| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Timothy Snyder. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2003. Pp. xv, 367. $35.00.
This is certainly one of the most interesting works in East European history to have appeared in the last decade.	1
The book is divided into three parts. The first concerns Vilnius or Wilno or Vilne, depending on whose point of view Timothy Snyder is discussing at the moment. He introduces Wilno in 1569 as the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a cosmopolitan place, a great cultural center for Catholics, Orthodox, Calvinists, and Jews. A Lithuanian could speak Polish, Ruthenian, Latin, the Baltic language we now call Lithuanian or, more likely, a combination of these.	2
Lithuania was a political conception with multiple cultural manifestations. Lithuania in this sense lasted until the Polish insurrection of 1863, when exclusively conceived nations began to contest the meaning of the name and its embodiment in the capital city. For those who now thought of themselves as Poles, Wilno was one of the four great centers of Polish culture, along with Warsaw, Kraków, and Lwów. For those in the region who identified with the new linguistically based Lithuanian nationality, Vilnius was venerated as the capital of their glorious medieval state, no matter that Lithuanian speakers only constituted a small minority in the city before the 1940s. Vil'nia was also the main cultural center of the majority nationality of the old Grand Duchy, now creeping toward crystalization as a Belarusian nation.	. . .

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