquisitions of a very dubious nature’ for its hospital, including the theft of porcelain, brass work and electrical equipment from the company who owned the spa complex.45 Alice and Claude Askew mention that among the several members of the First British Field Hospital who have ‘run counter to the police’ is a women caught photographing the Serb defences in Belgrade, although the offence is tolerated as ‘she was an English nurse, to whom much was permitted’.46 Regarding her work in the First Balkan War, Stobart happily admits to commandeering Turkish homes, appropriating food from Turkish restaurants and accepting from Bulgarian officials gifts which have been looted from Turkish households.47 This pointed prejudice against a warring faction became more widespread during the First World War, when relief workers were not averse to picking up weaponry and taking pot-shots at the enemy.48 The debate about whether humanitarianism should ally itself to military causes was of little interest to volunteers who viewed their work as an expression of fealty ‘for the Empire and the King’.49 The closest they come to disloyalty is expressing consternation at ‘the failure of the British government to fulfil its promised word’ to send military assistance to the Serbians, who talk about little else than the ‘longed-for arrival of the Allies’.50 It is perhaps due to the urgency of the immediate war effort that few of them pay any mind to that other long-standing dilemma: the choice to be made between relief work and development work. Davies contemplates briefly the idea of ‘Serbian girls of good standing’ taking over the British medical

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mission, but is ‘doubtful of its success’.51 Stobart realises that Bulgaria will need a good deal of foreign assistance for post-war reconstruction, but also knows ‘it would be most difficult to obtain, because public attention in England and elsewhere would by then have transferred itself to some more topical drama of sensation’.52 The unit that shows most interest in so-called ‘peace-work’ is Berry’s AngloSerbian Hospital Unit. Believing that their ‘greatest contribution [...] to Serbian civilisation is the idea of organised sanitation’,53 they attempt to reconfigure entirely the public health system of Vrnjačka Banja by draining a marsh, organising a refuse collection and constructing a drainage system for the main street. They are aware that the ‘apathy and [...] opposition’ of the townsfolk make it unlikely ‘that any system of public health that we established would be maintained’.54 Nevertheless, they push ahead with an unwanted path of reconstruction, their determination ‘to leave behind them some permanent record of their activities’ ensuring that, in Easterly’s summation of western peace-work, ‘the interests of the poor [get] little weight compared to the vanity of the rich’.55 The inequality of power between the suppliers and recipients of western aid was just as evident during the humanitarian operations of the 1990s. Reflecting their prominence during the 1870s and 1910s, the Balkans gripped the British public consciousness from the first stirrings of war in Slovenia and Croatia, through the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo to the eventual fall of Milošević. The region’s standing is shown by that fact that, even after the Dayton Accord, the former Yugoslavia remained the world’s top recipient of western aid until 2000, securing in a typical year twice as much as the second highest recipient.56 The continued assistance to the region cannot be explained solely by the unfolding tragedy in Kosovo during the late 1990s. As mentioned by Tony Vaux, the former Oxfam regional manager for eastern Europe, the humanitarian response to Serbian aggression against the Kosovan Albanians was the largest in history, despite the fact that the suffering was not as great as that of disasters in, for instance, Somalia or Sudan. The average Kosovan refugee ‘received as much as fifty times the aid given to a refugee in Africa’ and was accommodated in camps ‘where three hot meals were served every day and there were hot showers, air conditioning and laundries’.57 When considered alongside the West’s decision to intervene militarily, which it failed to do in key African conflicts,

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commentators have inferred that ‘white Europeans’ were being privileged in a manner indicative of ‘moral irresponsibility and racism’,58 thus absorbing the region into a Eurocentrism from which it is customarily excluded. Yet the real reason for the West’s sustained engagement lies in its concern for security along Europe’s eastern border and for restriction of the westward migration of refugees. It also lies in its desire to restore the credibility of the UN after the debacle in Bosnia, where humanitarian aid was used to distract attention from a signal failure to end the conflict: as Michèle Mercier points out, ‘western leaders found it easier to wave the flag of humanitarian assistance [than] to show real determination in making the belligerents respect their international commitments’.59 For the NGOs, a complicity with that ‘flag waving’ in Bosnia and an operational dependency on international troops in Kosovo meant that relief workers often appeared not ‘as impartial humanitarians but as if [they] were a part of NATO.’60 The dilemmas of the period are addressed at length in Larry Hollingworth’s memoirs of two years’ service with the UNHCR. Based in central Bosnia, Hollingworth was initially employed to oversee the airlift of aid to Sarajevo and later, as Chief of Operations, to organise convoys of food and medicine to the besieged ‘Muslim’ enclaves of Žepa, Maglaj, Goražde and Srebrenica. At the start of the text, the author is candid about his love of adventure, which had been nurtured in childhood by the stories ‘of exotic places, of ports, and harbours and seas and continents’ told to him by his father and grandfather, a soldier and merchant seaman respectively.61 After thirty years in the army, Hollingworth turns to relief work for ‘travel and fun and a challenge’ and spends most of his time in Bosnia ‘look[ing] forward to my part in the action’.62 As befitting the rules of masculinist adventure, he soon establishes himself as a key component in a broad network of power. This ranges from the political leaders in London and New York, through the higher military command of UNPROFOR to his team of local staff, whom he refers to as ‘[m]y Bosnians’ (p. 23). In his work directing food and medical aid, he also gains a remarkable level of influence over the lives of trapped civilian communities. This is illustrated when Hollingworth’s team takes a convoy into the town of Goražde, the largest of three enclaves in eastern Bosnia that Serbian forces, besieging them with mortar shells and multi-barrelled rockets, has been unable to conquer. After gaining

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authorisation from the Serbian military to spend one day in the town, the convoy is keen to pass the frontline checkpoints and enter the town as quickly as possible. Upon arrival, Hollingworth feels ‘a mixture of achievement, expectation and joy’ (‘God, we were so excited!’), but is deflated when the mayor, instead of offering ‘some thanks and some praise’, berates him for bringing a quantity of food barely adequate for one meal for a fraction of the townsfolk (pp. 44, 46, 44). His mood worsens when he finds that the workgroup of Bosniaks tasked with unloading the aid from the trucks is behind schedule: I started to get angry. ‘I want this truck unloaded now. I’ll give you thirty minutes to do it or I’ll take it back.’ I felt guilty because the men were as thin as rakes [...], but I had an obligation to my convoy. We had told the Serbs we would be out before dark. The road we had come along was bad enough by day. To negotiate it by night would be reckless. Besides, by now it might be mined. The locals were not interested in my problems, they proceeded at a very slow pace. I was not prepared to compromise nor was I about to take any of the food back as I had threatened. ‘Right. We will dump the sacks straight on to the floor. This will make life more difficult for you. Instead of them going straight on to your shoulders, you will have to pick them up.’ (p. 47)

These peremptory threats to take food away from starving people are hardly compatible with the UNHCR’s ‘“Hearts and Minds” programme’ (p. 24). At the same time, the final decision to make the task physically more difficult for the men denotes a sort of corporal punishment for disobedience. A similar scene occurs in Srebrenica when Hollingworth’s convoy has been given permission to evacuate around a hundred sick and wounded residents. On the day of departure, many other civilians attempt to board the trucks in order to escape the enclave and an infuriated Hollingworth ‘began to throw people off, [...] grabbing them by their limbs, their hair, and pushing them out’ (p. 211). The contempt shown towards local people is supported by the strand of denigratory representation that runs through the text. This includes the pejorative usage of regional typonyms (‘Balkan intrigue’, ‘Bosnian truths’), the designation of wartime realities as ‘opéra bouffe’ and the obsessive idea that ‘cannibalism’ is taking place in Muslim enclaves.63 While Hollingworth is under no illusion about Serbian culpability in the war, much of the balkanist cliché is directed at the Muslim population, particularly at officials,

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politicians and journalists, whose ongoing criticism of UN assistance he finds naive and exasperating. As in the writings of Pearson, Stobart and Berry, his portrait of the local population contrasts to that of western personnel, who are not only trustworthy, efficient and mature, but also allotted romantic imagery – a ‘film-star-handsome man’, ‘an aristocratic adventurer’, ‘a Boy’s Own image of a pilot’ – that heightens the mood of boyish adventure (pp. 12, 24, 9). The selfvalorisation climaxes when John Major, then prime minister, makes a flying visit to the headquarters of the British UN contingent in Split. This was the head of a government, it should be remembered, whose inflexible policy of non-intervention in the face of Serbian aggression provoked Margaret Thatcher to accuse the foreign secretary of ‘mak[ing] Neville Chamberlain look like a warmonger’.64 Nevertheless, upon meeting Major, an awestruck Hollingworth can only commend his ‘support to the humanitarian effort’ as a ‘proud’ gesture by the nation (p. 346). The interesting feature of the memoir, however, when considering it alongside humanitarian literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is its constant emphasis on professional quandaries. Far from concealing any crises of conscience, Hollingworth acknowledges the deficiencies both of the general humanitarian response to the war in Bosnia and of his own participation in that response, as his statement of guilt during the unloading at Goražde begins to indicate. On the frequent occasions he is reminded by local authorities that the Security Council has mandated UN assistance, allocating ‘the task of co-ordinating humanitarian aid to UNHCR and the task of supporting UNHCR to UNPROFOR’, he is unable to explain why, when these organisations ‘had access to unlimited resources’, its supply of basic medicines and surgical equipment is inadequate and its supply of food is way below the WHO’s suggested minimum (pp. 297, 113). ‘Our presence implied a commitment,’ he admits: ‘one we were unable to fulfil’.65 The selfcensure continues when Hollingworth touches upon the UNHCR’s commitment to the policies of neutrality, impartiality and independence. Its equal distribution of humanitarian aid amongst the ‘warring factions’ results in the Serbian besiegers of Sarajevo (Žepa, Goražde, Srebrenica) receiving equivalent consignments of food, petrol and medicine to those of the besieged, despite their atrocities against civilians being judged illegal by international law and despite

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their access to supply routes from Belgrade and to agricultural land ‘untouched by war’ (p. 40). Although Hollingworth fails to mention it, the injustice was compounded by the arms embargo placed on the whole of Yugoslavia by a Security Council resolution in 1991, which put the future Bosnian government, the only side to lack weapons, at a tragic disadvantage.66 The international community’s aggravation of regional inequalities is evidenced by Hollingworth’s descriptions of UNHCR convoys being delayed, blocked and redirected by the Serbian militias in control of the land routes, not to mention the UNHCR’s need to subserviently seek their approval for each delivery. ‘We were the most powerful organisation in the world’, he writes, ‘and yet we allowed ourselves to operate under conditions imposed by madmen and bandits’.67 The relationship that developed between the international community and the Serbian authorities appeared more like collaboration than neutral humanitarianism. It is not only the case that the thousands of tonnes of aid delivered to the Serbians contributed to the war coffers of the belligerents, an example of how western ‘relief supplies became the center of a new regional economy’, but also that the West’s negotiations with Serbian political leaders and military officers in eastern Bosnia worked to legitimise their faction and ‘reinforced the authority of the faction over that territory’.68 It is with bitter irony that Hollingworth refers to one formal agreement on movement made with a Serbian general as ‘another document for my “Neville Chamberlain” file’ (p. 235). The most overt form of complicity, however, was the way in which the West’s humanitarian operations suggested sympathy for the victims of Serbian and Croatian expansionism while allowing that expansionism to proceed unchecked. For Susan Woodward, the process of ‘[c]hanneling moral concerns into humanitarian relief while refusing to confront the political causes of the conflict [...] was creating more war, more casualties, and more need for humanitarian assistance’.69 There is certainly evidence in Hollingworth’s text that much of the UNHCR’s relief effort was conducted with an eye to attracting positive media attention for the organisation. Despite the meagre quantities of food that his convoys deliver to the enclaves (after ten months of siege, Žepa receives only 80 tonnes of flour for 29,000 people), their presence in the besieged towns always seems to be well covered by British journalists, whose reports no doubt promulgated suitable

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images of western benevolence. During the arrangements for the evacuation from Srebrenica, Hollingworth vetoes the inclusion of the ‘most urgent’ patients as he believes that any deaths on the journey ‘“will be bad publicity for the evacuation”’ (p. 208), by which he means the wrong kind of publicity for western humanitarianism. There are moments in the memoir which actually acknowledge that UNHCR activity has furthered Serbian military aims. For example, he is aware that evacuating injured people from Srebrenica facilitates ethnic cleansing and also senses that their convoys into the Muslim enclaves assist Serbian forces by obliging the Muslim defenders to clear the entry routes of obstacles, tank-traps and land mines.70 ‘We were doing this all wrong’, the author concedes, ‘but I did not know which way was all right’ (p. 163). These expressions of failure, however, never tip over into censure of his government’s policy of non-intervention. He mocks the US’s brief flirtation with military solutions – ‘Clinton’s answer to everything was, “Lift the arms embargo”’ – and during one televised discussion he publicly distances himself from Paddy Ashdown’s castigation of Serbian atrocities, as Ashdown’s ‘views [...] were not the UN’s, nor UNHCR’s, and in parts not mine’ (pp. 163, 31). This brief survey of Hollingworth’s memoir has not mentioned the full range of extraordinary dilemmas that the author faced during his service. His extensive admission of remorse, exemplified by his distraught response to news that children in Srebrenica have been killed by a shell whilst playing with a ball that he has donated, seems to indicate a fundamentally decent man undermined by an impossible brief.71 Certainly, his reflective approach to professional practice distinguishes him from other relief workers in the post-Cold War Balkans, who appear unaware of the humanitarian truism ‘that choosing a course of action that is guaranteed to be [...] free of negative repercussions is an impossible assignment’.72 Sally Becker’s The Angel of Mostar (1994), detailing her evacuations of injured children from Bosnia, is marked by superciliousness, by contempt of other charity workers and by mistrust of the UN forces who facilitate her missions into East Mostar.73 This kind of self-commendation is not unusual for a humanitarian literature which, in many instances, functions as publicity material for charitable corporations competing for market share. Although the authors of the Albanian Evangelical Mission’s account of their outreach work announce at the start that

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they have no intention of presenting the ‘naive, triumphalist narrative’ typical of charity documents, this is largely what their account of missionary work does before concluding with a call for new volunteers.74 It is paradoxical that a literature which encourages support from readers should be so demeaning of the populations for whom that support is sought. In her record of work in Romanian orphanages, Beverly Peberdy distances herself from British aid workers whose treatment of local staff recalls the way ‘the British behaved in Victorian times when they went out to the colonies, convinced that the natives were inferior’.75 Nonetheless, her own criticisms of the ‘natives’ lead to a number of confrontations, including a scene in which Peberdy yells at a Romanian care assistant, ‘“You are not going to heaven. You will go to hell for this!”’76 In a second memoir of Romanian aid work, a member of a British convoy entering the country, when asked by an obstructive border guard who is in charge, ‘stuck his finger in the air and said, “GOD of course mate”’.77 The arrogance of humanitarians is best dramatised by the convoy work of a British charity called Task Force Albania. As described in Bill Hamilton’s Albania Who Cares? (1992), the charity is the brainchild of John van Weenen, a karate instructor and evangelical Christian, whose distress at media reports about the country’s poverty motivates him to collect 740 tonnes of donated food, clothing and medicine. Shortly after the charity’s twenty 39-ton trucks enter Albania, they stop at the roadside to consult maps, only to find a gang rush out at the convoy and raid its contents: Van Weenen, fearing the worst, ordered his men into the cabs to remove the baseball bats they’d brought along just in case the locals fancied a sporting challenge somewhere along the way. Together, they charged down the road wielding their bats in anger. The ploy worked. Wondering what might come next, the raiders disappeared just as quickly as they had come.78

If this is Christian humanitarianism, it is a muscular Christianity born of nineteenth-century imperialism, and offers support for Hugo Slim’s contention that relief agencies can become ‘bystanders and colluders in the violence in which they operate’.79 Indeed, after the convoy reaches its destination, van Weeden summons the protection of the local authorities and, when more looters arrive, ‘the police smashed their hands with truncheons and the butts of their rifles’.80 The desire

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expressed by Hamilton, another evangelical Christian, for Albania to experience the ‘spiritual cleansing’ necessary for developing a life based on ‘dignity and [...] human rights’ is unlikely to be fulfilled through such aggression.81 It is particularly distressing that the literature of humanitarianism, with its grounding in abstract, universalist ideals, has failed to breach the circularity of balkanist representation. As inviolable as the discourse appears, however, one must assume that a conceptual framework that has proved susceptible to paradigm shifts in the past has the capacity to do so again. There may in fact be evidence that such a shift is occurring in the travel writing published after 11 September 2001. The US announcement of a new threat to western civilisation, via its commencement of the ‘war on terror’, came only a few months after the arrest of Milošević, an event that the western media, in its celebratory coverage, appeared to view as a welcome termination of its engagement with south-east Europe. In Another Fool in the Balkans (2006), Tony White records that in late 2001 a number of people in Croatia talked about how the Serbians were ‘relieved that the finger of international blame was no longer pointing at them after “9/11”; relieved to no longer be the universal bad guy’.82 Although White suggests that the Serbians had said no such thing, but rather that the Croatians made it up to further malign their former compatriots, the passage usefully introduces the kind of temporal fashions found within British imaginative geography. Tony Wheeler’s Bad Lands (2007), advertised as the record of ‘a tourist on the axis of evil’, only includes one Balkan country and this is merely because of its historical notoriety. Albania, Wheeler admits, is not ‘a Bad Land at all anymore’, and since the horrors of the Hoxha era it has become ‘a reformed nation, simply waiting for the outside world to realise all those image problems are part of the distant past’.83 His comment that these ‘image problems’ are ‘10 years out of date at least’ evokes traditionalist balkanism as a kind of fad, one that has been surpassed by more modish sources of alterity: namely, the Middle Eastern countries which comprise the rest of Wheeler’s book.84 Alongside this shift in discursive fashions, there is evidence that the academic deconstruction of balkanist discourse is beginning to seep into the work of travel writers. The bibliography of Dervla Murphy’s Through the Embers of Chaos (2002) includes Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania (1998) and Dubravka Ugrešić’s

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The Culture of Lies (1995), the latter author an especially powerful opponent of western supremacist attitudes towards south-east Europe.85 It is perhaps the influence of such egalitarian scholarship which encourages Murphy to end her travel narrative by citing voices from the region itself, including a Croatian-Serb man who asserts, in the face of western binarism, that ‘“[t]here’s nothing different about the Balkans”’.86 Echoing Murphy, James Pettifer’s culturally sensitive account of his years as a reporter in the southern Balkans commits itself to understanding ‘the evolution and reporting [of] perceptions of Kosovo’ and the frequent mendacity of ‘governments and their “spin” machines’.87 Moreover, recent travelogues have not been as denigratory as those published during the 1990s. In an echo of interwar commentary, Will Myer opens his account of travels in Bulgaria and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia with the candid admission that he is ‘in love with the Balkans’.88 The ‘Foreword’ to Myer’s People of the Storm God (2005) discusses the commonality between Reagan’s ‘evil Empire’ and Bush’s ‘axis of evil’, and denounces all representational systems which promote ‘the clash of cultures, the defining of oneself in opposition to the ‘“other”’.89 It is far too early to suggest that a paradigm shift is taking place in balkanism or to gauge the full impact of 9/11 on cultural production, but this more self-reflexive practice can only be a positive step forward. A fresh approach by travel writers may in time help to circulate more positive images of the Balkans, but a wider change of heart is urgently needed. In the twenty years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a vast swathe of eastern Europe has succumbed to social and economic recession, with parts of a region once designated the ‘Second World’ sliding rapidly into what is still termed the ‘Third World’. The tragedy is not limited to the heavily publicised wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Russian republics, but extends to such unreported effects of post-communist collapse as begging, prostitution, homelessness and malnutrition. The western media’s partiality to dramatic crises reminds one of Tolstoy’s famous proclamation, ostensibly on the famine stricken regions of Russia, ‘that “crisis” is not crisis at all but only a small publicized shock within the general occurrence of extreme poverty’.90 Indeed, even the media’s coverage of military conflict has overlooked the fact that the real story of the region is not western participation, so often the focus

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of British journalistic and humanitarian writings, but the indigenous experience. Alex de Waal’s important recognition that ‘relief is generally merely a footnote to the story of how people survive famine’ can be extended to cover all forms of crisis.91 In south-east Europe, the extraordinary tale of how local people have endured as individuals and communities is only fully told in the memoirs of regional authors. Along with the insights these authors offer into Balkan ‘meta-images’, their reports of the dignity and courage shown in the face of suffering have plenty to teach members of the more affluent democracies.92 Similarly, their first-hand coverage of the popular uprisings against authoritarian governments in the late 1980s, one of the most significant moments in twentieth-century European history, demonstrates to politically sceptical western publics the dramatic potential of collective action. Yet the lessons which can be learnt from the greater flow of information between East and West in the postCold War era are being lost. Instead, the West has preferred to dismiss south-east Europe as an inferior, unedifying periphery in need of western management.

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NOTES 1

Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 244. 2 Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, ‘Humanitarianism: A Brief History of the Present’, in Barnett and Weiss, eds, Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 31, 33. 3 Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), pp. 71, 47. 4 William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 4, 5. For Tony Vaux, humanitarianism is ‘beset by a constant sense of failure’ and ‘aid itself is not so much a solution as a symbol’ (Vaux, The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War (London and Sterling: Earthscan Publications, 2001), pp. 172, 170). 5 Tony Vaux, ‘Humanitarian Trends and Dilemmas’, in Deborah Eade and Vaux, eds, Development and Humanitarianism: Practical Issues (Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, 2007), p. 8. 6 The publication of Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace (1992), which outlined a new policy of intensified military humanitarianism, marked a revolution in UN ‘peacekeeping’. Between 1992 and 1994 the number of UN peacekeepers in deployment around the world rose from 12,000 to 79,948 and peacekeeping operations became characterised by a more aggressive use of force (see Hugo Slim, ‘Military Humanitarianism and the New Peacekeeping: An Agenda for Peace?’, http://www.jha.ac/articles/a003.htm (accessed 5 July 2008)). 7 Baehr, ‘“Humanitarian Intervention”: A Misnomer?’, in Michael C. Davis, et al., eds, International Intervention in the Post-Cold War World: Moral Responsibility and Power Politics (Armonk and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), p. 34. 8 It is interesting to note that, despite the term ‘humanitarian’ being in common usage amongst global institutions, the concept remains imprecise in usage, with the US government, the UN and the International Court of Justice all failing establish a clear definition. See Larry Minear and Thomas G. Weiss, Mercy under Fire: War and the Global Humanitarian Community (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 18-20. 9 Rieff, Bed for the Night, p. 61. He is reminded by US involvement in Iraq of Cecil Rhodes’s infamous claim that ‘Colonialism is philanthropy plus five percent’ (ibid., p. 60). 10 Easterly, White Man’s Burden, p. 23. Easterly takes his title from Kipling’s famous exhortation to the United States: ‘Take up the White Man’s Burden – / The savage wars of peace – / Fill full the mouth of Famine / And bid the sickness cease’ (Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, in Kipling, Selected Verse, ed. by James Cochrane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 128, lines 17-20). 11 Pupavac, ‘The Politics of Emergency and the Demise of the Developing State: Problems for Humanitarian Advocacy’, in Eade and Vaux, eds, Development and Humanitarianism, pp. 40, 27. Expanding on the point, Peter Shiras argues that ‘the relief community has contributed to a growing body of doctrine and precedent challenging the notion that intervention in the internal affairs of a state violates international law when it is carried out to save lives of those put at risk by the [...] host government’ (Shiras, ‘Big Problems, Small Print: A Guide to the Complexity of

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Humanitarian Emergencies and the Media’, in Robert I. Rotberg and Thomas G. Weiss, eds, From Massacres to Genocide: The Media, Public Policy, and Humanitarian Crises (Washington: The Brookings Institution; Cambridge: The World Peace Foundation, 1996), p. 96). 12 See James Gow, ‘Nervous Bunnies: The International Community and the Yugoslav War of Dissolution’, in Lawrence Freedman, ed., Military Intervention in European Conflicts (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 17. 13 Terry, Condemned to Repeat, p. 2. 14 Scherman, ‘Foreword’ to Laird Archer, Balkan Journal (New York: W.W. Norton, 1944), p. 9. 15 Strangford, Report on the Bulgarian Peasant Relief Fund, with a Statement of Distribution and Expenditure (London: Hardwicke and Bogue, 1877), p. 9. 16 Glenny, Balkans, p. 109. 17 Anderson, Balkan Volunteers, pp. 9-10. 18 Ibid., p. 9. 19 Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: The Free Press, 1997), p. 256. 20 Pearson and McLaughlin, Service in Servia, p. 347. 21 Ibid., pp. 13, 15, 15, 15-16. Furthering its political engagement, the text typifies nineteenth-century travel writing’s interest in the expansion of British trade in the region, stating at one point that Serbia’s ‘resources [are] capable of enormous development; foreign energy and capital would aid in this’ (ibid., p. 26). 22 Mary Anderson comments on the detrimental effects of such disempowerment: ‘When people who are accustomed to hard work suddenly find their daily tasks taken from them, they are physically drained and mentally depressed’ (Anderson, ‘Development and the Prevention of Humanitarian Emergencies’, in Thomas G. Weiss and Larry Minear, eds, Humanitarianism across Borders: Sustaining Civilians in Times of War (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), p. 32). 23 Pearson and McLaughlin, Service in Servia, pp. 178-9. Their mastery is symbolised in the way that any patient who needs to be transferred for treatment to a hospital in the capital ‘had a ticket pinned to him, “English Hospital, Belgrade”’, and that ‘others made signs that they, too, wished to be labelled “English”’ (ibid., p. 284). 24 Ibid., pp. 179, 181. The imperialistic bent of the text is enhanced by the flavour of expedition that the authors bring to their Balkan sojourn: see, ibid., pp. 38, 39, 272. 25 Vaux, Selfish Altruist, p. 91. 26 Pearson and McLaughlin, Service in Servia, pp. 92-3. ‘[I]t is a well-known fact’, she concludes cynically, ‘that an object of charity, to be intensely interesting, should be at a great distance [from home], and if on the verge of civilisation so much the better’ (ibid., p. 93). 27 Barnett and Weiss, ‘Humanitarianism’, p. 22. 28 Krippner, Quality of Mercy, p. 212. 29 Walshe, Serbs in Macedonia, pp. 102, 97, 101, 103. 30 Maren, Road to Hell, p. 7. 31 Stobart, Flaming Sword, pp. 16, 115. As another British volunteer comments, ‘one has to realize that, at a Military Hospital under the control of the Serbian Military Medical Authorities, we shall have to do not what we like, but what we are told’ (Davies, Farmer in Serbia, p. 106).

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Dearmer, Letters from a Field Hospital, pp. 172, 112, 110. Davies, Farmer in Serbia, p. 37. Monica Stanley’s warning to a group of lazy Austrian prisoners, ‘“No work, therefore no food”’, exemplifies Terry’s insight that aid is often misused as a ‘tool of control; reducing or withholding food and other rations pressures refugees to conform to the wishes of the aid distributors’ (Stanley, My Diary in Serbia, p. 110; Terry, Condemned to Repeat, p. 50). 34 Donald C. Norris, ‘Impressions of the Scout’, in James Berry, et al., The Story of a Red Cross Unit in Serbia (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1916), p. 64; Berry, ‘Mercury and Athene’, in Berry, et al., Red Cross Unit, pp. 110, 110, 110. 35 Berry, ‘Vrnjatchka Banja: Preparation of Hospitals’, in Berry et al., Red Cross Unit, pp. 28, 29. This kind of self-commendation or self-publicity was common in humanitarian memoirs of the period: see also Berry, ‘Mercury and Athene’, p. 115, and Stobart, Flaming Sword, p. 323. 36 Berry, ‘February, 1915’, in Berry, et al., Red Cross Unit, p. 50; A. Helen Boyle, ‘The Out-Patients’, in Berry, et al., Red Cross Unit, p. 142; F. May Dickinson Berry, ‘Austrian Prisoners’, in Berry, et al., Red Cross Unit, p. 83. 37 Berry, ‘Austrian Prisoners’, pp. 84, 94, 94. 38 Berry, ‘Mercury and Athene’, p. 110. 39 Ibid., pp. 103-4. 40 Berry, ‘Austrian Prisoners’, p. 87; W. Lyon Blease, ‘The Serb People As We Found Them’, in Berry, et al., Red Cross Unit, pp. 118, 129, 135; W. Lyon Blease, ‘The Escape of the Three’, in Berry, et al., Red Cross Unit, p. 225. As Blease concludes, ‘Western civilisation is with many Serbs still no more than skin-deep’ (Blease, ‘Serb People’, p. 129). 41 Berry, ‘Mercury and Athene’, p. 113; Anderson, ‘Development and the Prevention of Humanitarian Emergencies’, p. 30; J.L. Hammond, ‘Foreword’ to Wilson, Margins of Chaos, p. iii. As Anthony Lang also comments, the paternalist tendencies of humanitarianism ‘often derive from intellectual discourses that construct the target peoples as helpless and pliant’ (Lang, Agency and Ethics: The Politics of Military Intervention (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 198). 42 Matthews, Experiences, pp. 68, 68, 42, 68, 114, 119, 77. Like Pearson and McLaughlin, Matthews evokes the native Serbian population as a source of threat in a manner that echoes imperial discourse (ibid., pp. 73, 112, 124-5). 43 Paget, With Our Serbian Allies, p. 68. 44 Davies, Farmer in Serbia, p. 204. 45 Ibid., p. 176; Anon, ‘A Note upon Norris by Another Member of the Unit’, in Berry, et al., Red Cross Unit, p. 80. Berry’s team blames the disappearance on the Austrians military: ‘Those who appropriated the whole of Serbia can hardly complain if a few trifling excesses of zeal [...] are also laid to their charge’ (Anon, ‘Note upon Norris, p. 80). 46 Askew and Askew, The Stricken Land: Serbia As We Saw It (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1916), p. 177. 47 See Stobart, Miracles and Adventures, pp. 108, 109, 127. 48 See Jan and Cora Gordon, Two Vagabonds in Serbia and Montenegro, new edn (1916; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), pp. 59-60, and Matthews, Experiences, p. 88. This contradicts Terry’s claim that ‘[i]t is not the humanitarian actors who pull triggers or launch grenades’ (Terry, Condemned to Repeat, p. 245). 33

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Matthews, Experiences, p. 131. Askew and Askew, Stricken Land, p. 214; Davies, Farmer in Serbia, p. 201. This partisanship continued in the Second World War. Laird Archer, the Greek representative of the Near East Foundation, an American charity conducting agricultural and public-health projects in the southern Balkans, states that the foundation has ‘no ulterior political or trade motives’, yet also discloses that its work helps to ‘relieve the country of dependence’ on Italian products, as well as creating a ‘rallying point for patriotic Albanians’ against fascist Italy’s imperialistic designs on the country (Scherman, ‘Foreword’, p. 8; Archer, Balkan Journal, pp. 67, 91). 51 Davies, Farmer in Serbia, p. 80. 52 Stobart, Miracles and Adventures, p. 126. This is an early instance of what would become known as the ‘CNN effect’: see Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention (London and New York: Rouledge, 2002), p. 2. 53 Blease, ‘Sanitation and Side Shows’, in Berry, et al., Red Cross Unit, p. 149. 54 Ibid., pp. 150, 154. 55 Ibid., p. 155; Easterly, White Man’s Burden, p. 23. The pomposity and arrogance of western humanitarianism is also seen in Matthews’s assertion, ‘“I work for humanity”’, and in the Askews’ claim to ‘voice Serbia’ in their memoir of service (Matthews, Experiences, p. 18; Askew and Askew, Stricken Land, p. 16). 56 James D. Fearon, ‘The Rise of Emergency Relief Aid’, in Barnett and Weiss, eds, Humanitarianism, p. 59. 57 Vaux, Selfist Altruist, pp. 209, 30. 58 John Vidal, quoted in ibid., p. 31. 59 Mercier, Crimes without Punishment: Humanitarian Action in Former Yugoslavia, new edn (1994; London: Pluto Press, 1995), p. 196. 60 Vaux, Selfish Altruist, p. 27. 61 Hollingworth, Merry Christmas, Mr Larry (London: Heinemann, 1996), p. 2. 62 Ibid., pp. 4, 8. Among many other examples is his comment that ‘[n]o traveller ever approached Samarkand, no explorer ever entered Timbuctoo, with any less excitement than I entered Maglaj’ (ibid., p. 280). 63 Ibid., pp. 68, 22, 85, 169. His comments recall Durham’s oft-expressed notion that ‘the opéra-bouffe of the Balkans is written in blood’ and her claim that ‘ritual cannibalism’ had been reported in parts of Yugoslavia from the fifteenth to the twentieth century (Durham, Twenty Years of the Balkan Tangle, p. 12; Durham, Some Tribal Origins, p. 161). 64 Simms, Unfinest Hour, p. 50. 65 Hollingworth, Merry Christmas, p. 11. This sense of inadequacy is encapsulated in his comment that international personnel are merely ‘tourists in their hell’, at all times protected by ‘good clothing, good boots [...] and a ticket home’ (ibid., p. 203). 66 See Oliver Ramsbotham and Tom Woodhouse, Humanitarian Intervention in Contemporary Conflict: A Reconceptualization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 172. 67 Hollingworth, Merry Christmas, p. 57. Despite this description of the Serbian military, he often considers the commanders that he meets to be ‘decent and [...] honourable’, and even admits to ‘enjoying’ Radovan Karadžić’s company and to finding Biljana Plavšić ‘charming’ (ibid., pp. 118, 29, 36). At the time of writing, the 50

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latter is serving an eleven-year sentence for war crimes and the former is standing trial for genocide, amongst other charges. 68 Maren, Road to Hell, p. 14; Terry, Condemned to Repeat, p. 44. 69 Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington: The Brookings Institute, 1995), p. 325. Barry Munslow and Christopher Brown also point out that ‘aid is becoming a major factor in the continuation of conflicts’ (Munslow and Brown, ‘Complex Emergencies: The Institutional Impasse’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1999), p. 221). Michael Ignatieff, aware that relief work has historically ‘helped to legitimize comprehensive disengagement by outside powers’, wonders whether in Bosnia ‘the attempt to deliver humanitarian relief convoys to civilians [...] did not, in the end, prolong the war’ (Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, new edn (1998; London: Vintage, 1999), pp. 159, 102). 70 See Hollingworth, Merry Christmas, pp. 213, 113-14. 71 See ibid., p. 215. 72 Thomas G. Weiss and Cindy Collins, Humanitarian Challenges and Intervention: World Politics and the Dilemmas of Help (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1996), p. 99. 73 Becker, The Angel of Mostar: One Woman’s Fight to Rescue Children in Bosnia (London: Hutchinson, 1994), p. 79. The behaviour of Becker and many of her contemporaries confirms Winston Churchill’s suspicion that ‘[t]here are men (sic) in the world who derive as stern an exultation from proximity to disaster and ruin, as others from success’ (Churchill, quoted in Maren, Road to Hell, p. 42). As Vaux also comments on aid workers, ‘[w]e can enjoy our power, and by implication the other person’s weakness’ (Vaux, Selfish Altruist, p. 114). 74 Albanian Evangelical Mission, Mission Albania: Ten Years of Vital Christian Work for the Albanian People (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 1996), p. 6. 75 Peberdy, Do Robins Cough?, new edn (1996; London: Orion, 1997), p. 62. 76 Ibid., p. 69. 77 Joan Simkins, Ceaucescu’s Children: The Amazing Story of One Woman’s Mission to Romanian Orphans (London: Marshall Pickering, 1998), p. 2. Sophie Thurnham, who also worked in Romanian orphanages, deploys a more humanist argument when claiming that her charity’s task is not only to install ‘Western methods of hygiene’, but also to fight ‘for the right of a small group of people to live as human beings’ (Thurnham, Sophie’s Journey, pp. 141, 4). Similarly, Una Pride believes that in her teaching work in the Bulgarian town of Preslav she ‘became a sort of missionary figure in the neighbourhood, spreading the currency of the English language’ and, through this, teaching ‘a thing or two about civility and helpfulness’ (Pride, What Do I Know about Bulgaria? (London: Minerva Press, 1995), pp. 35, 39). 78 Hamilton and Bhasker Solanki, Albania Who Cares?, 2nd edn (1992; Grantham: Autumn Park, 1993), pp. 120-1. 79 Slim, ‘Doing the Right Thing: Relief Agencies, Moral Dilemmas and Moral Responsibility in Political Emergencies and War’, Disasters, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1997), p. 245. 80 Hamilton and Solanki, Albania, p. 122. 81 Ibid., pp. 49, 122. The damage to an afflicted country that such arrogance can cause has led many theorists to encourage relief workers to adopt as the first principal of

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humanitarian work the Hippocratic oath of medicine: ‘First, do no harm’ (Mary B. Anderson, Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace – Or War (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), p. 3). 82 White, Another Fool in the Balkans: In the Footsteps of Rebecca West (London: Cadogan, 2006), p. 67. 83 Wheeler, Tony Wheeler’s Bad Lands (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 2007), pp. 9, 305. 84 Ibid., p. 55. 85 See, for example, Ugrešić, The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth, new edn (1995; London: Phoenix House, 1998), pp. 156-8, and Ugrešić, Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), p. 22. 86 Murphy, Through the Embers of Chaos: Balkan Journeys, new edn (2002; London: John Murray, 2003), p. 351. This is not to say that a deconstruction of western representation necessarily avoids political pitfalls. Ann-Eve Prentice criticises sympathetic reportage of the Muslim plight during the war in Bosnia in an attempt to exonerate Serbian forces (see Prentice, One Woman’s War, new edn (2000; London: Duckbacks, 2001), pp. 70, 92). 87 Pettifer, Kosova Express: A Journey in Wartime (London: Hurst and Co., 2005), p. ix. 88 Myer, People of the Storm God: Travels in Macedonia (Oxford: Signal Books, 2005), p. x. 89 Shaoni Myer, ‘Foreword’ to Myer, People of the Storm God, p. ix. 90 Tolstoy, paraphrased in Vaux, Selfish Altruist, p. 159. 91 de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Oxford and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 1. 92 Joep Leerssen defines this concept as the ‘image we have concerning the other’s image of ourselves’: see Leerssen, ‘A Question of Terminology 2: Meta-Image’, Imagological Newsletter, http://cf.hum.uva.nl/images/ news/current.html (accessed 23 June 2008). For example, a short list of memoirs by Bosnian authors may include Rezak Hukanović’s The Tenth Circle of Hell (1993), Zlatko Dizdarević’s Sarajevo (1993), Elma Softić’s Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights (1995), Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary (1993) and the letters collected in Anna Cataldi’s edited Letters from Sarajevo (1993).

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Remote Tribes. With Notes on the Ballads, Tales, and Classical Superstitions of the Modern Greeks, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1869). Trench, Sally, Fran’s War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999). Trevor, Roy, My Balkan Tour: An Account of Some Journeyings and Adventures in the Near East together with a Description and Historical Account of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dalmatia, Croatia and the Kingdom of Montenegro (London: John Lane The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane, 1911). ——, Montenegro: A Land of Warriors (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1913). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Tyndale, Walter, and Horatio F. Brown, Dalmatia (London: A. and C. Black, 1925). Ugrešić, Dubravka, The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth, new edn (1995; London: Phoenix House, 1998). ——, Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994). Upward, Allen, The East End of Europe: The Report of an Unofficial Mission to the European Provinces of Turkey on the Eve of the Revolution (London: John Murray, 1908). Vaka Brown, Demetra [Mrs Kenneth Brown], In the Shadow of Islam (London: Constable and Co.; Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911). Vaux, Tony, The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War (London and Sterling: Earthscan Publications, 2001). Vila, Pablo, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). Vivian, Herbert, Servia: The Poor Man’s Paradise (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897). ——, The Servian Tragedy: With Some Impressions of Macedonia (London: Grant Richards, 1904). von Martels, Zweder, ed., Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing (Leiden, New York and Köln: E.J. Brill, 1994). Vulliamy, Ed, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War (London: Simon and Schuster, 1994). Walker, Mary Adelaide, Through Macedonia to the Albanian Lakes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864). Walker, Martin, The Cold War and the Making of the Modern World, new edn (1993; London: Vintage, 1994). Walshe, Douglas, With the Serbs in Macedonia (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane Company, 1920). Ward, Philip, Albania: A Travel Guide (Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1985). Watt, Donald C., ‘British Military Perceptions of the Soviet Union as a Strategic Threat, 1945-1950’, in Josef Becker and Franz Knipping, eds, Power in Europe? Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany in a Postwar World, 1945-1950 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 325-36. Watt, Ian, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980). Waugh, Evelyn, Robbery under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson (London: Chapman and Hall, 1939).

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——, ‘Scott-King’s Modern Europe’, in Waugh, Work Suspended and Other Stories, new edn (1946; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 197-250. ——, Men at Arms, new edn (1952; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964). ——, Officers and Gentlemen, new edn (1955; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964). ——, Unconditional Surrender, new edn (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964). ——, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976). Weiss, Thomas G., and Cindy Collins, Humanitarian Challenges and Intervention: World Politics and the Dilemmas of Help (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1996). Weiss, Thomas G., and Larry Minear, eds, Humanitarianism across Borders: Sustaining Civilians in Times of War (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993). Welchman, John C., ed., Rethinking Borders (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996). West, Rebecca, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia, new edn (1941; Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993). ——, ‘The Cordite Makers’, in West, The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-1917, ed. by Jane Marcus (London: Virago, 1983), 380-3. ——, ‘Madame Sara’s Magic Crystal’, in West, The Only Poet and Short Stories (London: Virago Press, 1992), 167-78. Westad, Odd Arne, ed., Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2000). Wheeler, Tony, Tony Wheeler’s Bad Lands (Melbourne, Oakland and London: Lonely Planet Publications, 2007). Whelpton, Eric, Dalmatia (London: Robert Hale, 1954). White, Ethel Lane, The Lady Vanishes (The Wheel Spins), new edn (1936; London: Fontana Books, 1962). White, Tony, Another Fool in the Balkans: In the Footsteps of Rebecca West (London: Cadogan, 2006). Whittell, Giles, Lambada Country: A Ride across Eastern Europe (London: Chapmans, 1992). Williams, Eric, Dragoman Pass: An Adventure in the Balkans (London: Collins, 1959). Williams, Raymond, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961). Wilkinson, William, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: With Various Political Observations Relating to Them (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820). Wilson, Barbara, Trouble in Transylvania, new edn (1993; London: Virago Press, 1993). Wilson, Francesca M., Portraits and Sketches of Serbia (London: The Swarthmore Press, 1920). ——, In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and between Three Wars (London: John Murray, 1944). Wilson, Kevin, and Jan van der Dussen, eds, The History of the Idea of Europe, new edn (1993; Milton Keynes: Open University Press; London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

312

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Winchester, Simon, The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans (London: Viking, 1999). Wingfield, W.F., A Tour in Dalmatia, Albania, and Montenegro; With an Historical Sketch of the Republic of Ragusa, from the Earliest Times down to Its Final Fall (London: Richard Bentley, 1859). Winnifrith, T.J., Shattered Eagles, Balkan Fragments (London: Duckworth, 1995). Wintle, Michael, ed., Image into Identity: Constructing and Assigning Identity in a Culture of Modernity (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006). Wolfe, Peter, Rebecca West: Artist and Thinker (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971). Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilisation on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Woodward, Susan L., Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1995). Woodward, Will, ‘Romanians and Bulgarians Face Immigration Curbs’, Guardian, 21 August 2006, 10. Woods, H.C., Washed by Four Seas: An English Officer’s Travels in the Near East (London and Leipsic: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908). Wright, Alfred, Adventures in Servia; Or the Experiences of a Medical Free Lance among the Bashi-Bazouks, Etc. (London: W. Swan Sonnenschein, 1884). Wykes, David, Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life (Basingstoke and London: Routledge, 1999). Wyon, Reginald, and Gerald Prance, The Land of the Black Mountain: The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro, new edn (1903; London: Methuen, 1905). Yeğenoğlu, Meyda, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Youngs, Tim, ed., Writing and Race (London and New York: Longman, 1997). Yovitchitch, Lena A., Pages from Here and There in Serbia (Belgrade: S.B. Cvijanovich, 1926). ——, Yugoslavia (London: A. and C. Black, 1928). ——, Within Closed Frontiers, 2nd edn (1956; London and Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1956). Zielonka, Jan, ed., Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Žižek, Slavoj, ‘You May!’, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/ print/zize01_.html (accessed 19 September 2007).

Index Aachen Programme 5 Adie, Kate 166 Afghanistan 81, 257 Africa 7, 8, 11, 43, 56, 60, 72, 95, 110, 135, 136, 160, 164, 175, 256, 271 Agenda 2000, 101 Albania 6, 10, 29, 30-1, 34-5, 52-4, 60, 69-70, 79, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 125, 129, 130, 133-6, 148, 151, 154, 155, 159, 173, 1759, 183, 186, 189, 193, 201, 217, 218, 220, 222, 234, 242, 277-8, 278 Albanian Evangelical Mission 276-7 Aleksandar I, King of Yugoslavia 161 Aleksandar I, King of Serbia 210 Alexander, Nora 183 Alexander, Ruth 76 Ali Paşa 69-70, 201 Allcock, John 44, 146 Ambler, Eric 215, 221-2, 243 Amery, Julian 185 Amsterdam Treaty 102 Anderson, Dorothy 261 Anglo-Serbian Hospital Unit 268-9, 271 Annan, Kofi 109 Ansted, D.T. 9 Appleby, John 221 Arata, Stephen 74 Armenia 26 Arnold, Matthew 175 Ash, William, 190 Ashdown, Paddy 276 Ashley, Bob 204 Asia 11, 60, 149, 160, 164, 246, 256, 257 Askew, Alice and Claude 270 Austria (see also Austria-Hungary) 22, 23, 29, 58, 72, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 129, 152, 154, 156, 160, 161, 214, 218, 260, 267, 268, 268-9

Austria-Hungary 19, 99, 152, 205, 216 Aycliffe, Jonathan 81-2 Baehr, Peter 258 Bailey, Paul 87 Baker, Valentine 129-30 Bakhtin, Mikhail 146 Bakić-Hayden, Milica 44 Balibar, Etienne 113 balkanism 7, 8-11, 12, 13, 15, 43-6, 47-8, 51-2, 54-5, 56, 59, 59-60, 62, 67, 94, 120-1, 138, 158-9, 164, 173, 175, 191-2, 194, 201-2, 216, 260, 234-5, 248, 255, 278-80; deprecatory 7, 8, 9-15, 19, 25-7, 30-2, 33-6, 43-56, 58, 60-2, 69-87, 94-5, 98, 110-11, 121-2, 124-7, 131-7, 138, 148-9, 151-2, 157, 159, 162-6, 222-4, 235-48, 255, 261-5, 267-70, 273-4; complimentary 9, 10, 13-14, 28-9, 46-7, 51, 56, 77, 127-8, 137, 149-50, 153-7, 159, 161-3, 173-94, 201-22, 223-4, 261, 279; and power 7, 9, 12, 47, 56-8, 60, 61-2, 94-112, 121, 123, 129-32, 133, 137-8, 151, 153-4, 157-8, 1624, 166, 187-91, 204-6, 209-18, 234, 247-9, 267-8, 263-4, 268-9, 270, 272-3, 275-8 Balkans 6, 7, 43-4, 48, 59, 72, 95-6, 97-8, 99-100, 147, 180, 187, 235 Balkan Wars 10, 27, 51, 94, 127, 147, 153, 163, 215-6, 266, 270 Ball, Oona 183-4 Barker, Pat 82 Barkley, Henry 48, 60-1, 126, 130 Barnes, Julian 82, 87, 243-4 Barrie, J.M. 183 Bartkowski, Frances 120 Basque Country 93 Bassett, Richard 135

314

British Literature and the Balkans

Becker, Sally 276 Belarus 105 Belgium 178, 265 Belgrade 19, 22, 23, 162, 163, 164, 165, 185, 213, 216, 219, 223, 23940, 268, 270 Bell, Martin 33, 137 Bell, Michael 182 Benson, Theodora 159 Berger, Florence 70, 71 Bergson, Henri 161 Berisha, Sali 106, 134 Berlin 31, 213 Berlin Conference 99 Berlin Congress 97, 152 Berlin Wall 29-30, 31, 36, 81, 83, 87, 279 Berry, James 268-9, 270, 271, 274 Best, J.J. 59, 99 Bevan, Tom 206-9, 214, 221 Bhabha, Homi 5, 120 Bigo, Didier 105 Bishop-Bird, Isabella 145 Blissett, Nellie 210 Blunt, Fanny 25-6, 122-3, 124 Blunt, Wilfred 54 Boer Wars 147 Boner, Charles 70-1, 72 Borger, Julian 110 Boris III, King of Bulgaria 189 Bosnia 14, 27, 33, 55, 58, 78, 79, 96, 97, 99, 105, 107, 108-9, 110, 11112, 131, 136, 137, 148, 149, 151, 152, 156, 164-5, 222, 223, 257, 259, 260, 264, 271, 272-6, 276 Bosnian and Herzegovinian Fugitives and Orphans Relief Fund 147, 150 Boswell, James 68 Bracewell, Wendy 44 Bradbury, Malcolm 82-5, 86, 87, 2467, 248 Brân, Zoë, 111 Brantlinger, Patrick 74 Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich 84 Bridge, Ann 218-20 Britain 9, 10, 11, 12, 23, 43, 56, 57-8, 71-2, 74, 80, 94, 95-6, 101, 105, 107, 108-9, 149, 153, 157, 159-60,

166, 174, 205, 207, 209, 217, 223, 233-4, 237, 266 British Red Cross (see also International Red Cross) 147, 154, 261-2, 264-5, 268 Brittain, Vera 153 Brophy, Bridget 215 Brophy, Charles A. 98-9 Brown, H.A. 70, 125 Brown, Horatio 187 Brownjohn, Alan 81 Bryant, Marguerite 210-11 Buchan, John 212-14, 221 Bucharest 70, 71, 77, 78, 79, 80, 119, 122, 124, 214, 235-6 Bulgaria 6, 10, 25, 26-7, 32, 33, 48, 51, 60-1, 70, 76, 82, 83, 85, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 107, 108, 124, 126, 127-8, 130, 131, 133, 148-9, 154, 155, 157, 159, 183, 188-9, 190-1, 193, 206, 209-10, 213, 215, 220-1, 242, 242-3, 244, 260-1, 264, 267, 269 Bulgarian Peasant Relief Fund 147, 260 Burgess, Adam 94, 107 Burgess, Alan 218 Burke, Edmund 68 Burton, Richard 54 Bush, George W. 279 Buzard, James 122 Byron, Lord Gordon George 14, 69, 173, 174, 194, 201, 204 Byzantium 93 Canon of Lek 177 Cardinal, Agnès 152 Caribbean 160 Carol I, King of Romania 209 Carter, Angela 243, 244 Carter, James Earl 232 Carver, Robert 34-5, 110, 133-6, 137, 138 Cawelti, John 203, 206, 215 Ceauçescu, Nicolae 29, 31, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 189, 234 Chamberlain, Neville 274, 275 Chetniks 186, 241

Index China 21 Christie, Agatha 211 Churchill, Winston 100, 233, 239 Cinnirella, Marco 14 Circassia 23 Clinton, Bill 276 Cocker, Mark 175 Cold War 10, 11, 14, 29-31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 77, 84-5, 87, 93, 100, 106, 113, 166, 189, 190, 192, 193, 214, 215, 218, 221, 222, 231-48, 256, 257 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 174 communism 11, 15, 29, 30, 32, 35, 79, 80-1, 84, 93, 100, 101, 106, 189, 189-90, 191, 193-4, 210, 2134, 221, 231-4, 237-9, 239-41, 2423, 244-8, 255 Constantinople, see Istanbul Cook, Mark 112 Coulson, Anthony 37, 120 Creagh, James 48 Crimea 23 Crimean War 23-4, 94 Croatia 28, 76-7, 100, 108, 109, 112, 165-6, 183-4, 223, 237-9, 240-1, 260, 271, 275, 278 Crosse, Andrew 72, 125-6, 132, 137 Cusack, Dymphna 193 Cyprus 93, 101, 134 Cyrillic alphabet 152 Czech Republic 101, 103, 204 Daily Graphic 26 Daily News 261 Daily Telegraph 10 Dalmatia 97, 125, 130, 157, 183-4, 218-20, 260 David-Neel, Alexandra 145 Davies, Ellen Chivers 153, 156, 21617, 268, 270-1 Dayton Accord 107, 271 Dearmer, Mabel 153, 267-8 de Bernières, Louis 82, 223 Decadence 175, 177, 180, 181 Defoe, Daniel 202 de Waal, Alex 280 de Windt, Harry 58

315 di Giovanni, Janine 166 Disraeli, Benjamin 97 Dodge, David 221-2, 243 Drace-Francis, Alex 44, 77 Drayton, Ray 222 Dunkin, Robert [‘Snaffle’] 99, 125 Durham, Mary Edith 52-4, 55, 124, 176-8, 194 Durrell, Lawrence 239-41, 244, 247, 248 Dyserinck, Hugo 5, 6, 13 Easterly, William 258 Eastern Crisis 7, 13, 96-8, 147, 259 Eastern Question 95-6, 98, 110, 148, 205 Eastern War Sick and Wounded Relief Fund 147 Edmonds, Paul 178-9 Edwards, Lovett Fielding 76-7, 187, 193 Elgar, Edward William 137 Ellison, Grace 159, 187-8 Englishness 6, 13, 120-2, 123, 125, 126-37, 151, 157-8, 182-3, 204, 213, 241-2, 262-3, 247, 274 English Levant Company 97 Enlightenment 23, 35, 45, 68, 69, 132, 137, 174, 177 Eritrea 81 Estonia 101 Ethiopia 25, 81 Europe 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14-15, 19, 21-2, 24, 27-9, 32-3, 35, 36-7, 45, 47, 48, 49, 57, 60, 61, 70, 78, 85, 93, 100-1, 119-38, 159, 188-9, 212, 238; borders in 11, 12, 19, 21-5, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 35-6, 47, 48-9, 78, 79, 81, 85, 93-4, 99, 104-5, 223, 272 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 103 European Commission 102, 106 European Monetary Union 102 European Union 12, 19, 32-3, 35-6, 85, 94, 95, 100-7, 108, 109, 110, 113 Evans, Arthur 99, 131, 138, 150, 152

316

British Literature and the Balkans

Evans, Glynne 107 Evans, Jon 222 Fanon, Frantz 5 Farer, Tom J. 14 Ferdinand, King of Romania 119 Ferdinand, Tsar of Bulgaria 209 Fermor, Patrick Leigh 175, 180, 181, 186, 192, 205 Fesperman, Dan 223-4 fiction 5-6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 46, 67-8, 79, 175, 180, 201-24, 234-48, 255 Fielding, Henry 202 Fife-Cookson, J.C. 129-30 Finnemore, John 206, 217 First British Field Hospital 270 First World War 9, 10, 13, 27, 27-8, 46, 94, 97, 99, 128, 147, 152-8, 166, 175, 178, 188, 210, 214, 217, 218, 243, 244, 255, 265-71 Fleming, Ian 215 Fleming, K.E. 46 Footman, David 221 Forman, Archibald 180 Forwood, William 193 Foster, Shirley 151 Foucault, Michel 43, 146, 247 Fowler, Bridget 209 France 5, 26, 43, 56, 57, 80, 81, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 105, 110, 178, 219, 265 Franco-Prussian War 147, 264 Franklin, Caroline 173 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 27, 152, 218 Fraser, G.S. 241-2 French Revolution 187 Freud, Sigmund 182 Fry, C.B. 209 Frykman, Jonas 22 Fussell, Paul 178 Gadsby, John 23-5 Gardiner, Leslie 193 Gatrell, Simon 87 Geneva Conventions 256, 257 Gerard, Dorothea 210 Gerard, Emily 71, 72

Germany 5, 29-30, 31, 77, 79, 80-1, 93, 94, 98, 100, 105, 106, 110, 119, 156, 160, 166, 185, 186, 189, 209, 212, 213, 221, 234, 235, 237-8, 247 Gilpin, William 220 Gladstone, William 96, 148, 186, 213 Glasgow Herald 154 Glazebrook, Philip 134-5, 192 Glenny, Misha 78 Goldsworthy, Vesna 204, 211, 214, 278 Gordon, Jan and Cora 48-9, 57, 60, 187 gothicism 11, 12, 31-2, 67-87, 192, 205, 255 Graham, Stephen 201, 218 Graphic, The 147 Graves, Robert 123, 124, 125, 127, 138 Greece 27, 34, 101, 103, 108, 124-5, 134, 156, 177, 202, 207-8, 212-13, 215, 259 Green, Martin 210 Greene, Graham 185, 211 Grey, Anthony 242-3 Grier, Sydney C. [Hilda Gregg] 20910, 221 Guardian 110, 150 Guatemala 246 Haggerty, John 112, 135 Haiti 35 Hamilton, Bill 79 Harding, Georgina 32 Haskell, Arnold 190-1 Hayes, Claire W. 217 Helsinki Committee 104 Henderson, Heather 174 Herbert, W.V. 133 Herodotus 12 Herriot, Édouard 192 Herzegovina 58, 96, 97, 99, 148, 149, 157, 260 Higgins, John 31 Hindustan 35 Hitler, Adolf 100, 213 Hobhouse, James Cam 69-70 Hodgetts, E.A. Brayley 26

Index Hollingworth, Larry 272-6 Homer 53, 54, 185-6, 207, 218 Honecker, Erich 84 Hope, Anthony 204-5, 206, 209, 223 Hoppé, E.O. 179-80, 181, 186, 194 Horace 185 Horowitz, Goldie 77 Hoxha, Enver 29, 30, 83, 189, 234, 278 Hulme, Peter 165-6 Hulme-Beaman, Ardern 124 humanitarianism 11, 14, 107, 147, 150, 152, 153, 154, 157-8, 223, 255-80 Hungary 22, 31, 33, 84-5, 101, 105, 242 Hurd, Douglas, 108, 109 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 181 Ignatieff, Michael 110 imagology 5-6, 9, 13, 280 imperialism 5, 9, 11, 14, 23-4, 43, 45, 47, 55, 56-8, 60, 69, 71-2, 73, 94, 95-8, 99, 105, 110-11, 121-2, 134, 159, 160, 182, 185, 207-8, 234, 246, 255, 258, 263, 269 India 8, 11, 57, 72 Information Research Department 233, 242 International Committee of the Red Cross 257 International Republican Institute 107 International War Crimes Tribunal 109 Iran 81 Iraq 81, 257 Irby, Adeline Paulina 148-52, 156, 159, 162, 166, 191 Islam 8, 12, 43, 45, 93, 149, 151, 163, 183, 194, 213 Islam, Syed Manzurul 121 Istanbul 22-3, 25, 50, 57, 96, 215, 219 Istria 157 Italy 28, 84, 94, 100, 106, 160, 164, 220, 238 Ivie, Robert 246 James, Jeremy 33

317 JanMohamed, Abdul 120 Jelavich, Barbara 235 Johnson, Samuel 68 Johnson, Stowers 192, 193 Johnston, Priscilla 148 Jones, Lloyd 11 Kabbani, Rana 54 Kaldor, Mary 247, 248 Kaplan, Robert 110 Karadjordjević, Petar 210 Kennan, George 232, 235 Kennedy, David 11 Kennedy, John F. 232 Kent-Payne, Vaughan 109, 110 Khrushchev, Nikita 242 Kinglake, A.W. 19, 20, 34, 50-1, 54, 56, 58 Kingsley, Mary 145 Kipling, Rudyard 157 Konrad Adanauer Institute 106 Korea 246 Korte, Barbara 13 Kosovo 14, 33, 77, 106-7, 108, 110, 136, 137, 149, 163, 165, 259, 271, 272, 279 Kostova, Ludmilla 67 Kovačević, Nataša 14 Krippner, Monica 266 Kristeva, Julia 132 Labour Market Programme 103 Lambe, John Lawrence 210 Lane, Edward William 54 Latvia 101 Lawrence, D.H. 175 Lawrence, Starling 218 Lear, Edward 70, 125 Lebanon 81 Leerssen, Joep 9 Le Gallienne, Richard 180, 181 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 83, 240 Leslie, Henrietta 159, 183 Lewis, Matthew 68 Lewis, Reina 54 Lithuania 101 London Graphic 154 Longhurst, Derek 223

318

British Literature and the Balkans

Longinović, Tomislav 78 Loughborough, Margaret 159 Lowe, Lisa 146 Lowenthal, Leo 203-4 Loyd, Anthony 135 Macedonia 25, 33, 106, 107, 108, 124, 125, 130, 165, 193, 206-9, 217, 222, 259, 269, 279 Macfie, Robert 127-8, 138 MacKenzie, Andrew 190 Mackenzie, Georgina Muir 148-52, 156, 157, 159, 160, 166, 191 Maclean, Fitzroy, 185 Major, John 108, 274 Malory, Thomas 135 Malta 101 Manning, Olivia 77, 235-7, 239 Marie, Queen of Romania 119, 121, 137, 179-80, 209, 220 Matthews, Caroline 153, 156, 269 Mayall, James 107-8 McAnally, G.H. 210-11 McCarthyism 232 McFarlane, James 182-3 McLaughlin, Louisa 261-5, 268 Médecins sans Frontières 258, 259 Mercer, Wendy 145 Mercier, Michèle 272 Middle East 43, 45, 46, 49, 51-2, 56, 58, 59, 95, 106, 183, 213, 278 Miles, Robert 8 Miller, Elizabeth Cleveland 217, 220 Mills, Sara 146, 151, 166 Milošević, Slobodan 33, 107, 108, 109, 271, 278 modernism 11, 28, 67, 180, 181-2, 182-3, 184, 218 Modleski, Tania 208-9 Moldova 79, 105, 119, 205 Montagu, Mary Wortley 22, 35, 206 Montenegro 31, 53, 70, 76, 96, 97, 129, 130, 148, 149, 150, 187, 193, 194, 215, 217, 218, 261 Mooney, Bel 79-81, 87 Moore, Arthur 25, 130 Morgan, Peter 111 Morning Post 215

Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina 105 Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna 12 Murphy, Dervla 33, 278-9 Myer, Will 279 Napoleon Bonaparte 96, 97 Nash, F.O.H. 220-1 National Aid Society for the Sick and Wounded in War 147 National Association of Evangelicals 232 nationalism 5, 10, 14, 15, 27, 72, 94, 95-6, 156, 160, 173, 178, 187-9, 215-7, 218, 255 Neale, J.M. 9 Newby, Eric 31 Newman, Bernard 218 Nicaragua 246 Nicolson, Adam 29-30, 32 Nietzsche, Friedrich 161 Nightingale, Florence 148 Norris, David 44, 47, 58, 187, 201 North Atlantic Treaty Organization 107, 108, 259, 272 Northern Ireland 93 O’Brien, Patrick 122, 133 O’Connor 77-8, 193 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe 106, 111 orientalism 12, 22, 43-6, 47-8, 49, 512, 54, 56-7, 58-9, 61, 62, 69, 147, 164, 234-5, 236 Orient Express 211, 219, 221 Orwell, George 95 Osborne, John 6 O’Shea, Brendon 112 Ottoman Empire 12, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 44, 49, 50-1, 53, 57-8, 60, 69, 72, 94, 95-9, 109, 110, 1223, 129, 131, 148-9, 151-2, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 173, 188-9, 192, 194, 204, 206-9, 215-6, 260-1, 262, 264, 265 Ouditt, Sharon 162 Owen, David 109, 112 Oxfam International 259, 271 Ozanne, J.W. 70, 71, 126

Index Paget, Leila 154, 269 Palmerston, Lord 97 Pankhurst, Sylvia 153 Parkinson, Maude 122, 124 Partisans 186, 237-8 Patmore, Derek 180 Pavelić, Ante 166 Peacock, Wadham 129, 175, 175-6 Pearson, Emma 130, 261-5, 268, 274 Peberdy, Beverly 277 Pettifer, James 279 Pietz, William 234 Poe, Edgar Allen 76 Poland 101, 204 Porter, Dennis 21, 52 Portugal 101 Portway, Christopher 242 postcolonialism 21, 160 postmodernism 67, 243-4 Poyer, Joe 243 Pratt, Mary Louise 7 Prentice, Eve-Ann 166 Preston, Christopher 104 Pupavac, Vanessa 259 Pushkin, Aleksandr 161 Quinton, Ann 222 racism 5, 8, 14-15, 146, 224, 255, 271 Radcliffe, Ann 68 Radford, Jean 202 Rambouillet Agreement 108 Rayner, Louisa 185-6, 187 Reagan, Ronald 232, 234, 244, 279 Reed, John 27, 34 Reeve, Clara 202 Rennie, Neil 7, 173 revolutions of 1989 11, 78, 100, 133 Richardson, Samuel 202 Rieff, David 256, 258 Rimmer, David 31-2 Roberts, Cecil 211-2, 220 Rodinson, Maxime 49 Romania 6, 10, 24, 29, 31-2, 33, 50, 70-8, 79-81, 81-2, 84, 86-7, 96, 97, 98 100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108, 119, 122, 124, 125-6, 127, 133, 137, 159, 179-80, 181-2, 186, 189,

319 192, 193, 205, 209, 214-5, 218, 220, 222, 234, 235-7, 242, 243, 259, 277 Romanticism 10, 11, 14, 29, 46-7, 56, 67, 68-9, 69, 161-2, 173-94, 201, 202, 203, 211, 212, 216, 217, 218, 220, 255 Rose, Michael 109, 110 Russia 12, 23-5, 26-7, 29, 30, 31, 578, 85, 87, 94, 95-8, 100, 105, 110, 119, 210, 213, 214, 231-4, 235, 236-8, 239, 241, 243, 247, 257, 259, 261, 262, 264, 265, 279 Russia Committee 233, 242 Russian Red Cross 264 Russo-Ottoman War 94, 130, 133, 152 Rwanda 257 Said, Edward 5, 13, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 52, 56, 57, 59, 62, 120 Saki [H.H. Munro] 205-6, 215-6 Sandes, Flora 154-8, 159, 160, 162, 166, 192, 218, 267 Sarajevo 27, 77, 150, 152, 162, 164, 214, 218, 272, 274 Sava, George 188-9, 191 Schengen 101, 104, 105-6 Scherman, Harry 260 Schippers, Thomas 20 Scott, Walter 14, 201, 204, 210, 222 Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service 266 Scottish Women’s Unit 153, 269 Second World War 13, 29, 77, 100, 103, 147, 159, 161, 164, 166, 1845, 188, 189, 221, 234, 235, 237-9, 259 Selbourne, David 11, 78 Serbia 10, 19, 22-3, 27, 48, 50-1, 58, 70, 96, 97, 98 100, 105, 107, 108-9, 126, 130, 148, 149-50, 152, 153-8, 161, 163-6, 185-6, 191, 192, 210, 213, 215, 216-7, 217, 218, 221, 222, 239-41, 261-5, 266-71, 272-3, 274-6, 278 Serbian Relief Fund 147, 266, 269, 270

320

British Literature and the Balkans

Serbo-Ottoman War 127, 261 Seymour, Gerald 222-3 Shaw, George Bernard 161 Shaw, Tony 233 Sheldon, Sidney 243 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 174 Shohat, Ella 49, 54 Simmons, Dan 86 Simms, Brendon 108 Sinclair, May 153 Sitwell, Sacheverell 181-3 Skopje 25, 269 Slovakia 101 Slovenia 29, 101, 106, 271 Sofia 25, 123 Solanki, Bhasker 79 Somalia 81, 257, 271 South America 7, 25, 256-7 Soviet Union, see Russia Spain 101 Spaull, Hebe 217-18 Spectator 181 Spurr, David 52 Srebrenica 109 Sri Lanka 81 Stability and Growth Pact 102, 103 Stalin, Joseph 83, 100, 240, 242 Stanley, Monica 153 Starkie, Walter 77, 180 Stasi 29 Stavrianos, L.S. 57 St Clair, S.G.B. 98-9 Stevens, Robert Tyler 214, 215, 218 St John Ambulance Brigade 154 Stephanson, Anders 233 Stevenson, R.L. 183, 188 Stewart, Bob 112 Stillman, W.J. 99, 126 Stobart, Mabel St Clair 153, 266-7, 270, 271, 274 Stoker, Bram 31, 71-6, 77, 79, 82, 84, 86, 87 Strangford, Emily 129, 130-1, 138, 260 Sudan 81, 271 Sutherland, John 224 Switzerland 80, 84 Syria 19, 50-1

Task Force Albania 277-8 Tennyson, Alfred 135, 157, 194 Tennyson, Hallam 193-4 Terry, Fiona 259-60 Thatcher, Margaret 234, 274 Thessalonika 26, 123, 124, 207, 211 Thornton, Philip 77, 183-4 Thurnham, Sophie 78 Tito, Josip Broz 193-4, 237, 240 Todorova, Maria 45-6, 46-7, 51, 52, 56 Tolstoy, Leo 279 Tornquist, David 190 Tozer, Henry 60 travel writing (see also women’s travel writing) 7, 8, 12, 13, 22, 46, 51, 52, 68-9, 72, 79, 121-2, 132, 159, 174-5, 192, 201, 218, 219, 255 Transylvania 70, 71, 72, 76, 77, 84, 86, 87, 181, 192 Treaty of San Stefano 97 Trench, Sally 82 Trevor, Roy 27, 217 Truman Doctrine 232 Turkey 19, 32, 81, 105, 164, 213, 242, 270 Ugrešić, Dubravka 278-9 Ukraine 105 United Nations 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 136, 223, 272, 274, 276 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 104, 110, 259, 272-6 United Nations Protection Force 111, 112, 272, 274 United States 10, 34, 35, 43, 85-6, 103, 106, 107, 231-4, 234-5, 244, 246, 257, 276, 278 United States Agency for International Development 266 van Gennep, Arnold 21 van Weenen, John 277-8 Vance, Cyrus 112 Vance-Owen Peace Plan 112, 113 Vaux, Tony 271 Victoria, Queen 25, 119, 124 Vienna 22

Index Vietnam 246 Vila, Pablo 20 Vinaver, Stanislav 164 Virgil 185 Vivian, Herbert 130 Vlad Ţepeş 78, 84, 86 Vulliamy, Ed 78 Walker, Mary Adelaide 124 Walpole, Horace 68 ‘war on terror’ 14, 15, 87, 93, 104, 258, 278, 279 war in former Yugoslavia 7, 43, 62, 78-9, 82, 107-13, 135, 137, 202, 222-3, 259, 271-6 Waugh, Evelyn 185, 237-9, 241, 247 Wells, H.G. 55 West, Rebecca 28-9, 159-66, 184, 192, 194 Wheeler, Mark 166 Wheeler, Tony 278 Whelpton, Eric 193 White, Ethel Lina 211 White, Hayden 93 White, Tony 278 Whittell, Giles 11 Wilde, Oscar 181 Wilkinson, William 72 Williams, Eric 215, 242, 243 Wilson, Barbara 86-7 Wilson, Francesca 153, 191 Winchester, Simon 33-4, 79

321 Wingfield, W.F. 9 Wintle, Michael 6 Wolff, Larry 44 Women’s Convoy Corps 266 women’s travel writing (see also travel writing) 13, 27, 128-9, 14566 Woodward, Susan 275 Woollacott, Martin 110 World Health Organization 274 World Trade Centre 14 Wordsworth, William 174 Wright, Alfred 127 Yeats, W.B. 35 Young, Antonia 146 Yovitchitch, Lena A. 185, 217 Yugoslavia (see also war in former Yugoslavia) 6, 10, 28-9, 30-1, 33, 48-9, 55, 57, 76-7, 78-9, 82, 103, 111-2, 159-66, 183-4, 187-8, 192, 193, 194, 201, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223, 237-9, 239-41, 244, 271, 275, 279 Zaborowska, Magdalena 87 Zagrab 164 Zhivkov, Todor 82 Zielonka, Jan 106 Žižek, Slavoj 8