Barbara Jelavich, who died recently, taught history for nearly four decades at the University of California, Berkeley, and Indiana University. With her husband Charles, she was one of the pioneers of Balkan historical scholarship in North America. When the American universities became the prime center of Balkan studies after the Second World War, the role of the Jelaviches acquired a broader significance both in research and the training of graduate students. The two-volume history of the modern Balkans, recently published in Hungarian translation, represents the apex of Barbara Jelavich's lifelong accomplishment.
Back in the days of Roosevelt's New Deal, when America was still innocent of European entanglements, scholarly research on the Balkans or any other region of Eastern Europe simply did not exist in the United States. The exception was California, where Robert J. Kerner, himself of Czech origin by way of Illinois, trained the first American students interested in the subject. These were mainly the children of south Slavic immigrants, the intellectually curious young men from Long Beach and Mountain View, like Wayne S. Vucinich and Charles Jelavich, whose family lore (and sometimes direct experience) included stories from the Old Country.
Barbara Jelavich was not part of this group. She was of Anglo-American stock with roots in the academic establishment of Cal, as old Berkeley is still called by native Californians, and developed interest in the Balkans almost by accident. Her dissertation, defended in 1948, dealt with the German system of alliances during the period of the "Second Imperialist War," that is, during Stalin's cynical bargain with Hitler from 1939 to 1941. It was in this context that she became interested in the perennial Russian involvement with Moldavia and Bessarabia, and generally with Russian Balkan entanglements. Her interest was whetted by access to the papers of the Russian imperial diplomat N. K. Giers (1820-1895) and ultimately resulted in the 1959 monograph Russia and the Rumanian National Cause. 1858-1859. Thereafter, Barbara Jelavich specialized in Russia's Balkan policy with particular reference to Greece and Romania. She brought out a dozen or so monographs on this and related questions, thereby complementing the related south Slavic interests of her husband Charles Jelavich, who also focused to some extent on Russia's foreign policy.
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The two-volume History of the Balkans
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was written in the twilight years of Balkan communism(s) and published by Cambridge University Press in 1983. Its Hungarian publication is quite an event: for better or worse, it will shape a modicum of intellectual interest for modern Balkan history in Hungary.
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Though Jelavich restricted herself to the last three centuries of Balkan developments, her two volumes, individually and as a whole, provide an accomplished synthetic narrative that will satisfy the needs of anyone interested in the whole span of Balkan history or histories. Both specialists and non-specialists will quickly discover that Jelavich's books supersede all previous attempts in this field by a wide margin. Although one might contest the accuracy of this or that statement or interpretation in the text, the preeminent effect of these two volumes is positive. Jelavich is discerning, consistent, and prodigally impartial. She writes with shrewd intelligence and perception. Her accounts of the most controversial topics ring true because they are entirely lacking in sensationalism. Her history is coolheaded, and an air of inevitability is created by her austere prose.
This significant leap away from the confines of narrow political history is especially noteworthy because the author gives prominence to the history of the Balkan peoples, in the sense of the developing aggregative communities, and at the same time offers, but only in the second place, exactly the right amount of information on the outward imperial systems that determined the course of indigenous national histories. This method underscores the coherent bonds among the divided co-nationals, separated, as they often were in Balkan history, by arbitrary political and systemic frontiers.
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