The prologue to Duke Bluebeard's Castle (John 1991, 46) invites the audience to use the opera as a mirror for itself, to observe connections between spectator and spectated and also to look beyond the surface of the bloodied castle for its meanings. We do well to think similarly when considering ‘Eastern Europe’, which unlike other ‘Topographies’ in this volume, was not a politically unified entity before the Soviet Union occupied it in 1949. The region' s agglomeration of nations has nonetheless been characterized as a whole in various ways, regarded frequently as an aspiration, but equally often as a problem(see, for example, the editors' preface to Central Europe, 1/1 (May 2003), 3). It has been viewed as a ‘Kingdom of the Spirit’ (Garton Ash 1989, 161–91), a region of people sharing ‘thought-styles and thoughtworlds’ (Schöpflin 2004) or just a myth constructed by Western Europe (Wolff 1994). Eastern Europe's citizens themselves have had far from straightforward relations with their so-called homeland – many emigrated beyond its apparent provinciality or lived in deeply nostalgic, enforced exile. And at times, people have been placed there by sheer brute force.