A continent’s shifting mental geography
ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL political interventions made by a novelist in our time, Milan Kundera’s essay on Central Europe appeared four decades ago. The fact that it was republished in book form last year (TLS, April 7, 2023) speaks to its enduring influence.
Writing from Paris, the exiled Czech novelist argued that countries such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland were part of a cultural and historical West that had found itself imprisoned since 1945 in a political East, under Soviet-Russian domination. Together with fellow writers such as the Hungarian essayist György Konrád and the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, Kundera insisted that this region should be called Central – not Eastern – Europe.
His intervention came at a moment when opposition movements such as Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia were about to gain new hope through the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin in 1985, followed by the end of communism in those countries just four years later, in 1989. Soon the foreign ministries of the West would be rebranding their East European departments as Central European ones.
Kundera’s essay provoked a passionate response from Russian writers such as Joseph Brodsky, furious at what they saw as Russian culture being consigned to a semi-barbaric, non-European East. This debate has acquired a new topicality in the light of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Ukrainian intellectuals today, like their Czech, Polish and Hungarian colleagues four decades ago, define their country as everything that Russia is not. And people have started talking of Ukraine as … Central Europe.
Central Europe is thus a moveable feast. When you look carefully you find multiple versions. Most of them are defined, as identities often are, by reference to an Other. So here are nine Central Europes in search of an Other. My notes explore both the extraordinary impact of Kundera’s essay and the pitfalls into which this still influential idea can lead us.
Central Europe vs Politics
Kundera asserts the primacy of culture. His essay was originally published as “Un Occident kidnappé, ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale” in Le Débat in November 1983. Two English-language versions followed in spring 1984, in the New York Review of Books, titled “The Tragedy of Central Europe”, and in Granta, where it appeared as “A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out”. He starts by saying that Europe was “always” divided into two halves, the Roman and Catholic West vs the Byzantine and Orthodox East. Central Europe was the West that, after 1945, “woke up to discover” that it was now in the East. Kundera’s argument carries a strong hint of cultural determinism: your cultural past is your politica
