In the past few decades, a logical pattern by which writers translate historical events into the written word has evolved.

First, there are the instant accounts--the "I was there to see it all" stories, the news compilations, the inside scoops.

Some, often many, months later, there are the scholarly analyses. Competing and complementing scholars attempt to frame the debate after carerful highbrow consideration. Theories abound. A School of Thought may even emerge.

And finally, through the undefinable creative process, the ultimate analysis appears. Literature.

The Magic Lantern:

The Revolution of '89

Witnessed in Warsaw,

Budapest, Berlin and Prague

By Timothy Garton Ash

Random House

156 pages; $17.95

In the eight months since the "revolutions" of Eastern Europe, publishers have flooded the market with instant account books, some better than others. The scholarly books are just beginning to appear, playing to a limited academic audience. And the "literature of 1989" has for the most part, not yet arrived.

But in the scant months since those monumental events, Timothy Garton Ash has produced a work which brings out the best aspects of all three genres. The Magic Lantern is at once sensational, scholarly and literary.

Ash has compiled five essays of his own first-person accounts of the East European "refolutions," as he calls them. The first four essays recount the changes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The fifth attempts to summarize his observations and draw some conclusions from the first four chapters.

The book's first-person essays get progressively better, longer and more elaborate. Ash's accounts begin in warsaw in 1980, where as an observing historian, he met opposition leaders Lech Walesa and Adam Michnik even before Solidarity became a household world in the West.