A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe (2023)

I am writing from a small nation which is currently under threat, not only from the Orange Buffoon who wants a 51st, 52nd and 53rd State (as if that would get his face on Mt. Rushmore, or even a 666 dollar bill), but also from that weakness which politicians and political parties throughout the ‘West’ (‘And what just is that ‘West’, exactly, and how came it by its capital, Dubya?’, you ask? I’ll set aside what e.g. David Graeber might say about that, and give ya MK’s version below) have for their true constituents, those billionaires and corporations, whose ‘donations’, and lobbyists have procured those low-tax, lax-regulated environments which threaten to forever enshrine their monopolistic, trans-national dominance—at the expense of whatever is left of what we once called our culture—

‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general.’ (Raymond Williams, Keywords)

—as good a starting partial definition as any, I suppose (if but one of Williams’s tripartite initial forays into the topic) , or, with Milan Kundera in this book,

‘The identity of a people and of a civilization [as] reflected and concentrated in what has been created by the mind’

—a collectively-imagined homeland-of-the-soul which seeks out not so much political, corporate incarnation (though that, too, is by force majeure necessary for peoples from small nations, nations under threat), as continued expression and development in the lives of those who have staked a claim on that shared, imagined identity.

OK, that’s a (very) preliminary stab at culture, but: small nation?

Leopold Bloom took famously took his own stab at the second half of that term in his confrontation with the Nationalist in the Cyclops episode of Joyce’s Ulysses:

—But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

—Yes, says Bloom.

—What is it? says John Wyse.

—A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. . . . Or also living in different places

To that, I would only venture to add: ‘…or different people living in the same place…’

Anyhow, here is Kundera’s supplement:

I offer you my definition: the small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it. A Frenchman, a Russian, or an Englishman is not used to asking questions about the very survival of his nation. His anthems speak only of grandeur and eternity. The Polish anthem, however, starts with the verse: “Poland has not yet perished. . .” 

Ironically, though, cos even circa 1983, the larger nations, too, have become, by stealth, increasingly more imperilled by those forces which Kundera diagnoses in the second of the two essays (‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’) to be found in this book—forces which had by then already swallowed up small nations such as his own native Czechoslovakia: those totalizing, totalitarian forces of

uniform[ity], standardiz[ation], [and] centraliz[ation], determined to transform every nation of its empire /[…] into a single […] people.

—a single, dispossessed, deracinated, subjected people, the overlords of whom for Kundera was of course, in the ‘East’, the Soviet Union, but here, in the ‘West’, the ‘Free World’? As a newly-arrived emigrant to France in 1975, Kundera witnessed a ‘West’ which was, even then, becoming increasingly beset by mass ‘culture’ (mass media, delivered to the masses top-down, access to and the imprimatur of which which—for artists, intellectuals and so-called ‘consumers’ alike—was sanctioned/gate-kept by the mid-level bureaucrats of another form of debased culture—’corporate culture’.

Such gate-keepers are one species of the genera that Kundera labels as ‘Vandals’:

Who is a vandal? It is absolutely not the illiterate peasant who in a fit of fury sets fire to the rich landowner’s mansion. The vandals I myself run into are all of them educated, pleased with themselves, socially well situated, and not especially resentful toward anyone. The vandal, rather, is that prideful narrow mind, pleased with itself and ever ready to claim its rights. That proud narrow-minded fellow believes that the power to fit the world to his own image is among his inalienable rights and, since the world is largely made up of matters beyond his capacities, he adapts the world to his image by destroying it. Thus, an adolescent knocks the head off some statue in a park because the statue infuriatingly seems a better human than he; and since any act of self-affirmation brings man satisfaction, he does it with delight. Men who live only their own contextless present, who know nothing of the historical continuity around it and who lack culture, can transform their nation into a desert with no history, no memory, no echoes, and untouched by beauty.

So, Vlad the ImPutinator, and Xi Jinping? Yeah, sure, but where I live it’s the Larry Ellisons, the Elon Musks, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Peter Thiels and Alex Karps and Sam Altmans, etc., etc., who are actively at work making not illiterate peasants, but AI-literate serfs of us all for that almost-here ‘contextless present’ in which we will all submit to whatever ‘rules-based order’ funds and fuels and produces (but needs no longer bother manufacture consent for) those forever-wars which will be are dutifully trumpeted at us in the troughs of our ‘feeds’ (and, for the not-so-’OK’-boomers, don’t forget ‘legacy media’), all of which are owned by the new Vandals in Chief (heck, just today, we Canadians found that, while we likely will be offering-up our ID/private data to prove to the likes of Palantir (or, you-name-the-Tolkien-inspired post-humanist data-harvester) that we aren’t children-on-the-interwebs, we won’t be even ever-so-slightly taxing foreign ‘streaming media’ giants and are in desperate need national ‘AI Literacy’ education, buy-in, and ‘trust’, hmm, wonder why?)

And ‘populist’ grifters take the people’s real anxiety over what the (very late) capitalist or dawning techno-feudal world has done and will go on doing to their lives and in exchange for their bodies and their souls offers them …nostalgia for some non-existent past, be it the purported golden age of the Daddy Knows Best, McCarthyite Yank 1950s, or some equally mythical utopia when the free markets ruled the streets because Britannia ruled the waves, and the Ancients were crushing the Moderns in the Academy (cf the Battle of the Books/Querelles des Anciennes)—you know, when colonization was just the spread of ‘Western Civilization’, ‘the Western Tradition’ of Greek sculpture and Petrarchan Sonnets and obeisance to whatever J.D. Vance imagines he thinks that St. Augustine meant by a book whose title, The City of God is all that that sad, sycophant extraordinaire and hollow simulacrum of a man has ever read of thar Church Father…

But before that particular sub-section of the Twitterverse, those lovers of all things ‘trad’ and ‘northern European’ out there get their panties wet over the cover of this book, buying it thinking that its title means that ‘our West’, for Kundera, the word ‘West’ hearkens to an intellectual history which may begin with the schism between Rome and Byzantium, but which finds its true expression first in the coffee houses of the eighteenth century…

the era founded on the authority of the thinking, doubting individual, and on an artistic creation that expressed his uniqueness …

and its apotheosis in the modernist cosmopolitan cultures (plural) of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, characterized not by any uniform notion of culture, but by their very multiplicity and by the spontaneous, organic growth of arts (literature, music, film and other visual arts, theatre) in the hearts and lives of the people—and especially by those ‘Reviews’ (intellectual-artistic journals, sort of, kind of like the LRB or NYRB, etc., but read by an enormous number of ordinary people in countries such as Kundera’s own, and which celebrated and protected and disseminated the avant-garde movements in those very arts).

So, culture as an imagined, then created (and grass-roots-nourished/fostered) movement as well as ideal, and capital-H History as a looming threat…

Central Europe longed to be a condensed version of Europe made up of nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest space. How could Central Europe not be horrified facing a Russia founded on the opposite principle: the smallest variety within the greatest space?

Alas, here in the (now post-History, eternally-present) West…? With its potentially greatest variety in the greatest space (what Leonard Cohen said of the USA, where ‘they got the range, and machinery for change)…?

The West has kidnapped itself, it seems, for

‘ The disappearance of such reviews from Western public life or the fact that they have become completely marginal is, in my opinion, a sign that “culture is bowing out.”’

(In France none of his friends even understood what they had already given up for TV-land back then, let alone what Kundera’s homeland was losing, let alone…everywhere…what we all stand to be losing now…)

You know, it used to be (in Czech of 1968, also Latin America not so long ago, e.g.), if you banned or tried to control the arts, the nation/the people rose up and the artists upped their game in a tag-team/mutually-reinforcing kinda way.

The identity of a people and of a civilization is reflected and concentrated in what has been created by the mind—in what is known as “culture.” If this identity is threatened with extinction, cultural life grows correspondingly more intense, more important, until culture itself becomes the living value around which all people rally. That is why, in each of the revolts in Central Europe, the collective cultural memory and the contemporary creative effort assumed roles so great and so decisive—far greater and far more decisive than they have been in any other European mass revolt. […] It was the theater, the films, the literature, and the philosophy that, in the years before 1968, led ultimately to the emancipation of the Prague Spring

Now, though? Can we re-learn what we have lost (especially without falling for some nostalgic golden-age grift)? Can we defend what is left of the human(e) world before it disappears up the spout of the algorithm? Listen to just a bit of the song that MK sings of the West, in spite of the atrocities we have piled up around us: we once had the possibility of…great variety.

Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a vision based on a deep distrust of History. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx, that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate—that is the history of conquerors. The people of Central Europe are not conquerors. They cannot be separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the wrong side of this history; they are its victims and outsiders. It’s this disabused view of history that is the source of their culture, of their wisdom, of the “nonserious spirit” that mocks grandeur and glory. “Never forget that only in opposing History as such can we resist the history of our own day.” I would love to engrave this sentence by Witold Gombrowicz above the entry gate to Central Europe.

[…] in our modern world where power has a tendency to become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few big countries, all European nations run the risk of becoming small nations and of sharing their fate. In this sense, the destiny of Central Europe anticipates the destiny of Europe in general, and its culture assumes an enormous relevance.

It’s enough to read the greatest Central European novels: in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, History appears as a process of the gradual degradation of values; Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities paints a euphoric society that doesn’t realize that tomorrow it will disappear; in Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, pretending to be an idiot becomes the last possible method for preserving one’s freedom; the novelistic visions of Kafka speak to us of a world without memory, of a world that comes from historic time. All of this century’s great Central European works of art, even up to our own day, can be understood as long meditations on the possible end of European humanity.

---

89 Words (2025)

To attempt to help illustrate what MK is talking about in that final, longish passage quoted above, concerning one of the great cultural legacies of the last century, the (formal and existential) discoveries made by the novel in general and the Central European novel in particular, I shall now extract and briefly comment on some entries from this new, brief book, which is perhaps for the completists only, but for me (wannabe completist) it hit the spot…well, almost completely, particularly the first half, the ‘89 Words’ half, as the terms he ‘defines’ therein form the basis, from circa 1985, of the later, shorter, sometimes modified list included at the end of Kundera’s 1986 book, the absolutely essential The Art of the Novel

PS: for any other MK fans out there, my lengthy midrash upon The Art of the Novel —hereafter TAOTN below— can be found here …

In that book his penultimate chapter, ‘Part Six’, is subtitled ‘Sixty-three Words’… Below I will sometimes offer a comment on some of the present 89 Words, after reproducing a selection of same, though I may also simply reproduce those entries, almost always verbatim, which are self-explanatory, or about which I am unequipped to comment.

Kundera’s publisher has also employed an asterix (★) in the present volume , to indicate 12 new terms introduced to TAOTN and also included in 89 Words.

Some of my own contributions will provide context from elsewhere in TAOTN, but others will focus on those variations, when they occur, between the two lists, when simultaneously appearing in both books—mostly on those entries which are of most interest to me a practicing writer…

I shall format these differently:

Kundera’s text shall appear in the body of the post…

…and if I have anything to add or mention, those comments will appear as block quotations beneath the entry.

Finally, I have chosen not to write about the second half of this book (‘Prague, A Disappearing Poem’) at this time, though it is well worth reading

89 Words

★BEAUTY (and KNOWLEDGE). Those who say, along with Broch, that knowledge is the novel’s only moral end are betrayed by the metallic aura of the word “knowledge,” which is compromised by its connections to science. More is needed: the novel discovers every aspect of existence, including beauty. The first novelists discovered adventure. It’s thanks to them that adventure seems beautiful and something we want. Kafka described the situation of a person who is tragically trapped. Those who study Kafka used to argue a lot about whether the author was giving us any hope or not. No, no hope. Something else. But Kafka discovers how the unlivable situation is both strange and full of black beauty. Beauty: the last possible victory of a person who has lost hope. Beauty in art: the light subtly emanating from the never-said. This light suffuses great novels; there will never be a time when it fades because, human existence being perpetually forgotten by people, the discoveries of novelists, even when they become dated, will never cease to amaze us.

Kundera’s second sentence above is revised (which I have added bold for emphasis, and shall continue doing so below) as: Whatever aspects of existence the novel discovers, it discovers as the beautiful.

Additionally, Kundera is being absolutely serious when he says that the discovery of such ‘knowledge’ (some heretofore undiscovered aspect of the human condition) is the novel’s only morality: in TAOTN, he argues that what marks the novel’s “progress” most particularly is that it does not discover objective truths about morality, say, as science would claim objective knowledge of the material world. Rather, the novel sees ambiguity and contradiction everywhere it looks, and its sole duty is to undermine those who would seek to impose the scientific, binary, either/or way-of-knowing on the human realm–what Kundera calls “totalitarian truth”(14).

In Testaments Betrayed (hereafter TB), Kundera lauds Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses as having learned a key lesson from Rabelais, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel urges us to read the world the very way we should also read its text: to view it ironically, ambiguously. He wishes us to withhold moral judgement, suspend it, at least while we are reading his book. And above all else, humor is the key to helping us do just that.

Elsewhere, he writes: ‘Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil’ (TB 7).

(By the way, any novel that fails to clear this bar is, for Kundera, an “immoral” one (TAOTN 6)).

BOOK. If I’ve heard it said once, I’ve heard it said a thousand times on various radio broadcasts: “As I say in my book . . .”

The word “book” is given such weight, it’s stretched out so long and pronounced at least an octave above all the other words. When the same person says, “As people in my town say . . .” there’s no special emphasis on the word “town,” which has almost the same intonation. “My book” . . . the phonetic cue for literary masturbation.

COMIC. In offering us a beautiful illusion of human greatness, tragedy brings with it this one consolation. Comedy is crueler: it reveals to us in brutal terms the meaninglessness of everything. I guess that everything human has its comic side that, in certain cases, is widely known, admitted, exploited, and, in other cases, hidden from view. The true comic geniuses aren’t those who make us laugh the most but those who use comedy to reveal the unknown. History was also considered an exclusively serious terrain. However, there’s the unknown comic side of History. Just as there’s the comic side of sexuality (which is difficult to accept). (Here, homage to two friends: Philip Roth and Miloš Forman—to his Firemen’s Ball, in particular.)

This entry is somewhat longer in the present volume, as MK leaves out the references to History and sexuality in TAOTN. The sentence in bold above is rendered a bit differently as well, as: ‘I suppose all things human have their comic aspect, which in certain cases is recognized, acknowledged, utilized, and in others is veiled’. Elsewhere Kundera employs that last term, ‘veiled’, a number of times, e.g., in the entry for ‘Central Europe’: ‘Nineteenth century: A few great poets, but no Flaubert; the Biedermeier spirit: the veil of the idyllic draped over the real’ (in TAOTN—in 89 Words, ‘draped’ is renedered as ‘thrown’).

And: ‘Some translators want to replace the word “ugly” with the words “horrible” or “intolerable.” They find it illogical to react to a moral situation with an aesthetic judgment. But the word “ugly” is irreplaceable: the omnipresent ugliness of the modern world is mercifully veiled by routine, but it breaks through harshly the moment we run into the slightest trouble. (‘Ugly‘, TAOTN, altered in 89 Words)

And: ‘Indeed, all the great existential themes Heidegger analyzes in Being and Time—considering them to have been neglected by all earlier European philosophy— had been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the novel (four centuries of European reincarnation of the novel). In its own way, through its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one.’

And: ‘Kafka was one of the first (certainly along with Joyce) to uncover it in his novels. He unveiled sex not as the playing field for a small circle of libertines (in eighteenth-century style) but as a commonplace, fundamental reality in everyone’s life. Kafka unveiled the existential aspects of sex […]’ (TB 44)

IRONY. Which character is right, and which, wrong? Is Emma Bovary a pain in the ass? Or is she courageous, inspiring? No answer. The novel is by its very nature ironic, by which I mean its “truth” is hidden, unpronounced and unpronounceable. People want simplified portraits of the world where good and bad are clearly separated. With the heroism of Don Quixote, the novel finds itself in this inalterable terrain, while revealing to us the fundamental ambiguity of human affairs. Irony isn’t a personal penchant of this or that writer. It’s the essence of the novel as an art form. Irony = the way of making the ambiguous known.

The bold words above are rendered as ‘its “truth” is concealed, undeclared, undeclarable’ in TAOTN, where he also adds:

“Remember, Razumov, that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action,” says a Russian woman revolutionary in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Irony irritates. Not because it mocks or attacks but because it denies us our certainties by unmasking the world as an ambiguity. Leonardo Sciascia: “There is nothing harder to understand, more indecipherable than irony.” It is futile to try and make a novel “difficult” through stylistic affectation; any novel worth the name, however limpid it may be, is difficult enough by reason of its consubstantial irony.

★ NOVEL (European). The European novel developed in Central Europe in the first years of modernity, and it represents a historical entity in and of itself that, much later, would extend beyond the geography of Europe per se (into North and South America, in particular). By the richness of its forms, by the blinding intensity of its evolution, by its social position, the European novel (just like European music) is without compare.

This key entry is rendered somewhat differently in TAOTN, and could be seen as anticipating criticism of his understanding of the novel as a Eurocentric one—yes, he does claim primacy for the European novel, because of how it evolved, via the cosmopolitan nature of writers, all over the world, reading and responding to Rabelais and Cervantes inventions, creating an international Republic of Letters, literature not as a nationalist enterprise, but as artists reacting and replying to each others’ work…Europe as the cradle of a global phenomenon, not as a shrine of dusty antiquities:

Novel (European). The history (the integrated and continuous evolution) of the novel (of everything we call the novel) does not exist. There are only histories of the novel: of the Chinese novel, the Greco-Roman, the Japanese, the medieval novel, and so on. The novel I term European takes form in Southern Europe at the dawn of the Modern Era and in itself represents a historic entity that will go on to expand its territory beyond geographic Europe (most notably into both Americas). In the richness of its forms, the dizzyingly concentrated intensity of its evolution, and its social role, the European novel (like European music) has no equal in any other civilization.

NOVEL (and poetry). 1857: the most important year in the nineteenth century. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal: the height of lyric poetry. Madame Bovary: for the first time, a novel took up the conditions of poetry (the intention of “searching everywhere for beauty”; the importance of each specific word; the intense melody of the text; the demand for originality applied to each and every detail). In 1857, lyric poetry passed the baton to the novel’s poetry. The history of the novel moving forward would be that of the “novel as a form of poetry.” But to take up the conditions of poetry is something entirely different from a lyrical turn in the novel (to renounce its capacity for irony, to turn away from the exterior world, to transform the novel into a personal confession, to decorate it with ornamentation). The most important poetic novelists are antilyric: Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Gombrowicz. A novel = antilyric poetry.

NOVELIST (and writer). I’m rereading Sartre’s essay “Why Write?” Not even once does he use the words “novel” or “novelist.” He only talks about the “prose writer.” It’s a meaningful distinction. The writer has original ideas and an inimitable voice. He can use whatever form (including the novel), and everything he writes, being identifiable by his thinking and his voice, belongs in his oeuvre.

The novelist doesn’t make much of his own ideas. He’s an explorer who, while searching here and there, manages to uncover an unknown aspect of existence, which only a novel can clarify and make visible. He isn’t caught up in his voice but by a form, and he chases after it. Only the forms that respond to the needs of his dream make up his oeuvre.

The writer delves into the spiritual map of his time, nation, and eventually the history of ideas.

The only context where the value of a novel is made clear is in the history of the European novel. The novelist owes nothing to anyone, except Cervantes.

In TAOTN, Kundera appends, at the end of each major ¶, two short lists of writers who, in his estimation, are novelists worthy of the name and exemplify the novel’s definitive sine quibus nons that he is singling out:

‘[…] whatever he writes—being marked by his thought, borne by his voice—is part of his work. Rousseau, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Gide, Malraux, Camus, Montherlant’.

‘[…] he is seeking, and only those forms that meet the demands of his dream become part of his work. Fielding, Sterne, Flaubert, Proust, Faulkner, Celine, Calvino’.

NOVELIST (and the novelist’s life). “The artist must make posterity think that he never existed,” Flaubert said. Maupassant prevented his portrait from appearing in a series of famous writers. “The private life of a man and his face don’t belong to the public,” he said. Hermann Broch said the following about himself, Musil, and Kafka: “Not one of us has a real biography.” This doesn’t mean that their lives lacked interesting events, but that their lives weren’t destined to be distinguished, to be public, to become life-writing. When Karel Čapek is asked why he doesn’t write poetry, he says, “Because I hate talking about myself.” The distinctive characteristic of a novelist is they don’t want to talk about themselves. “I hate sticking my nose into the intimate details of the lives of great writers, and no biography can ever remove the veil from my life,” Nabokov said. Italo Calvino warned others: he was resolved to never say a single true word to others about his life. And Faulkner wanted “to be a nobody, kept out of history, leaving no trace at all, other than what is in my books.” (Let’s emphasize “books” and “published,” and not manuscripts, letters, and journals.) According to a famous metaphor, the novelist destroys the house of his life in order to build another with its bricks: the house of novels. With this in mind, the biographies of a novelist undo what the novelist did, and redo what he had undone. Biographies, which add nothing to art, cannot bring light, value, or meaning to a novel. When Kafka attracts more attention than Joseph K., then his posthumous death is underway.

---

I have bold-italicized the last sentence of this entry because of how central this idea is to Kundera’s book Testaments Betrayed, which I am (a tad stuck) in the middle of preparing one of my ‘Digested Reads’ for—after each section of which will also hopefully include a conversation with novelist Gary Amdahl, who, IMHO has one of the best eye-ear combos in the business. But I will leave you with a representative couple of pages from TB, forllowed by a ¶ from that WIP of ours—which hopefully goes some way toward illustrating just how much MK loathes the substitution of the artist’s life for his or her work. In TB, Kundera demonstrates how ‘Kafkaology’, the semi-religious worship of Kafka as some kind of latter-day saint, began via his literary executor, the writer Max Brod, who in one of his (desultory) novels turned his friend into the saintly character of ‘Garta’, and pursued his quest for secular canonization through four separate monographs

(Franz Kafka: A Biography (1937), The Faith and Teachings of Franz Kafka (1946), Franz Kafka, He Who Shows the Way (1951), and Despair and Salvation in the Work of Franz Kafka (1959))

on the Man, which appeared along with the novels, all published via Brod’s efforts alone…

Kafkology itself can be analysed into several facets:

1. “Following Brod’s example, Kafkology examines Kafka’s books not in the large context of literary history (the history of the European novel) but almost exclusively in the microcontext of biography.” His books are somehow “‘not separable from his person’”. Kafka is Joseph K, Gregor Samsa, etc., in other words, and the key thing is to come to understand not Kafka the artist, but Kafka the person.
2. “Biography becomes hagiography” (41). Kafka is made into some kind of saint (religious, leftist, etc.)
3. “Kafkology systematically dislodges Kafka from the domain of aesthetics“: his alleged philosophy, his letters, his diaries thus all become of primary importance, the novels far less so.
4. “Kafkology ignores the existence of modern art” (42), as if the context in which Kafka’s art developed was irrelevant or even detrimental to understanding him.
5. “Kafkology is not literary criticism […but] exegesis: his work is to be treated as analogical or allegorical. Literary criticism would deal with his work in terms of aesthetic context and innovation, and as the imaginative transformation of reality, but Kafkology “decodes religious messages, [and] deciphers philosophical parables.”

In closing, I can only repeat, with slight variation, MK’s last sentence from his entry ‘Novelist’ above:

When novelists attract more attention than their novels do, then the novel’s posthumous death is underway.

Thanks for reading!