6 stars. This is a truly massive and game-changing book. My respect goes out to Rebecca West as the research and detail that must have gone into it are simply mind-boggling. She traveled to Yugoslavia during the interwar period and penned this remarkable work. It's not your typical travel book as one might expect. Instead, for me, it delved into the psyche of the Slavic people, serving as a sort of mind map of them. What I discovered both frightened and awed me in different places. The aspect I loved most about the book was Rebecca's writing style. Apparently, she had a child with HG Wells. Her writing really reminded me of W Somerset Maugham in that it was literally poetic in certain passages. I've lost count of how many times I jotted down "wow – beautifully written Rebecca" in the margins of the text. She not only presented me with new perspectives on an area I thought I understood but did so in a beautifully poetic manner. As a Muslim myself, the one concern I had with the book was what I perceived as a rather pro-Serbian slant. It could just be my interpretation, but the book was divided into chapters, and there were two dedicated to Serbia and older Serbia. She was traveling with a Serbian Jewish man, which might have influenced her slightly in some respects. Having said all that, I would be lying if I said I had read everything there was to read about the past wars in that area from the Serbian side. To be honest, I don't think I had read anything from that angle at all. So, hearing about some of the Turkish atrocities and the impact of approximately 500 years of Turkish rule in that area from "the other side," albeit written by a diplomatic English lady, was quite eye-opening. What repeatedly comes across in the book is what seems to be the natural inclination towards violence, power, and strength that lies at the heart of the Slavic character. I guess it's something I sometimes ask my two young boys to tap into when they're sparring in boxing. Slavs are such a tall, strong, and beautiful race of people. It's just a shame that religion divided them into the various fractions Yugoslavia was split into after the war and the factions it was divided into before the formation of that "south Slav" identity.
There is also an incredibly detailed section on the incident that galvanized the beginning of WW1 when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on St Vitus’ day in 1914.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts from this fascinating 1,000-plus page book:
“Since the industrial revolution capitalism has grooved society with a number of free slots along which most human beings can roll smoothly to a fixed destination. When a man takes charge of a factory the factory takes charge of him.”
“The Croats were originally a Slav tribe who were invited by the emperor Heraclitus to free the Dalmatian coast and the Croatian hinterland from the Avars, one of the most noxious pillaging hordes.”
“Croats are fierce and warlike intellectuals.”
“The sense of inevitability in a work of art should be quite different from scientific conception of causality for if art were creative then each stage must be new, must have something over and above what was contained in the previous stages and the connexion between the first and the last may be creative in the Bergsonian sense. He added that it is to give this creativeness its chance to create what is at once predictable and inevitable that an artist must never interfere with his characters to make them prove a moral point, because this is to force them down the path of the predictable.”
“Because men of that day had convictions where we moderns have only opinions.”
“Here was the authentic voice of the Slav, these people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the west we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it.”
“So you are intellectuals. The false sort that are always in opposition. My God, my God, how easy it is to be an intellectual in opposition to the man of action.”
“We in England have an unhistorical attitude to our lives, because every generation has felt excitement over a clear-cut historical novelty which has given it enough to tell its children and grandchildren without drawing on its fathers and grandfathers tales.”
“And it seemed very probable that Rome was able to conquer foreign territories because she had developed her military genius at the expense of precisely those qualities which would have made her able to rule them. Certainly she lacked them to such an extent that she was unable to work out a satisfactory political and economic policy for Rome itself and perished of that failure.”
“But I passed one of the nuns and remarked as I had done before that the rank and file of the female religious order presents an unpleasing appearance because they have assumed the expression of credulity natural and inevitable to men who find it difficult to live without the help of philosophical systems which far from outrun ascertained facets, but wholly unsuitable to women who are born with a faith in the unrevealed mystery of life and can therefore afford to be sceptics.”
“The great men for whom humanity feels ecstatic love need not be good, not even gifted but they must display this fusion of light and darkness which is the essential human character they must even promise by the predominance of darkness that the universe shall forever persist in its imperfection.”
“There is a Finnish word “sisu” which expresses this ultimate hidden resource in man which will not be worsted, which takes charge when courage goes and consciousness is blackened, which insists on continuing to live no matter what life is worth.”
“That philanthropy consisted of giving sops to the populace which would make it forget that their masters had seized all the means of production and distribution and therefore held them in a state of complete economic subjection.”
“These are among the most pleasing architectural gestures ever made by urbanity. They do not publicly declare the relationship of man and god like a Christian tower or spire. They raise a white finger and say only “this is a community of human beings and look you we are not beasts of the field.” - talking about Mosques.
“Her stillness was more than the habit of a western woman, yet the uncovering of her mouth and chin had shown her completely un-oriental as luminously fair as any Scandinavian. Further away two Moslem men sat on a bench and talked politics beating with their fingers on the headlines of a newspaper. Both were tall, raw-boned bronze haired with eyes crackling with sheer blueness: Danish sea captains perhaps had they not been wearing the fez.”
“A musical instrument each note for its own colour, the gurgle of wine pouring from a bottle of water trickling though a marble conduit in the garden – all sorts of sounds that many westerners do not even hear, so corrupted are they by the tyranny of the intellect which makes them inattentive to any message to the ear which is without an argument.”
“These people could pass what the French consider the test of a civilised society: they could practise the art of general conversation, voice dovetailed into voice without impertinent interruption; there was light and shade, sober judgement was corrected by mocking criticism and another sober judgement established and every now and then the cards were swept off the table by a gust of laughter and the game started afresh.”
“Like her husband she could see no point in consistency, which is the very mortar of society.”
“He took to shutting himself up in his poor room and read enormously of philosophy and politics undermining his health and nerves by the severity of these undirected studies.” - me?
“That characteristically Slav look which comes from the pulling of the flesh down from the flat cheekbones by the tense pursing of the mouth.”
“The lad was the worse off for being a Christian; he had not that air of being sustained in his poverty by the secret spiritual funds that is so noticeable in the poverty stricken Muslim.”
“It is the misfortune of the Jews that there are kinds of Jews who repel by their ugliness and the repulsion these cause is not counterbalanced by other kinds who are beautiful because they are too beautiful, because their glorious beauty disconcerted the mean and puny element in the gentile nature, at its worst among the English, which cannot stand up to anything abundant or generous which thinks duck too rich and chambertin too heavy and goes to ugly places for its holiday and wears drab clothes.”
“For she was not Slav and she had not made that acceptance of tragedy that is the basis of Slav life.”
“Suddenly I remembered friendship and how beautiful it is in a way that is difficult in London or any capital where one suffers from an excess of relationship and I realise that it was probably greater comfort for this German woman so far from home to talk with my husband whose German is like a German’s and of her own kind for he learned It in Hamburg and she was of Bremen.”
“So far the history of Belgrade like many other passages in the life of Europe makes one wonder what the human race has lost by its habit of bleeding itself like a mad medieval surgeon.”
“Human beings love to inflict pain on their fellow creatures and the species yields to its perverse appetite allowing vast tragedies to happen and endure for centuries people to agonize and become extinct. The pleasantness of life which is so strong when it manifests itself that it is tempting to regard it as the characteristic and even determinant reality of the universe is of no real avail. I could be burnt to death in this church though the air smelt of honey.”
“It may be that the breakdown of the turkish administration was not only a matter of political incompetence but resulted from a prevalent physical disability affecting men precisely at an age when they would be given the most responsible administrative posts.”
“Of course the english have no real religious instinct but thy approve of religion because it holds society together.”
“The congregation had realized what people in the west usually do not know: that the state of mind suitable for conducting the practical affairs of daily life is not suitable for discovering the ultimate meaning of life.”
“The churches of asia became extinct not because islam threatened them with its sword but because they were not philosophers enough to be interested in it's doctrive not lovers enough to be infatuated with the lovable throughout long centuries and in isolation. But these macedonians had liked to love as they had been taught by the apostles who had come to them from byzantium.”
“Turkey in europe was an advantage to england who wanted a weak power at the end of the mediterranean to keep out any strong power that might have inconvenient ambitions. It held back the austrian empire on its way to the black sea and the russian empire from its pan slavist dream and its itch for constantinople.”
“And i alleged to myself that probably nothing had fallen at Kossovo that was an irreparable loss, that perhaps tragedy draws blood but never life blood.”
“I saw before me what an empire which spreads beyond its legitimate boundaries must do to it's subjects. It cannot spread its own life over the conquered areas for life cannot travel too far from its source and it blights the life that is native to those parts. Therefore it imprisons all it's subjects in a stale conservatism in a seedy gentility that celebrates past achievements over and over again.”
“What is art? It is not decoration. It is the reliving of experience. The artist says I will make that event happen again altering its shape which was disfigured by its contacts with other events to that it's true significance is revealed.”
