JOURNALS FROM EAST CENTRAL EUROPE: A SELECTION

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

It was summer. We were on our way home from Greece. We disembarked from the Venizelos in Trieste and headed straight for Slovenia. I changed some money at the border because we needed it to pay the highway tolls. AsI changed the larger nominations into smaller ones at the gates and got acquainted with all the Slovenian banknotes, one after another, it struck me, almost like a blow, that although I fancied myself to be erudite and cosmopolitan I did not recognize a single one of the Great Men portrayed on the banknotes. In fact, I had never even heard their names. I began to wonder how familiar I might be with the 'great ones of the financial world' in other countries in the region: after all, any European citizen of average erudition, wherever he or she may live, is on intimate terms with the notables on, for example, French banknotes: Pierre and Marie Curie, Paul Cezanne, Gustave Eiffel, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and so on. The momentary shock was soon replaced by a feeling of deeply rooted familiarity. I am a sociologist, and ever since I began my work (or should I call it a profession?) I have been well aware that, while information would be rela- tively easy to obtain on what was going on in the USA, 'what the score was' in Great Britain, what the German beer-bibbers and schnapps-drinkers were up to, and how things stood with the French, who, as a result of particular historical circumstances, drink Pernod and Bcaujolais, I would find it consider-ably more difficult to become well informed about the situation in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which share both a history and the present with my own, unless a sociologist of the 'cultured West' wrote about them in one of the languages I speak. Of course, I could have learned to speak Slovakian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, and so on. That would have enabled me to read more than the occasional English abstracts in their periodicals of which, changes of regime notwithstanding, I must confess, I know no more than I ever did. I can therefore only assume that these periodicals are sometimes interesting, sometimes boring, and either well or badly edited, just as our own periodicals are. When I accepted an invitation to participate in editing the next issue of East Central Europe/L'Europe du Centre-Est, a journal which introduces the periodicals of the region, the desire to introduce the region to the West-which will no doubt marvel at the fact that civilized inhabitants dwell in this part of the world, too-was only one of my motives; I also hoped that-the countries of the region would become better acquainted with each other. The French Institute in Hungary recently organized a workshop entitled What's the Use of Periodicals? (Fall 1998), with French and Hungarian participants. At one of the sessions a Hungarian speaker said: "If I had to characterize the state of high culture in Hungary today with a single expression, I would call it a 'journal culture'." To be honest, I have no idea if the same is true for other countries in the region, but at the same time it cannot be out of the question. Discovering our neighbors' periodicals is surely likely to help us get to know each other better. The undertaking has proved to be more difficult than I could ever have guessed (this can be attributed partly to the fact that I was somewhat foolish and naive). It was clear, however, that we would have to face a perplexing abundance of publications. Our explicit goal was to cover the social sciences and humanities, necessitating a terribly large number of contacts with a terribly large number of periodicals; how on earth were we to arrange all of them? We were aware of a bunch of publications (both as professionals and private persons); some we had only heard about, some we knew inside out, some we liked, others we did not (although we also knew that we could not afford to omit them in the course of editing); but we were also well aware that we did not know all the periodicals of our home country, let alone those of neighboring ones. Fortunately, we were able to launch the project with the help of Peter Krasztev of Collegium Budapest, who allowed us to use a database containing several dozen periodicals. We 'fished' in 15 countries: Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Macedonia, Moldavia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In some of these countries we found 15 titles, in others only two. We expected to make further contacts through the editors of the journals and the Budapest embassies of the country of origin, in the latter case by asking the staff to provide an official though obviously not up-to-date and precise list of the periodicals of their country. Well, those plans went up in smoke. Only the press attache of the Embassy of the Czech Republic, and the librarian of the House of Polish Culture (operated by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland) offered their help and I would like to express our thanks for their kindness. Everywhere else, people simply raised their arms regretfully and said they had no idea how many periodicals-all trying to find their own place, meaning, and justification-there were in their home country. Many of them added that not only did they not know, but that no man alive could say anything for certain. The only available database, therefore, was the one we already had, together with the possibility of making more contacts by mail. In retrospect, I am ashamed