Atlantic Monthly Flashbacks: Balkan Epic

["D.R." <danica_razlag@usa.net>]

Atlantic Monthly Flashbacks: Balkan Epic 

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/west/west1.htm

J A N U A R Y  1 9 4 1

by Rebecca West

Violence was indeed all I knew of the Balkans,' writes
Rebecca West, 'all I knew of the South Slavs. And since
there proceeds steadily from the southeastern corner of
Europe a stream of events which are a danger to me,
which indeed for years threatened my safety and deprived
me forever of many benefits, that is to say I know
nothing of my own destiny. The Balkan Peninsula was
only two or three days distant, yet I had never troubled to
go that short journey, which might explain to me how I
shall die, and why.' So it was that in 1937 Rebecca West,
with her husband, set out to explore the Balkans, and
particularly Yugoslavia, to see for herself why the fate of
the Continent and of England has so often been
threatened by the Powderkeg of Europe. The story she
brought back with her annihilates distance, and touches
every thoughtful reader. 

I raised myself on my elbow and called through the open door
into the other wagon-lit: -- 'My dear, I know I have
inconvenienced you terribly by making you take your holiday
now, and I know you did not really want to come to
Yugoslavia at all. But when you get there you will see why it
was so important that we should make this journey, and that
we should make it now, at Easter. It will all be quite clear, once
we are in Yugoslavia.'

There was, however, no reply. My husband had gone to sleep.
It was perhaps as well. I could not have gone on to justify my
certainty that this train was taking us to a land where everything
was comprehensible, where the mode of life was so honest that
it put an end to perplexity. I lay back in the darkness and
marveled that I should be feeling about Yugoslavia as if it were
my mother country, for this was 1937, and I had never seen
the place till 1936. Indeed, I could remember the first time I
ever spoke the name 'Yugoslavia,' and that was only two and a
half years before, on October 9, 1934. ............. 




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