Robert Cottrell is a former Moscow bureau chief of the Economist and the Financial Times. He is also the founding editor of the Browser. His review was written for books.substack.com.
Here is an essential quote from the review:
‘Czyżewski seems to hope that history is something which can be valued but transcended. He imagines that Europe can have a future continuous with, and yet somehow quite different from, its past. As I read him, his ideal Europe would have nations and peoples, but not wars between them; identities and cultures, but not xenophobia; borderlands for the mingling of identities and cultures, but not the nuisance of actual borders. His arguments mix the mystical with the practical.’
Writing about Krzysztof Czyżewski’s book, Robert Cottrell seems to be impressed by the way Czyżewski espresses his ideas, but also shows sympathy about the author of Xenopolis and makes the final remark which refers to the war in Ukraine: ‘How dispiriting it must be to fix one’s eyes on the twenty-first century, and then to find the nineteenth century at one’s back with a large invading army attached.’