ABSTRACT
From the turn of the nineteenth century onwards, Eastern Europeans dreamed of transforming the world around them through sweeping visions, bold political action, and determined political organization. These dreams linked them to their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, and were evidence of transnational hopes for the creation and development of a modern society, transmitted through journals, debating societies, and personal travel, among many other ways. But Eastern Europeans were not simply mimics, taking ideas fully formed elsewhere as blueprints for their own lives. Theirs was a creative appropriation, in which they adapted broader European ideas and visions about popular sovereignty and modern society to particular social circumstances and translated them into vernacular political idioms. In this way, they produced creative, often novel responses to the rise of mass politics, the challenges of industrialization, and the persistence of rural poverty.
