Two celebrated essays by Milan Kundera have been republished in a new volume by Faber. Kundera has spent his long career grappling with questions about the writer’s place in politics and society, and as a Czech writer living in France since 1975, with questions of East, West and the idea of Europe.
The first essay is an address given to the Czech Writers’ Congress in the lead-up to the 1968 Prague Spring, when a flourishing Czech literary culture was coming into greater conflict with the communist regime. While the spectre of state censorship shadows the essay, Kundera takes a different angle on the question of writers, politics and nations by examining the cultural anxiety of “small nations” at perpetual risk of being swallowed by larger ones; in the case of Czech culture, threatened on each side by Germany and Russia and in the late 20th century, by globalisation.
Rather than succumbing to narrow nationalism, Kundera’s solution is to face outwards: for small nations to position themselves as part of Europe, situating the local in global context and being guided by human rather than national values. Translators are given particular praise for their work in deprovincializing literature while retaining focus on the specific, national and local.
The second essay, A Kidnapped West, makes it immediately clear why these essays were republished in 2022. Here Kundera is concerned with how geography and politics have shaped the ways we imagine Europe. Writing in the early 1980s when the Soviet Union showed no imminent signs of collapse, he saw central Europe as under perpetual threat from Russian aggression. Positioned since 1945 on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, Kundera considered central Europe to belong instead, in cultural terms, to western Europe: the “kidnapped West”.
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He comes across as sharply prescient in pinpointing Russia, rather than the communist ideal, as the real threat. But if he manages to correctly predict the continuity between Soviet expansionism and the Russian imperialism that has re-emerged under Putin, the idea of western Europe as a space of shared values and culture seems much less certain today. If in the 1980s television seemed the greatest threat, in our own internet age of far-right populism and hardened borders, the shared imaginary of western Europe appears even more fragile and fragmented.
