Research Paper on:
Historical Significance of Inventing Eastern Europe The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment by Larry Wolff

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17-49 - speaks to defining moments of the Enlightenment that portrayed Eastern Europe in a wholly negative and condescending manner. While philosophers such as Rousseau and Voltaire were emitting  pungent literary remarks concerning how Eastern Europeans were barbaric, backward and uncivilized, the extent to which these erroneous accusations wreaked havoc upon its people was both grand and far-reaching.  Wolff presents these documents as a means by which to illustrate just how influential - if not detrimentally so - philosophical ideals were to Eastern Europes development, as well as  how such damning words became infused within the Eastern Europeans themselves, causing them to believe how wretched a people everyone else believed they were. "Clearly Poland and Russia, in  the eyes of Segur, belonged to the very same sphere and melange where continents and centuries, barbarism and civilization, mingled in fantastic improbability...Yet these impressions of Russia were in certain  respects more vivid and more explicit than those of Poland. Barbarian peoples of the ancient world simply came to life, marched right off a column that was carved in  the second century, and stepped out of stone relief into three dimensions" (Wolff 22). Early on, when Russia was but a small  eastern European principality, the desire for cultural advancement was not of paramount importance. Instead, as the territory progressively developed into a great empire, the primary focus was upon gaining  significant ground with regard to establishing themselves as a world power. Prior to this time, however, Russia was comprised of the Slavs and the Rus, two communities that joined  together to become the first Russians. As Russia established its strength over time, there was no mistaking that this developing world power was a force with which the rest