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E.E. in 2022: Young, angry, and female?

When the region that today lies between Germany and Russia received global attention in the tumultuous decade from 1980 to 1990, its voice resonated differently than it does now, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A symptomatic 1984 essay titled E.E. The ExtraTerritorial, published by post-1981 (when martial law was introduced in Poland) emigrant Stanisław Barańczak, may help to illuminate the key differences. Barańczak represented the Eastern European as an ‘out-of-this-world’ creature, in a gesture today clearly readable as soft self-othering. This newcomer-alien politely embraced the Western paradigm and while spotting some of its weaknesses, directed criticism rather to its own country of origin, dutifully repeating the acts of orientalization aimed at him and his peers. If there was a remedy available to overcome the sotto voce implication of ‘galactic’ differences existing between these regions, it would not include any truly demanding social, political, or economic changes by the West. Rather, the global exchange of elite cultural production would suffice to achieve mutual understanding in the future (Barańczak, 1990). In short, the narrator of the essay represented the many Eastern Europeans who – as Czesław Miłosz, another vocal Eastern European émigré once put it – arrived in Western Europe self-identifying as ‘traveling barbarians,’ feeling that they had ‘entered the universal,’ which left them ‘dazzled and desiring’ (Miłosz, 2003: 393). Those seeking refuge in Western Europe in 2022 are far from dazzled: they are sufficiently disillusioned by 30 years of relationships, which have rarely taken the form of courteous exchanges, to see clearly the non-universal character of the Western paradigm. The emotional tenor of the conversation has also changed. After 24 February, the global arena has been confronted with the ‘voice of the region’ on completely different terms and in novel formats. While Barańczak’s essay appeared in print 3 years after his emigration, today’s commentators garner instantaneous audiences thanks to digital media. While the E.E. text was delivered by The New Republic in 1984, and then Harvard University Press in 1990, the current wave of intellectual analysis does not require acknowledgment and approval by established Western outlets: blogs, news repositories, and online journals have destroyed the waiting room routines that emigrant voices had traditionally to endure,