Like all important undertakings in one’s life, this one was over-determined. In 1989, when the revolutions in Eastern Europe began to reverberate like a series of powerfully plucked harp strings, I knew this was one historical event I wanted to see for myself.

‘Eastern Europe’ has been for me a notion potent with personal associations. I was born in Poland and got my primary schooling there, along with an intense early education in politics and the sentiments. I emigrated in early adolescence; but for a long time afterward, Poland – and by extension, Eastern Europe – remained for me an idealized landscape of the mind. Because I had loved and lost it, because I had been cut off from it summarily and, it seemed, irrevocably, it stayed arrested in my imagination as a land of childhood sensuality, lyricism, vividness, and human warmth.

To a great extent, Eastern Europe had stayed arrested in actuality as well. I had grown up in Poland under the aegis of Communism – the force that had provided, or inflicted, the ruling narrative on a large region of the world for more than four decades. The given of the ‘system’ imposed certain unbudgeable conditions on the lives of several generations; it divided whole societies into bipolar oppositions between ‘us’ and ‘Them.’ Throughout the various thaws and freezes, the liberalizations and the tightenings of screws, the basic elements of that overriding situation held in place. But now, in 1989, the meta-narrative met its abrupt end; nothing much was clear about what would happen next, except that Eastern Europe was going to be changed, changed utterly – and I wanted to go before that happened. This was the most personal urge behind my long excursion: that I wanted to see ‘my’ Eastern Europe before it disappeared, but to see it, this time, without my childhood fantasies and projections. I wanted to make an attempt, at least, to understand it for what it was – from a larger, more robust, and more informed perspective. Happiness, Freud said, is the fulfillment of a childhood wish; meaningful knowledge, perhaps, is the satisfaction of a childhood curiosity.

But there was, behind my expedition, a less private – and undoubtedly more presumptuous – impulse as well. I was not immune to the kind of fascination that suddenly made the eyes of the world turn on Eastern Europe. It was clear, as the amazing events of 1989 unfolded, that history was happening there – and I thought that this was my opportunity to catch it in the act. I wanted to see how it took place day by day and near the ground; to understand what such a momentous social transformation means in the lives and psyches of particular people. In other words – aside from my very personal reasons for going there – I wanted to witness history in the making, to catch it in vivo, on the wing.

But to see any place for what it is is a famously difficult undertaking – and perhaps nowhere more so than in Eastern Europe. Our psyches seem to be so constructed that we need and desire an imagined ‘other’ – either a glimmering, craved, idealized other, or an other that is dark, savage, and threatening. Eastern Europe has served our needs in this respect very well. For many centuries, it had been, to some extent cut off, separated, and – for all the insignificant geographic distances – strangely unknown. And for centuries, it had served as a stand-in for the exotic, the other. When Shakespeare wanted to indicate a fabulous never-never land, he called it Illyria (which, as a real place, used to be situated in what is now Bulgaria and Albania), or ‘the Seacoast of Bohemia’ (that notoriously nonexistent geographic entity). And when he wanted to suggest a shadowy realm, somewhere on the outer margins of our political concerns, he made a glancing reference, at the end of Hamlet, to the kingdom of Poland.

The real Eastern Europe is a region of civilizations as old and strongly defined as those of the West. The Greater Moravian Empire, the ancestor of modern Czechoslovakia, was established about A.D. 800; the first Bulgarian kingdom rose to its height in the seventh century; Poland and Hungary can each claim a social and cultural, if not a political, continuity of over a thousand years; and Romanians still profess a kinship with the Dacians, whom the Romans found so hard to conquer that they celebrated the eventual victory for thirty years. But while the civilizations have survived and retained their identity, the national borders in this part of Europe have shifted in the last ten centuries with the capriciousness of a checkerboard puzzle being rearranged by a particularly wanton player. Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia all had their imperial, expansive phases before the seventeenth century; but more recently, Eastern Europe has been the arena for imperial struggles and expansion from both East and West. Partly because of their location on trade routes and partly because of geographic structure – several countries squeezed into a relatively small area – the nations in this part of Europe have been perennially subject to invasion, colonization, great-power bargaining, partitioning, and sheer conquest.

No wonder, then, that the region rarely achieved long periods of stability or economic growth, and that, in the imagination of the West, it never quite ceased being ‘the other Europe’ – less developed, less civilized, more turbulent and strife-ridden than the Europe we think of as the real thing. Even in modern times, when it became more accessible and better known, Eastern Europe tended to be seen as a source either of primitive savagery or of operetta entertainment. Still, during the interwar years of the twentieth century, some of the invisible barriers between the West and its sister Europe had begun to come down. Poland and Czechoslovakia once again became nation-states, with some admired political figures to represent them; the cultural achievements emanating from Eastern Europe were beginning to be appreciated as a salient part of modernism; and the region’s capital cities became plausible places to visit.

But whatever penetration had become possible during that interval was abruptly curtailed by the eruption of the Second World War and the subsequent descent of the Iron Curtain. For the following forty-some years, Eastern Europe subsided into an even darker invisibility than before. To a large extent, normal communications and travel between East and West came to a halt. And ironically, while the literal distances became ever more trivial, the rifts of culture and life conditions widened. While the West, after World War II, started moving along a galloping accelerator of material development, Eastern Europe came close to an economic standstill, or even regression. And while the West, willy-nilly, had to experiment with various forms of democratization and pluralism, the East suffered a virtual stasis of political demagogy and centralization as well.

During those decades, Eastern Europe once again became a Rorschach test for Western wishes, dreads, and misunderstandings. To some, it was a repository of utopian ideological hopes; to others, a heroic region struggling against a demonic dystopia; but to most, I would hazard, ‘Eastern Europe’ had become a lifeless, monochrome realm where people walked bent under the leaden weight of an awful System.

From growing up there, I knew at least that it wasn’t the latter, that life was as multifarious and surprising in Eastern Europe as anywhere else, and just as impossible to summarize or reduce to a few concepts.

Nevertheless, before setting out on my travels, I made some working assumptions about what I was going to be looking at. I realized, of course, that the very notion of ‘Eastern Europe’ is to some extent a fiction, and that the countries through which I was going to travel have distinct histories, traditions, identities. And yet I thought that the fiction was at least useful, and probably based on some measure of historical reality. This has been particularly true since World War II: The history of that period was largely unchosen, but definitely shared. The interval of Soviet domination created Eastern Europe, even if such an entity didn’t exist before. And while I am well aware that the current debate about restoring the distinctions among Central Europe, Central Eastern Europe, and Central Southern Europe is much more than semantic, it did not seem crucial, for my purposes, to resolve it. For the sake of simplicity and convenience, I refer to ‘Eastern Europe’ most of the time, though occasionally ‘Central Europe’ seems clearly more appropriate; the same holds true for ‘Balkans.’

The five countries through which I decided to travel – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria – could all plausibly be said to have been part of the older Eastern Europe, as well as the postwar one; they were also the countries where ‘the revolutions’ had already happened by the time I went there. I decided not to go to the places where the exit from Communism was following highly exceptional routes – i.e., Yugoslavia and Albania; and I left out East Germany from my trajectory because it had not been historically a part of Eastern Europe, even if it became a member of the ‘fraternal’ bloc after the war.

But while I thought there were good reasons to speak of Eastern Europe, I also knew that this was a region full of its own social and ethnic variety. One of the myths imposed on Eastern Europe in the last forty-five years, and quickly abolished by recent events, was the myth of uniformity. Now that the stifling blanket of Communism has been lifted, the...