“On Trying to be a Historian of Eastern Europe.”

Intro: Two attempts to become a historian of Eastern Europe “On Trying to be a Historian of Eastern Europe” was the title of the 1988 essay1 in which the prominent British historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, Hugh Seton-Watson, offered a kind of balance sheet of his long professional life at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at the University of London—in a volume edited by his students as a commemorative publication to their mentor. The essay begins with the following sentence: “I have been trying for more than thirty years to find out, but I am still not at all sure, what is meant by a historian or by eastern Europe.”2 He mentioned, among the reasons for these doubts, the influence that the dramatic events of the twentieth century in Europe had had on his thinking as a historian and the increasing vagueness or even emptiness of the Slavic paradigm itself, i.e., the questions surrounding the precise meaning of the adjective Slavonic in the name of his institute.3 I myself have striven to become or be an Eastern European historian, following in Seton-Watson’s admittedly large footsteps, but I can understand his doubts about the Slavic paradigm, though I am a Slavicist myself.4 I do not, however, share his uncertainties concerning the profession of the historian. That the historian is responsible for the past and analysis of the past, and in a certain way also for interpretation