2023-07-16 17:26:46
With Milan Kundera (1929-2023) disappears a great writer for whom “the art of the novel” was one of the common threads for understanding the European cultural heritage. He also, in his essays, sketched out a certain idea of Europe, which joins that of a Stefan Zweig or a Paul Valéry. A reflection that starts from the Central European experience but quickly widens to the destiny of the continent and today acquires a particular resonance.
In an essay published forty years ago in the journal Debate and which has just been opportunely reissued (And west kidnapped preceded by its twin: the “speech on the culture of small nations” delivered in Prague in 1967, Gallimard, 2022), Kundera defined Central Europe as a “Kidnapped West” : “culturally in the West, politically in the East and geographically in the center”. We can read post-1989 Europe as an attempt to reconcile politics with culture and geography.
Read the obituary: Milan Kundera, novelist of existence, is dead
For the small nations of Central Europe – this is one of their specificities – this is an existential question. Precisely because their existence is not self-evident, is not assured, they must persevere in their being through culture, through their contribution to European and universal culture.
This primacy of culture for the identity of the nations of Central Europe and the idea that they have of Europe does not mean “identity withdrawal”, but on the contrary openness. Central Europe, writes Kundera, is “maximum diversity in minimum space”. A summary of the European paradigm.
“The Other Europe”
Why did Western Europe not feel the cut with “The Other Europe” like mutilation, Kundera wondered? You can invoke the “provincialism of great cultures” – to use the expression of the Czech intellectual Antonin Liehm (1924-2020) – linked to their feeling of self-sufficiency. There was also, for a long time, a lazy acceptance of mystifying ideological language such as the hallowed phrase in journalism, as well as in school textbooks: “The People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe.” Three words, three lies. They were not democracies, but dictatorships, eminently unpopular regimes that were not even in Eastern Europe, but in Central Europe. “To misname an object is to add to the misfortune of this world”, said Camus. Kundera offered another glossary, another reading grid and thereby contributed to modifying the mental geography of Europe in the West of the continent.
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