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This article comments on the problematic uses of East–West rhetoric in Anglo-American academia, literary culture, and popular media more generally. Of special interest to the author is how the cultural cachet of an Eastern European origin offered émigré writers a readymade audience in the last decades of the Cold War, and how these same writers then used this attention to redefine Eastern Europe, and in such a way that would exclude them from it. Rather than rehearse well-established critiques of the East–West binary, the article suggests several ways in which both scholarly and popular discourses continue to rely on it, though often in ways that call even our disciplinary boundaries into question.

Inhalt: Nihilism -- Time flows, the child plays -- Good and evil, joy and pain -- Reason, which hurts -- The time is at hand -- The death of God -- The flame of eternity -- Eternal love -- Our insatiable desire for more future: on the eternal return of the same