Do you need a long century to create a nation?

Abstract

The issue of nation-building in Eastern Europe in modern studies is increasingly considered from the standpoint of constructivism. In the region, there is an active revision of ideas about the hierarchy of identities and the role of nations in its history. Therefore, the plots associated with the processes of constructing nations are in the current historiographic field. An example of such a study is a collective monograph: Stalunas, Darius (ed.). Spatial Concepts of Lithuania in the Long Nineteenth Century. Boston, 2016. It is devoted to the analysis of images and ideas about the “Lithuanian space”, which were formed in the “long 19th century” in the context of Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Belarusian nation-building. The creators of the book propose to use the concept of “spatial rotation” of the German academic tradition, in particular, Karl Schloegel, who interpreted the social space as a place in which “history takes place”. The study of this space, according to Schloegel, is part of the conceptual “spatial rotation”. The book is an undoubted step forward in the study of (self-) presentation of the nations of Eastern Europe. It is written on a wide range of sources, many of which are involved in this context for the first time, and is focused on modern approaches to the study of the national. The book sums up a certain amount of current research on the “Lithuanian national”, and became a stage in the study of the mental and historical “Lithuanian space”.