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At the Fence of Metternich's Garden

Essays on Europe, Ukraine, and Europeanization

By Mykola Riabchuk, Andreas Umland

Published by ibidem Press · 2021

  • Academic

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About this book

This collection of essays reflects the personal experience of a Ukrainian intellectual engaged, since his Soviet-time youth, in a painstaking but fascinating process of the both cultural and political ‘Europeanization’ of his country. The title refers, ironically, to the notorious Chancellor Metternich’s quip that Asia presumably begins at the eastern fence of his garden (or, as another apocryphal version maintains, at the eastern end of the Viennese Landstrasse). This is a story of both exclusion and inclusion, of walls and fences, but also of a longing for freedom and a quest for solidarity. It is a book on different ways of being a ‘European’—at both the collective and individual level,—despite various challenges or, perhaps, thanks to them.

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