War, identity, irony: how Russian aggression put central Europe back on the map
“Are you a dissident?”, a journalist asked Milan Kundera, when he had became exiled in France from his native Czechoslovakia in the mid-1970s. “No, I am a writer,” replied the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Not that he was indifferent to the plight of those who were opposing the Czech regime from inside, but he was wary of a political label being attached to a novel, and more generally to literature with a message, to art in the service of a political idea.
Yet Kundera, who died last month, was a man of ideas, which he explored particularly in his essays, the most influential being A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, published in Paris in 1983 and republished in English earlier this year. Central Europe, Kundera argued, belonged “culturally to the West, politically to the East and geographically in the centre”. The predicament of the small nations between Russia and Germany was that their existence was not “self-evident” but remained closely tied to the vitality of their culture, and historically intertwined with that of the west from which they had been “kidnapped” in 1945.
By putting central Europe on the map again, Kundera challenged the then prevailing misperceptions of the region, seen only through the prism of the primacy of the ideological east-west divide. This seminal essay sparked a Europe-wide debate in the 1980s and contributed to a change not only in the region’s self-perception but also to western Europe’s mental map of the continent.
A key element of this change was the rediscovery of the varied cultural legacies of central Europe. But the most controversial issue in the 1980s debate concerned the region’s relationship with Russia, which was – and remains – its main “constitutive other”(Germany being the other one), against whom the borders and identities of central Europe were shaped.
A most telling illustration of the ways cultural identities became entwined with political ones (with echoes of the current discussions of postcolonialism) can be found in a memorable debate in Lisbon in 1988 involving writers from central Europe (including Czesław Miłoszand György Konrád) and from Russia. Though Kundera was physically absent, his essay was very much part of the debate. Joseph Brodsky, the exiled poet from Leningrad, criticised Kundera’s concept of central Europe, as an imagined community with no substance:
“In the name of literature, there is no such thing as ‘central Europe’. There is Polish literature, Czech literature, Slovak literature, Serbo-Croatian literature, Hungarian literature, and so forth. It is impossible to speak about this concept even in the name of literature. It is an oxymoron.”
Miłosz: “Divide et impera [divide and conquer]. This is a colonial principle, and you are for that.
Brodsky: “Divide et impera. In what way, Czeslaw? I don’t understand you … Could you be specific?”
Miłosz: “The concept of central Europe is not Kundera’s invention. You have an obsession that it is Kundera’s invention. Not at all. Central Europe is an anti-Soviet concept derived from the occupation of those countries … And I am afraid there is certainly a taboo in Russian literature and that taboo is empire.”
During the 1980s the central European idea moved from culture to politics – from the “Kundera moment” to the “Havel moment”, and thus prepared the ground for its emancipation from the Soviet fold.
Forty years on, some 20 translations of Kundera’s essay have appeared within a year (the latest in Thai and Korean), a phenomenon that suggests it has acquired a new relevance in a context tied to the war in Ukraine and the return of “the Russian question”.
Kundera’s argument in 1983 was that Russia represented “another civilisation”, centred historically on the rise of an autocratic imperial state, where religious and political power had merged, leaving little or no space for civil society and the autonomy of the cultural sphere – two conditions of freedom as understood in the west. Russia’s “Europeanisation” was associated with its westward expansion into Europe. In this perspective Soviet Russia was the continuation of imperial Russia by other (though sometimes rather similar) means. Putin’s version provides a synthesis of the two.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is about postimperial unfinished business and spheres of influence. It is also about real and imagined cultural and political boundaries in Europe, including that old chestnut about what constitutes central and eastern Europe.
The second reason for the revived interest in Kundera’s essay is Ukraine itself. By launching a war, Russia has become a constitutive other for a Ukrainian nation that now shares the fate of what Kundera described as the “small nations of Central Europe” whose very survival cannot be taken for granted. This existential anxiety is not a matter of numbers. For historical reasons 2 million Latvians, 10 million Czechs and 40 million Ukrainians have – all differently, of course – shared that predicament. Putin’s aggression acted as a catalyst and Ukraine now thinks of itself today as part of a “kidnapped west”.
As the war redefines political borders and identities, we are being reminded that Lviv used to be Lvov before the second world war and Lemberg before the first world war, and part of Ukraine used to be in central Europe as Kundera understood it. Today, not just Lviv but the whole of Ukraine is leaning westwards, and its nearest west is central Europe.The irony of history is that by including Ukraine, central Europe – once Kundera’s “kidnapped west” – is reinventing itself by expanding eastwards.