Recent Books
194 foreign affairs
The Great Cauldron: A History of
Southeastern Europe
BY MARIE-JANINE CALIC.
TRANSLATED BY ELIZABETH
JANIK. Harvard University Press, 2019,
736 pp.Since the early twentieth century,
southeastern Europe has been disparaged
as “the Balkans,” a term that often
connotes tribalism and violence. In this
detailed and comprehensive history,
Calic nimbly seeks to broaden the way
the region is understood. The book ranges
from the advent of Ottoman dominion
to the collapse of Yugoslavia. Calic
concludes with the nato bombing of
Serbia in 1999, observing that the war,
which was waged without a un
mandate, had a “legitimacy problem”—
and that this compelled Western
governments to spin the intervention
with a “clever propaganda strategy.”
Although sympathetic to the work of
the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia (for which she
worked), she does not discuss the
difficulty it had in achieving
recognition and support in the most
relevant places of all: in the lands of
the former Yugoslavia. The substance
of the book criticizes stereotypes about
the region, and yet the title references
an unpleasant Western cartoon from the
period of the Balkan Wars (1912–13),
thus somewhat undercutting Calic’s
effort to rethink conventional accounts.
larrY wolffTo See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of
Western Culture
BY ELEONORY GILBURD. Belknap
Press, 2018, 480 pp.
In 1957, after decades of Stalin’s terror,
when contacts with foreigners, real or
imagined, were treated as high treason,
Moscow hosted the Sixth International
Youth Festival. As related by Gilburd’s
rich history of the Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev’s cultural opening to the
West, the festival brought about two
weeks of unceasing communal elation,
as young Soviet men and women
passionately bonded with peers from all
over the world: wandering about
Moscow, dancing, singing, forging
friendships, making love. Unlike earlier
attempts at westernization, the one
initiated by Khrushchev’s “thaw”
reached beyond Soviet elites to include
the masses. French pop music played on
the radio, Italian films appeared in
movie theaters, and the “domesticating”
approach to literary translation made
Western novels part of Soviet culture—
and even Soviet life. But as this stream
of Western culture flowed into the
Soviet Union, the state’s borders remained
closed, and foreign travel, heavily
restricted. The Soviet people became
infatuated with a mythical West. Later,
many experienced the reality of the
West firsthand either as immigrants or
when post-Soviet Russia sought to more
fully embrace Western ways and
norms—and then they came to believe
they had been wronged. What they felt
was more than disillusionment, Gilburd
writes: it was dispossession.