Table Of ContentINVENTING
RURITANIA
THE IMPERIALISM OF THE IMAGINATION
VESNA GOLDSWORTHY
Yale University Press
New Haven and London
1 ‘)<)X
Copyright © 1998 Vesna Goldsworthy
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in
any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written
permission from the publishers.
Set in Times by Print Line, New Delhi
Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 98-84046
ISBN 0-300-07312-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 I
To Simon
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xii
Map of the Balkans xiii
A Note on Spelling xiv
Chapter One
‘And what should I do in Illyria?’: English Literature
and the Balkans 1
Chapter Two
Byron’s Children: Literary Perceptions of the
Balkans in the Nineteenth Century 14
Chapter Three
The Balkans in Popular Fiction 42
Prisoners of Zenda: The Imagined States of
the Balkans 43
The Balkan Threat: Vampires, Spies, Murder and the
Orient Express
Dracula and the Balkan Gothic 73
Balkan Settings of the Spy Novel 87
On the Orient Express Route 101
Chapter Four
War and Diplomacy in the New Ruritania: Comic
Visions of the Balkans 112
Bernard Shaw’s Bulgaria 113
Saki’s Lost Sanjak 117
E. M. Forster’s Passage to ‘The Heart of Bosnia’ 126
vii
Lawrence Durrell and Mis I’iciIcitssois:
British Diplomats in the Balkans 131
Kvelyn Waugh: An English Officer with the Partisans 146
Chapter Five
Spectres of War: Representations of the ‘Real’ Balkans 160
Edith Durham and the Balkan Tangle 161
Rebecca West Travels East 171
Olivia Manning’s Balkan Cityscapes 184
‘Why the Balkans Attract Women’ 198
Chapter Six
Reclaiming Balkan Erewhons 202
Notes 213
Chronology 231
Bibliography 234
Index 246
PREFACE
A in I Balkan?, 1 ask myself as, having worked on this book for some years,
I return to its beginnings and ponder again the possible implications of the
term. Being referred to as such frequently has negative connotations - it is
ii toponym which easily becomes an insult. The Balkan peninsula is
undoubtedly part of the European mainland, yet the adjective ‘Balkan’ can
imply the opposite of European. In the region itself the Balkans are always
thought to be elsewhere, to the south-east of wherever one is, until, on the
shores of the Bosphorus, one catches sight of Asia across the water.
In my mother tongue, which until recently was called Serbo-Croat, I too
used the word as an expression of disdain or impotent rage. Yet one’s
' Kuropeanness’, implicit in any anger against ‘Balkan’ behaviour, reflects
only in part an adherence to a shared - if perhaps utopian - vision of an
affluent, tolerant Europe to which one might proudly belong. The desire to
attribute ‘Balkanness’ to one’s neighbour is, to a much greater degree, a
product of a Europe in which poverty or ignorance breeds bigotry. This
Europe is confined neither to the east nor the south.
In an age so sensitive to discrimination of all kinds, a racism which is
born not of colour but of nuance, the chauvinist narcissism of minute
differences, frequently remains undetected. The idea of Europeanness is
itself sometimes used to express feelings which would otherwise be
unacceptable, to offer racism a ‘politically correct’ form. Even the most
broad-minded of Western journalists and authors write about European
values with the same swaggering assurance that enabled their forebears to
assume so confidently that white, Christian civilisation was superior to the
cultures it destroyed. It is hardly surprising therefore that each Balkan nation
chooses to see itself as aguardian of European values rather than the barbarian
at Europe’s gate./The Balkanisation of the Balkans continues to take place
precisely because ‘Balkan’ always refers to someone other than ourselves.
This book looks at how the Balkans are seen by outsiders. It examines the
process by which a definable Balkan identity gradually emerged in works
of English literature in the nineteenth century, and established itself over
the past hundred years. In this context, a focus on British writing is
particularly rewarding. The Balkans might seem too far away to be of
consistent interest to American writers, even if a few well-known novels -
such as Saul Bellow’s The Dean's December - are set in the peninsula.
Britain is, one might say, just distant enough. The Balkans are sufficiently
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x Preface
close to remain in the field of vision, yet remote enough to be relatively
free of the ‘traditional friendships’ and ‘historical alliances’ which frequently
inspire the specific interests in the area of other European powers. Even
more importantly, images produced in British fiction, transformed and trans
mitted by the British and American entertainment industries through count
less films and television programmes, have been disseminated to an
unprecedented and unrivalled degree.
The Balkan worlds of popular imagination are peopled by British
creations. Bram Stoker’s Transylvania and Anthony Hope’s Ruritania are
arguably the best-known brand names produced in this imaginative take
over of the Balkans, which was as important for the booming publishing
industry at the turn of the century, and later for the film industry, as the
diamond and gold fields of South Africa were for imperial trade. Faced
with the economic power of the Western industries of the imagination,
indigenous Balkan produce had as much chance of competing as the cotton
industry in India when its markets were flooded with British manufactures.
British ‘narrative colonisation’ of the Balkans began early in the nineteenth
century with Byron as its Columbus; it continues still. As a ‘colonised’
region, the Balkans offer a mirror image to the more traditional fields of
post-colonial inquiry with their focus on textual practices in the framework
of the physical exploitation of an area by a Western power. The take-over
of the intellectual domain, the exploitation of the raw resources of history,
can be similarly lucrative and - precisely because it often appears frivolous
- more insidious in its consequences. Although the physical colonisation
of large parts of the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire provides a reverse
example of traditional colonial patterns (a portion of Europe dominated by
an Eastern, alien and non-Christian empire), this ‘textual colonisation’ has
provided the industries of the imagination with easy, unchallenged access
to raw material. In contrast, while Ottoman rule surpassed in its longevity
almost any instance of Western colonisation, its direct narrative contribution
to the way the Balkans are seen and imagined by outsiders is negligible.
Historically, British (and later American) economic interests in the
Balkans tended to be comparatively small. British imports from the five
Balkan states (Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia)
amounted, for example, to only 0.66% of total UK imports in 1929 and
1.22% in 1938; while exports were 1.45% of the total in 1929 and 1.51%
in 1938. Yet it was in the same period that the most abiding images of the
region were created through the indirect colonisation and exploitation of
Balkan settings by the British and American entertainment industries. This
process has much more to do with the needs and the power of these
industries than with any real interest in the area. Indeed, the Balkans could
continue to supply the raw resources - to act as an exotic backdrop in
travelogues and tales of romance, adventure and political intrigue - for so
long precisely because, until the 1990s, direct involvement in the region
Preface xi
by the English-speaking countries was so slight. While British, and later
American, rivalry with Russia meant that the Balkans, as an area of potential
Russian expansionism, could not be ignored, there were few economic
concerns and no expatriate communities at stake. Their strategic interests
were part of a wider Great Game and not intrinsic. Throughout the decades
leading up to the landings at Salonika in the First World War, the Balkans
did not claim the bones of a single British grenadier.
When not a theatre of war, the area seemed to inhabit the misty edges of
perception. ‘Trieste, Sarajevo, Montenegro, Sofia... names which conjure
up a part of Europe still exotic, relatively untravelled, a melting pot of East
and West, of old and new,’ proclaimed a dust-jacket of a British travel
book published in 1990.' ‘This was a time-capsule world: a dim stage upon
which people raged, spilled blood, experienced visions and ecstasies. Yet
their expressions remained fixed and distant, like dusty statuary,’ wrote an
American traveller in 1993.2
The comparative absence of direct economic involvement in the Balkans
thus perversely supported the influence of the imagery which originated
in the Anglophone countries, helping to shape the way the Balkans continue
to be perceived throughout the rest of the world. The current, predominantly
right-wing perception is of the Balkans as a contagious disease, an infectious
sore in the soft underbelly of Europe, best left to fester in isolation. The
opposing, mainly left-wing - but unconsciously neo-colonial - notion is
of Balkan conflicts as revolting departures from the ideal of cosmo
politanism which could and should - to everyone’s benefit - be solved by
mature and responsible powers wielding a-big stick and a few small carrots.
Both are underpinned by the stereotypes examined in this book. The fact
that, in the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, all the warring
factions employed the services of British and American public relations
companies to ‘represent’ them in the West underlines the importance of at
tempting to understand the way in which elements of Western language
about the Balkans came to be created in Britain and America.
The relevance of this examination to the wider field of cultural studies
lies, I believe, in the fact that it draws attention to those marginal and
ambiguous areas of the world which have offered refuges to patterns of
neo-colonial behaviour no longer acceptable elsewhere. It is possible for
writers who consider themselves to be advanced exponents of European
multicultural ideals to write about Albanians, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians
and Romanians with the sort of generalised, open condescension which
would appal them if applied to Somalis or the peoples of Zaire. If post
colonial examination has so far, and not unjustly, focused on the Third
World, this study contributes to a re-examination of the changing identity
of the ‘Second World’, which defines both the ‘First’ and the ‘Third’. We
are all Greek, Shelley wrote in 1821. I wonder if he really wanted to say
that we were all Balkan.
acknow ledgem ents
Among those who provided advice, encouragement, or practical assistance
in the preparation of this book are Michael Baron, Thomas Healy and Peter
Mudford of Birkbeck College, Leonee Ormond of King’s College, and
Wendy Bracewell of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, all
from the University of London; Valentine Cunningham of Corpus Christi
College, and Mary MacRobert of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford;
Mihaela Irimia of the University of Bucharest; Svetozar Ignjacevic and
Djordje Trifunovic of the University of Belgrade; and Ioannis Kakridis of
the University of Bonn. I am also indebted to the British Academy which
funded much of my research.
I am deeply grateful for the help and information offered by Milos and
Nada Bjelogrlic, Neville Braybrooke, Henry Davis, Nikola Djuretic, Milica
and Petar Dodic, Margaret Drabble, Aleksa and Zaga Gavrilovic, Elizabeth
Goldsworthy, Roderick Goldsworthy, Zivojin Jovanovic, Caroline Juler,
Francis King, Joanna Labon, Sarah Posey, David Simpson, Alan Walker,
and Aleksej Zoric. My discussions with Philippa Brewster were particularly
inspiring. All the remaining errors and omissions are of course my own. I
must also thank Dejan Corovic who took the photograph reproduced on
the jacket flap on a bitterly cold January day.
Some of the ideas contained in this book were initially explored in the
articles ‘Tennyson and Montenegro’, published by the Tennyson Research
Bulletin, and ‘Rebecca West’s Journey to the Balkans’, published by Women:
a Cultural Review, as well as in discussions with colleagues from the BBC
World Service, including Sorin Matei from the Romanian Section who inter
viewed me about Olivia Manning’s work. Papers given at conferences and
research seminars at Nottingham Trent University, the University of Sussex
and Thames Valley University provided opportunities for invaluable feedback.
1 am grateful to the Society of Authors as the representative of the Pro
vost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, for their permission to
quote extracts from the two unpublished works by E.M. Forster: ‘What
Does it Matter? A Morality’; and ‘The Heart of Bosnia’.
My thanks for support are also due to my agent, Faith Evans; to John
Nicoll, Gillian Malpass and everyone else at Yale University Press who
helped in the production of this volume; and to Simon Goldsworthy, whose
ideas, knowledge of the Balkans, enthusiasm for the volumes I explored,
and generous help over many years, shaped this work.
London 1998
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