Volume 28, Number 17 · November 5, 1981
The East: Three Reports
By Barbara C. Sproul, George Konrad, Peter B. Reddaway, Translated from the Hungarian by Ivan Sanders
It's here in East Central Europe that Eastern and Western culture collide; it's here that they intermingle. Here we see side-by-side the physical and psychic baggage of industrial and preindustrial civilizations. Our heads, like old radios, hiss and buzz with the claims of Soviet-style state socialism and Atlantic liberalism; we try to adjust the tuner, but get the same static again and again. As intellectuals we groan under, and revel in, our own authority. Personified contradictions, we'd like to see ourselves in a clearer light. But that's hard and risky to do. So we drink instead. Nowhere in the world are there as many drunken thinkers as in Eastern Europe.
Feature, 3000 words
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