The Tragedy Of Central Europe

“We should welcome the context Kundera gives for the struggles between Russia and Europe, and the plight of those caught between them. His defense of small languages, small cultures, and small nations feels pressing.”—Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine “Kundera focuses on the relationship of Europe’s central ‘small nations’ like Czechoslovakia and Ukraine to Western culture and argues that their cultural identities were increasingly threatened.”—New York Book Review A short collection of brilliant early essays that offers a fascinating context for Milan Kundera’s subsequent career and holds a mirror to much recent European history. It is also remarkably prescient with regard to Russia’s current aggression in Ukraine and its threat to the rest of Europe. Milan Kundera’s early nonfiction work feels especially resonant in our own time. In these pieces, Kundera pleads the case of the “small nations” of Europe who, by culture, are Western with deep roots in Europe, despite Russia imposing its own Communist political regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Kundera warns that the real tragedy here is not Russia but Europe, whose own identity and culture are directly challenged and threatened in a way that could lead to their destruction. He is sounding the alarm, which chimes loud and clear in our own twenty-first century. The 1983 essay translated by Edmund White (“The Tragedy of Central Europe”), and the 1967 lecture delivered to the Czech Writers’ Union in the middle of the Prague Spring by the young Milan Kundera (“Literature and the Small Nations”), translated for the first time by Linda Asher, are both written in a voice that is at once personal, vehement, and anguished. Here, Kundera appears already as one of our great European writers and truly our contemporary. Each piece is prefaced by a short presentation by French historian Pierre Nora and Czech-born French political scientist Jacques Rupnik.

Excerpt from The Tragedy of Central Europe IT has been my endeavour in this book to describe some of the strange events in Central Europe of which I was an eye-witness during the year of 1919, when the future of millions of men of many races and of many creeds was being decided at the Conference of Paris. The year 19i9 witnessed the collapse and disintegration of the Austro - Hungarian Empire, an event of such far reaching results that no one can foretell what future lies in store for the small dominions and republics which have arisen from amidst the ruins of the Old Dual Empire. The year 1919 saw the desperate struggles between the Royalists and the Bolshevists in Russia, and was rendered memorable by the amazing attempt of Lenin to convert the ancient feudal kingdom of Hungary to the doctrines of Moscow. This strange adventure, by which a small gang of Lenin's agents captured the entire machinery of govern ment in Hungary and exercised despotic sway for a period of five months, was intended as the preliminary step towards a vast campaign to convert all the states of Central Europe to Bolshevism. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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This timely volume charts the discussions and debates which have led to the rediscovery of "Central Europe" within the political cultures of Eastern and Western Europe alike. From various historical, economic, cultural and political perspectives, the volume's contributors offer an appraisal of the distinctive features of a Central European identity and its relevance to contemporary European thought and politics. Contents: Central Europe: Definitions Old and New; What is Europe, Where is Europe? From Mystique to Politique; The Meaning of the Social Evolution of Europe; Central Europe: A Historical Region in Modern Times: A Contribution to the Debate About the Regions of Europe; Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change; We, Central-European East Europeans; The European Ideal: Reality or Wishful Thinking in Eastern-Central Europe?; Central European Attitudes; Central European Writers About Central Europe: Introduction to a Non-Existent Book of Readings; Milan Kundera's Lament; ; Central Europe: What It Is and What It Is Not; Another Civilization? An Other Civilization?; Is the Russian Intelligentsia European?; Who Excluded Russia From Europe?; Which Way Back to Europe?; Central Europe Seen From the East of Europe; Does Central Europe Exist?

Much of the debates in this book revolves around Milan Kundera and his 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” Kundera wrote his polemical text when the world was pregnant with imminent social and political change, yet that world was still far from realizing that we would enter the last decade of the twentieth century with the Soviet empire and its network of satellite states missing from the political map. Kundera was challenged by Joseph Brodsky and György Konrád for allegedly excluding Russia from the symbolic space of Europe, something the great author deeply believes he never did. To what extent was Kundera right in assuming that, if to exist means to be present in the eyes of those we love, then Central Europe does not exist anymore, just as Western Europe as we knew it has stopped existing? What were the mental, cultural, and intellectual realities that lay beneath or behind his beautiful and graceful metaphors? Are we justified in rehabilitating political optimism at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Are we able to reconcile the divided memories of Eastern or Central Europe and Western Europe regarding what happened to the world in 1968? And where is Central Europe now?