Published in 1941, on the precipice of a cataclysm that would engulf her subject, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia is far more than a travelogue. It is a colossal, 1,200-page meditation on history, civilisation, violence, and the eternal struggle between the creative and destructive impulses of humanity. Born from two extended trips to Yugoslavia in 1937, the book uses West’s journey, accompanied as she were, by her husband, her guide Constantine; a Serbian poet and diplomat, and his wife Gerda, all along as a narrative scaffold to support an immense historical and philosophical inquiries. At its heart lies a central, urgent thesis: to understand the turbulent, fractious, and seemingly incomprehensible present of the Balkan region, one must undertake a deep, unflinching excavation of its past. For Rebecca West, the Balkans were not a fringe “powder keg” but the very vessel where the forces shaping European history; empire, faith, nationalism, sacrifice, and tyranny, have been most violently and revealingly forged. The present, in all its complexity and foreboding, is seen as the direct and logical, if tragic, product of accumulated centuries, a whole Landscape as a Pergament of written history. Join me in a look into her interpitations.
