#whatireadovershabbat Milan Kundera's A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, translated by Linda Asher and Edmund White (Harper, 2023)
Short books often fail to make an impact. When you talk about (if you are someone who does talk about) the Great American Novel, consider the contenders: Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Augie March, Underworld—books on the scale of an epic. Even less sweeping contenders, like The Scarlet Letter or Beloved, aren’t brief either. How many novellas really hold their own in this company—Benito Cereno, Daisy Miller? The qualifier “Great” all by itself seems to discount them.
Novels aren’t the only books that suffer the bias of length. For every Meditations on First Philosophy, you will find three works of classic philosophy as long as Phenomenology of Spirit. There exist many cherished one-act plays, but the three-act play still dominates the performance repertoire.
A cynical view would be that it all comes down to confirmation bias: anyone who devotes the time to reading, say, In Search of Lost Time has to believe it’s worth it. The longer one goes on reading—and hence not reading something else, or doing something else—the more value-added the psyche demands.
Maybe I’m credulous, not to say gullible, but I think the truth about long books is fairly banal. The longer the book, the more time the author has to immerse you in her world, or deepen your sympathy for her characters, or convince you of her claims. A confirmation bias built into the very act of reading, if you will.
Given my outlook (my bias, perhaps), it should come as no surprise how little I expected from A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, a collection of two previously published essays by Czech writer Milan Kundera. A Kidnapped West looked embarrassingly padded, quotes praising Kundera’s previous books filling several of the book’s less than 90 pages. That both essays first appeared more than 40 years ago heightened my fear of a cash-grab in the wake of his death last year.
Cash-grab it might well be, but this is a short book with an outsized impact. Indeed, each essay made ripples when first published: “The Literature of Small Nations” was delivered at a 1967 Czech Writers’ Congress that bluntly repudiated Soviet authority, anticipating, if not precipitating the Prague Spring of the following year; “The Tragedy of Central Europe” appeared in the magazine Le Débat in 1983 and was quickly translated into half-a-dozen languages. Historian Pierre Nora, former editor of Le Débat, says of the latter, “Kundera’s essay prepared minds for the enlargement of Europe to the Eastern countries” after the fall of Communism. “Who knows if its diffuse influence is not still active in the determination of some Central European countries to stay loyal to their own historical and cultural heritage?”
Reading the essays, I felt the thrilling tingle of a widened horizon of understanding. The first of them, “The Literature of Small Nations,” is a cri de coeur, a paean and a warning about the meaning of culture in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kundera, as a representative of one such “small nation,” makes the case that while culture—rather than religion or dynasty in previous eras, or commerce and entertainment in our own—changed the face of Europe between 1807 and 1938 (or thereabouts), nowhere was culture as impactful as in the overlapping lands of Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. This territory was the heart of multicultural Europe. Precisely because it brought together so many different cultures and peoples, remaininig to some extent undefined, in flux, it was surrounded and invaded by countries which sought to incorporate the region into some vaster, self-assured culture; above all, that of the Russian Empire. Only a self-reflexive commitment to one’s own national culture could justify, not to mention defend, the continued existence of any of these nations.
Such commitment materialized, leading to, besides a sense of national identity, an efflorescence of artistic offerings of the highest order, from Hermann Broch’s novels to Béla Bartók’s compositions to Freud’s revelations of the psyche. This outpouring is where “The Tragedy of Central Europe” picks up. When the Soviets descended on the area nebulously designated “Central Europe,” they cut these countries off from the sources of their culture. Christian (and Jewish) in character, an inheritor of Greco-Roman civilization and Enlightenment rationality, Central Europe wasn’t some bridge to the East, but rather the last outpost of the West. The Iron Curtain is an aptly chosen metaphor. The conquered lands were supposed to find the impediment to the outside world, to their former neighbors, opaque and immovable.
The Western origin of Central Europe has been overlooked, Kundera warns, because the West is losing its own connection to this shared past. Whereas the “small nations”—including, Kundera explains in a series of impassioned asides, the Jewish people—clung to culture as their (literal) raison d’être, much of the rest of the Western Europe could afford to focus its energy elsewhere: trade and politics, journalism and entertainment. He hardly doubts that the demotion of culture is irreversible, or that it has been completed in one form or another for decades. And without the perspective of a combined Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, Enlightenment tradition, no sense of commonality can be recognized between Western and so-called Central Europe. A part of the West was “kidnapped” by the Soviets. Worse yet, it was abandoned, and hardly anyone realized.
A short book’s advantage, I suppose, is as a shock delivery-system. Brevity forces a compression of new insight, until the end-result is a kind of pinpoint strike. Centuries after it was written, The Prince still gives a bracing dose of political realism. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense helped spark a revolution.
Before I opened A Kidnapped West, I regarded the illiberalism, so widely reported, of countries like Hungary and Poland as a reaction against Communism. Now I see it in a new light. Is this sort of illiberalism not the symptom of a ferocious return to the grounds of culture that secured these nations’ existence? the earthshaking reclamation of a past artificially buried? A short book can’t give all the answers. But the shock of a new perspective might be enough to make you pull down a few tomes you never found the time for before. Next up for me: Jacques Rupnik’s The Other Europe, Milosz’s The Captive Mind and, of course, more by Kundera himself.
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