Kundera is not in a hurry to disentangle one and all – in an aphoristic tone – with Russian politics and Russian culture.
THE Milan Kundera is today 93 years old, but his text “The Mutilation of the West or The Tragedy of Central Europe”which was published in the French magazine “Le Debat” in November 1983, and recently published by Hestia, in an excellent translation by Yannis H. Haris, it has a dynamism and vitality that show no wrinkle (the book was published only a few months ago for the first time in French). A key concept in Kundera’s dense essay is the concept of Central Europe, under which he subsumes the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, possibly also Austria. Such a Central Europe, which derives a crucial part of its identity from culture, with composers such as Hungarian Bela Bartokthe Czech prose writers Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek or the Pole Witold Gombrowicz, one of the leading exponents of the absurd, seems to be absent from the European consciousness of the first post-war decades, when the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Polish mobilizations from 1956 to 1970 come into open confrontation with the Soviet Union, causing a major political drama, as well as leaving a deep political and cultural trauma. A part of Europe which belongs to its best traditions, “expressing the greatest possible diversity in the smallest possible space”, collided with the Soviet Union and endured the heavy shadow of Russia, which presented the exact opposite: “the smallest possible diversity in the largest strong space”.
Kundera is not in a hurry to disentangle one and all – in an aphoristic tone – with Russian politics and Russian culture. It speaks of Russia’s historical efforts to modernize and of its desire to make contact with Europe and the West and acknowledges European debts to the Russian novel, but does not seek to silence what we all know in our own post-war days. of Russia with Ukraine from February 2022: the fact that Russia has never actually stopped fearing and distrusting Europe, considering that it has always been a superior, separate and at the same time united and compact world. Again, however, despite the fact that his approach is coming to the center of the current political topicality, the issue that perseveres with Kundera is not Russia’s more or less given positions and aspirations, but Europe itself: a Europe that he did not see in the post-war “small nations” of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland their desire for autonomy and independence, but only their narrow political problem. The “small nations” (with the distinct influence of the Jewish element) are not an occasion for a patriotic outburst, for a nationalism of the powerless and the weak, which will turn dwarfs into giants. The “small nations” formed a culture and a cultural and artistic continuum that clearly highlights the physiognomy of Central Europe: the mistrust towards a holistic conception of historical magnitudes, the discomfort with the idea that the beastly steps of History will lead anyway in her triumph. The culture of the “small nations,” the substance and weight of their wisdom, act as hidden nuggets of gold whenever they sneer at grandeur and glory, or whenever they realize that History may not be identified with an endless march of progress, but equalized with the exact opposite, with a process of discounting values. And to move from culture to politics, this is exactly how the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland of the post-war years either mocked or criticized the Soviet Union and its satellites on the ground. And in this line, even if Europe does not mean it and does not understand it, the “small nations” are flesh of the flesh of the European continent. Child of the Greco-Roman civilization and Christianity, Europe, unable to recognize the contribution of the “small nations” in its history, first lost its God (probably hid him) and soon it was also deprived of its culture, in order to replace with the spirit of consumption and the omnipotence of the market, technology and media.
In the book we will also find Kundera’s speech at the Czechoslovak writers’ conference in 1967 a year before the Prague Spring. The author examines here the struggle to free the Czechs (beginning to lose their independence as early as the 17th century) from the long arm of Germany and from the specter of Germanism, which is done both through original literary production and through the volume and the bank of translations into the Czech language. Kundera’s texts are prefaced by Jacques Rupnik and Pierre Nora (from the Czech Republic and France respectively), knowledgeably and succinctly placing their thinking in today’s contexts.
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