Definitely a tough read even if you know lots about modern Eastern Europe. By the time you get to the chapter on Voltaire, the picture is already clear and a bit repetitive. Eastern Europe was backward and largely unknown, the people barbarian and uncivilised, yet not exotic as 'the orient'. This conveniently helped to define western Europe as 'civilisation as we know it'. Some similarities with the criticisms of The west made by Edward Said.

However some good stories and the intrepid women travellers were interesting

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A history of how the continent of Europe came to be conceived as divided into Western and Eastern Europe. ‘It was Western Europe that invented Eastern Europe as it’s complementary other half in the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment’ (p. 4).This book is an investigation of late eighteenth-century western ideas of Eastern Europe, ideas which persist today. The Enlightenment ideas of Eastern Europe as barbaric and, uncivilised and failing to ‘evolve’ to the same extent as the 'scientific west' were often written by authors who had never visited the countries they were writing about. In one of Wolff’s discussions about an essay written in 1914 he states; ‘the whole vocabulary in which the issues of Eastern Europe were defined was that of the eighteenth century: barbarism and civilisation, wildness and the frontier, the picturesque and the instructive, and finally an ingenuous note of surprise that the people were white’ (p. 366). Included are extensive notes and an index. This is a valuable book for those studying the idea of Eastern Europe which has persisted even without the Iron Curtain. ( )