Inventing Eastern Europe Chapter 1 Analysis

Larry Wolff. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. xiv + 419 pp. Maps, notes, and index. $45.00 (cloth),
ISBN 0-804-72314-1.
Reviewed by Thomas J. Hegarty, University of Tampa.
Published by HABSBURG (July, 1995)
In a book based on an extraordinarily rich array of fascinating sources, including eighteenthcentury
Western European travelers’ accounts of trips to Eastern Europe, maps and atlases drawn at the time, and letters and literature of the
Enlightenment about Eastern Europe (ranging from personal accounts, to philosophical treatments, to pure fantasy), Larry Wolff has written a delightful, erudite, and useful work of intellectual history in
Geographical exploration was going on, fed by the interest of monarchs to know their own realms as well as those of neighbors
Chapter 5, "Addressing Eastern Europe, Part
I: Voltaire’s Russia," is a demonstration of the power of mental mapping. Chapter 6, "Addressing
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Eastern Europe, Part II: Rousseau’s Poland," presents, inter alia, the account of the journey of
Mme. Geoffrin, the house guest from hell of the last king of Poland. Chapter 7, "Peopling Eastern
Europe, Part I: Barbarians in Ancient History and
Modern Anthropology" and chapter 8, "Peopling
Eastern Europe, Part II: The Evidence of Manners and the Measurements of Race," discuss in part the fascination of Western Europeans at showing the
Scythian or Tatar roots of Eastern European peoples, false ethnic and linguistic connections, and an inventiveness regarding everyone’s past.
Gibbon’s low regard for eastern Europe is balanced by the kinder attitude of Herder, who saw Slavs as an underdeveloped, but "victimized people