It was a place, West soon learned, of endlessly fascinating complication, and a place that was gravely endangered. Here was a land whose past, present, and future placed it always at the intersection of immensely powerful states, empires, and faiths. West wrote to an official of the Council that the country would inevitably be "overrun either by Germany or, under Russian direction, by communism which would destroy its character, blot out its inheritance from Byzantium." Soon she would realize, if she did not already, that that "inheritance from Byzantium" was also a tense and complex thing, since the Byzantium of Christian Orthodoxy was also the Istanbul of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the rise of the Nazis and the ongoing depredations of Stalinism, tensions were rising in the Balkans-as if they had not historically been high enough. In the spring of 1936, the British Council invited Rebecca West to lecture in Yugoslavia. FT March 2000: Rebecca West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)Ĭopyright (c) 2000 First Things 101 (March 2000): 47-48.
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