The cultures of East Central Europe Imperial, national, revolutionary

A discussion of culture in East Central Europe during the modern period, could take any number of directions. In East Central Europe cultural institutions and literary and artistic movements of all kinds were closely linked to imperial projects in the eighteenth century, and subsequently to the construction of nations and nation-states. Furthermore, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cultural groups sometimes tied to revolutionary movements of the left and right sought to challenge aristocratic forms, hegemonic “world” or imperial languages, and bourgeois aesthetic norms. The politics of culture in modern East Central Europe is not, however, limited to national or nationalist agendas. The art, music, and literature created by self-conscious “modernists” was cosmopolitan and anti-traditional even if the anti-establishment artistic elites also reached out to the folkloric repertoire. Up until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of the lands were ruled from the imperial cities of Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Istanbul.