Not sure where this essay is headed; it starts off by noting the increased cosmopolitanization of contemporary Eastern Europe as affected by peacetime capitalism, while pointing that the psychological stereotypes live on in fewer and fewer places that are more rural and further from the malls and thoroughfares of second-tier cities. But then it winds through a retrospective of many decades of literature defined by different circumstances of the time: a multi-ethnic hodgepodge of people living in alternating periods of peacetime and war who often dipped down to dry humour to maintain some semblance of normalcy and sanity in spite of the political, military, and economic conflicts hanging over their lives.
Perhaps more so than in any other part of the world, Eastern Europe's people have been more acutely defined by economic inequality than anywhere else: whether from the Empire days when one's ethnicity was secondary to one's status as a serf or civis or nobility until it came time to kill each other in someone else's war, or from the Eastern Bloc times when socialist governments handed down a bureaucratic and unremarkable forced egalitarianism that applied only to the masses but not the ruling class, even if it gave them affordable housing and education and healthcare and womens' and workers' rights, or today when middle-class people in Timișoara and Debrecen can buy world-class consumer goods but good jobs are few and far between, and lucrative opportunities lie in few fields, or on the other side of the continent, or in remittances.
Yes, perhaps the stereotype of Eastern Europe is dead, and its cities are more lively to the untrained eye. But plenty of problems still exist; they're just hidden beneath a veneer of disposable spending of South Korean goods to absorb people's momentary desires while being unable to cultivate lasting wealth. It's still a deeply troubled place, albeit in ways that the banlieues of France, the run-down districts of Brussels, the declining Midlands, the small towns of America can relate.
Perhaps more so than in any other part of the world, Eastern Europe's people have been more acutely defined by economic inequality than anywhere else: whether from the Empire days when one's ethnicity was secondary to one's status as a serf or civis or nobility until it came time to kill each other in someone else's war, or from the Eastern Bloc times when socialist governments handed down a bureaucratic and unremarkable forced egalitarianism that applied only to the masses but not the ruling class, even if it gave them affordable housing and education and healthcare and womens' and workers' rights, or today when middle-class people in Timișoara and Debrecen can buy world-class consumer goods but good jobs are few and far between, and lucrative opportunities lie in few fields, or on the other side of the continent, or in remittances.
Yes, perhaps the stereotype of Eastern Europe is dead, and its cities are more lively to the untrained eye. But plenty of problems still exist; they're just hidden beneath a veneer of disposable spending of South Korean goods to absorb people's momentary desires while being unable to cultivate lasting wealth. It's still a deeply troubled place, albeit in ways that the banlieues of France, the run-down districts of Brussels, the declining Midlands, the small towns of America can relate.