Postwar Studies on the Human Geography of Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is one of the less well-known parts of the world as far as geographers in the English-speaking world are concerned. Yet it has consistently attracted a modest level of interest and the literature that has accumulated over the last few decades provides both a useful fund of information about the region and a challeng ing indicator of potential for future work. In a short essay it is hardly possible to provide a comprehensive review and attention is restricted to contributions in the English language. This is perhaps unfortunate in that the persistent interest of French and German scholars in Eastern Europe cannot be fully documented, while the formidable output of East European geographers may be obscured. However, many of the contributions by English-speaking geographers include ample references to works in East European and other languages. Furthermore there are some East European countries with a regular output of English language geographical publi cations. Outstanding here is the Polish journal Geographia Polonica published entirely in English and running into almost 50 volumes since publication started in 1964. The collections of essays published in English by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences are also impressive, while the geographical section of the Romanian Academy's Revue Roumaine de Giologie Giophysique et Giographie Sirie de Giographie (abbreviated Revue Roumaine: Giographie in the references) contains a number of pieces in English interspersed among articles in French, German and Russian. However, because of the large number of such East European contri butions and the fact that there is a tendency towards repetition of certain basic themes, reviews of individual articles (as opposed to collections) are restricted to the last 15 years. To achieve even more stringent definition it is also proposed to restrict atten tion to literature produced during the period of socialism in Eastern Europe. This is not meant as a dismissive gesture towards the valuable foundation works such as M.I. Newbigin's (1915) Geographical aspects of Balkan problems in relation to the