654
PARTISAN REVIEW
New York Times Book Review
and its analogues at
The Washington Post
and
The Los Angeles Times,
and many others - have contributed greatly
with articles and reviews, with translations of essays and speeches. Other
smaller-circulation, more specialized periodicals have also been attentive
to the area:
Formatiol1s,
edited by Jonathan Brent, a quarterly devoted to
contemporary world art and literature, and
East Ellropea/l Politics and
Societies,
edited by Ivo Banac , a quarterly with a broad social-science
perspective. The periodical most clearly concentrating on Central Europe
as a cultural entity, however, is
Cross Cllrrents,
which was founded in
1982 by Ladislav Matejka as (according to its subtitle) "A Yearbook of
Central European Culture ." A miscellany of primary and secondary
sources, it not only provides a basic education in Central Europe but
virtually defines the field.
Various public and private organizations have also played their part.
The East European Studies Program of the Woodrow Wilson In–
ternational Center for Scholars, as part of the Smithsonian Institution,
sponsors scholars from the area for extended stays, who have thereby
helped to raise our consciousness and the consciousness of their own
countries when they return. The Wilson Center's
Wilsoll Qllarterly
has
also featured Central Europe prominently in recent years . A particularly
spectacular contribution to the field has come from the New York-based
Soros Foundation, which began by bringing over individual scholars
from Hungary, the native country of its founder George Soros, and has
expanded throughout East-Central Europe with a large number of
educational and cultural projects. Most ambitious is the Central Euro–
pean University, a post-graduate, degree-granting institution based pri–
marily in Prague but with an active branch in Budapest, that focuses on
area studies of the region, primarily in social science but with a humani–
ties component as well.
American universities have responded to the new interest in Central
Europe in various ways. Departments of sociology, anthropology, and
economics, traditionally less than friendly to the area because it is so la–
bor-intensive (its many "small" languages and cultures need to be studied
separately) and because in Cold War conditions the countries involved
tended to hinder fieldwork and fudge statistics, have started opening up
to it. The Joint Committee on Eastern Europe under the aegis of the
American Council of Learned Societies has for several years now carried
on a competition to initiate tenure-track teaching positions for experts
in the area by providing five years of funding, after which the university
takes over. In the last few years a number of universities have instituted
courses in Central European literature, incorporating pertinent Austrian,
