A friend introduced me to the novels of Milan Kundera at the beginning of my first year as an undergraduate. Here was something irresistible: a fusion of wit, style, absurdity, extravagantly choreographed sex, vaulting high-mindedness and principled disdain for what Nabokov called poshlost—“Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities…” Starting with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I read through all his books by the end of the Christmas holiday. It was not difficult to create a genealogy in which Kundera stood as a successor to the two other Czech writers of whom I’d heard, Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hašek (author of The Good Soldier Švejk—which if you haven’t read, you should), and I held forth on the subject to anyone who would listen.
Returning to the novels over the past couple of months, for the first time since then, Kundera’s virtuosity is still apparent—but my overwhelming feeling has been one of sadness. Not for the preposterousness of my undergraduate self, but for the plight of an artist who successively embraced, suffered, resisted and escaped the imperialism—cultural, political and military—imposed on what was then Czechoslovakia by its Soviet-Russian overlords. Sex and high culture, at least as his novels represent them, were a form of protest against the stultifying conformism of life under totalitarian rule; an attempt to celebrate and shore up the human condition against an ideology and a political apparatus that would overwhelm it.
All of this was no doubt clearer to others than it had been to the teenage me, and by the early 2010s Kundera’s reputation was waning. Cool and even edgy a decade and a half earlier, he was on the verge of becoming a Cold War relic: a period piece moulded by his experiences under Stalinism and its heirs, and whose responses, though ingenious and occasionally daring, could have little to say to a multipolar world that had moved on.
But neither history nor literary history run along straight lines, and Kundera’s currency has seldom felt stronger than it does today. This is the doing of an unlikely and unwitting benefactor: the Russia of Vladimir Putin. The invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 have been a vivid reminder of that which, for Kundera, was always at stake: the freedom of individuals, particularly those in the nations that were constrained to exist within the eastern bloc, to express and enjoy and endure the perplexities of the human condition.
Kundera is now 94 years old. He has lived in France since 1975—first as an exile, then as a citizen. In the years since the iron curtain came down, he generated his share of controversy for having supported the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia before turning against it, but he is now celebrated in Brno and Prague. Although it is no great stretch to imagine the tenor of his thoughts about the war in Ukraine, we can only guess at their detail. In doing so, there is much to be gained from his new title, A Kidnapped West, in which his publisher reissues two of his most powerful essays: “The Literature of Small Nations”, originally delivered as a lecture to the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in 1967, and “The Tragedy of Central Europe”, first published for a western audience in 1983.
The invasion of Ukraine has been a vivid reminder of that which, for Kundera, was always at stake
“The Literature of Small Nations” is the shorter of the two pieces. In it, Kundera reflects on the condition of Czech as a language with a comparatively small number of speakers, and as a culture with a correspondingly diminished footprint. How to marry a sense of national identity to a literary and artistic world in which the wellsprings are, almost to a fault, cosmopolitan?
The answer for many Czechs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (not including Kafka, who guaranteed himself an international audience by writing in German) was to invent a literature in their own tongue that could stand alongside those of the major European languages in quality, if not quantity. Kundera urged his compatriots to do the same in their own age. The cause could not be more important. Because art deals in “universalism”, it has the capacity to banish the “provincialism” that the sham enlightenments of the Soviet project took as their prey. If, in 1967, the “Czech nation” was to be rescued from the “cultural periphery of Europe”, then his fellow writers knew what they had to do.
For his own part, Kundera had just published his first novel, The Joke, a deftly managed testament to Gore Vidal’s dictum that “at full strength, wit is rage made bearable”, with much to say about Czech folk tradition and the cruelly dehumanising fictions of life under party rule. When the Soviets sent in the tanks to reassert their authority the following August, The Joke was banned.
Exiled in France, the prospect of his homeland being forced to the “periphery of Europe” continued to trouble Kundera. The second essay here, “The Tragedy of Central Europe”, is one response—and is more complicated than one might expect. The “tragedy” Kundera had in mind was one of cultural and therefore political erasure, but the target of his ire was not only or principally the Soviets. Rather, he had in his sights the Europe that, in the interests of a quiet, prosperous life, abandoned Czechoslovakia (along with Poland and Hungary) to Soviet imperialism.
In doing so, this Europe—while often patting itself on the back for its internationalism and social progressivism—not only absolved itself of responsibility for people like the Czechs but also effaced the bonds of culture and history in virtue of which Europe stands for anything at all. As such, the “tragedy” of central Europe was one that, whether the west cared to acknowledge it or not, engulfed Europe as a whole.
It is easy to see Kundera’s point. We tend to think of the Urals as the geographical boundary of Europe, just as the ancient Greeks and Romans saw it as extending as far as the Don river. One might also consider the famous maps of “Queen Europe” devised in the 16th century to appeal to Spanish imperial vanity, but also congenial to a certain kind of learned Protestant keen to stress the peripherality of Rome. Here, Bohemia—the western portion of what is now the Czech Republic—sits right in the middle, somewhere around this queen’s solar plexus. A paradoxical effect of the eastern expansions of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires in the 19th century was that Bohemia moved closer to the eastern fringe: the boundary of Europe now fell where German ceased to be a language of government. Beyond that lay the Slavs, whose barbarism and geostrategic insignificance meant that they could be left to the mercies of their Russian brethren, the better to keep both of them out of the “civilised” parts of the continent. One thinks of The Waste Land, where—channelling Hermann Hesse—Eliot conjures the threat posed by “those hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains”.
When, after the Second World War, the eastern boundary moved west with the advancing Red Army, it was accepted that the cultural and national identities of Bohemia (along with the rest of central Europe) should be reassigned. Better this than to risk the horde overrunning Europe entirely.
In brief, Kundera seeks to remind his western readers that the Europe to which they profess themselves committed is more than an accident of geography, and that Mitteleuropa is very much a part of it.
It is here, however, that we run into problems with what Kundera has to say. Between 2004 and 2007 all of what had, until 1990, been the Soviet-controlled states of the Warsaw Pact were admitted to the EU. In response, it was often asserted that, in all senses that matter (excluding Eurovision and football), the eastern boundary of Europe was the eastern boundary of the EU. Beyond this, rights shaded into realpolitik in the form of a Russian sphere of influence.
Suffice it to say that, after February 2022, this position became untenable. This was not simply on account of Russian brutality, but because the Ukrainians defended themselves—just as the Hungarians and Czechoslovaks tried to do in 1956 and 1968—in the name of their European-ness, of their right to choose for themselves their cultural and political orientation without direction or approval from Moscow. So it was that the first states to understand the threat and come to Ukraine’s military aid were found beyond the EU’s heartland in the territories that once comprised Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire: Russia’s former European vassals and annexes (with the exception of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary), Nordic countries and the UK.
Any definition of Europe worthy of the name must be able to accommodate Ukraine, and do so on the grounds of culture every bit as much as those of politics or economics. Putin’s propagandists and useful idiots may argue that “the west” is trying to claim Ukraine as its own, but “the west” in this case simply means Europe, of which Ukraine has always been a part. The uncomfortable truth—shirked by Kundera, by many of those repulsed by what Russia is doing and by the Russian government itself—is that Russia is European too. This is true of the achievements of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Tarkovsky and the Ballets Russes, of course, but also of Russia’s destructive-appetitive worst. One of the oddest things about coverage of the 2022 Russian invasion was the procession of those wondering, with anguished sincerity, how something so awful could be happening in Europe. As if, throughout history—some of it very much within living memory—Europeans had not done atrocious things to one another and to various peoples around the world.
With such considerations in mind, it is clear that Kundera certainly has, or has had, his blind spots—particularly when looking east. But these are his problem rather than ours, and they should not distract us from the debt of gratitude that he is otherwise owed. The signal virtue of his novels is that they affirm the value of culture—literature, music, the performing and visual arts—both as excellent to think with and as the most representative object of human experience. Now, perhaps more than ever, this affirmation matters.
