About this book
"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.
About Unknown Author
Milan Kundera (1. dubna 1929 Brno – 11. července 2023 Paříž) byl česko-francouzský spisovatel. Od roku 1975 žil ve Francii, v roce 1979 byl zbaven československého státního občanství, roku 1981 získal občanství francouzské a v roce 2019 mu bylo vráceno občanství české. Texty psal nejdříve česky, později francouzsky. Do literatury vstoupil jako básník a dramatik, nakonec se ale stal celosvětově známým především jako prozaik a esejista. Jeho texty, zejména *Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, Nesmrtelnost* a *Žert,* se zařadily mezi nejčastěji překládaná česká díla ve světě. Svá pozdější díla ve francouzštině k překladům do češtiny dlouho nesvěřoval, první přeloženou prózou do rodného jazyka se stala až Slavnost bezvýznamnosti v roce 2020.
----------
Milan Kundera (April 1, 1929, Brno – July 11, 2023, Paris) was a Czech-French writer. He lived in France since 1975, was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979, acquired French citizenship in 1981, and had his Czech citizenship restored in 2019. He first wrote his texts in Czech, later in French. He entered literature as a poet and playwright, but eventually became known worldwide primarily as a prose writer and essayist. His texts, especially *The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality* and *The Joke*,* are among the most frequently translated Czech works in the world. He did not entrust his later works in French to Czech translations for a long time, and the first prose work translated into his native language was The Celebration of Insignificance in 2020.
Track your reading journey with BookOwl
