History: subjectivity

Norman Davies “Europe. A History”

I have a book, it’s called “Europe. A History”, written by Norman Davies. It is a rather big book, more than a thousand pages about – obviously – the European history. It took me more than a year to finish, and not only because it is so long and has a very specialized lexicon, but because during the reading I had a strong urge to throw this book at the wall, and had to put it away and cool off a little bit.

Do not mistake me: I loved this book. I finished it two years ago and wanted to write about it since. The author – British historian – undertakes an impossible task: to write about the history of the part of the world we call Europe from the first people there to year 1992 AD. His main objective was to show all parts of Europe in an equal light. He was very subjective what light it should be.

The book taught me one important thing – the thing I probably should have known by now: history is subjective. As diligent as we try to find how people lived hundreds, thousands years ago, what happened, what those events meant – we are not discovering the TRUTH. We are interpreting the evidence. And sometimes we are interpreting interpretations.

The fact that the world history in Russia changed several times in this century – without falsifying any documents – is rather telling.

Norman Davies is unapologetically subjective in his vision of the European history. He presents a brilliant, lively picture where the author’s face is not hidden as it is usually appropriate in this kind of books. His style is flowing easily between countries and centuries, making interesting analogies, surprising connections, and curious hypotheses. He takes an interest in obscure places and epochs and makes them take their rightful place in the building of Europe as we know it now.

So, if the book is that wonderful what caused that violent reaction I was talking about earlier?

You see, he really, really doesn’t like Russia. And he confused Katherine Medici with Maria Medici.