If you’re looking for a towering intellect to dispense guidance and illumination on current events, particularly one from Central Europe, the hearth of gravitas, piano sonatas, polyglotism, the reading of Hegel etc, Milan Kundera, in A Kidnapped West, will be a bit of a disappointment.
This isn’t Kundera’s fault. The volume contains a short speech from 1967 and an essay from 1983. It’s a pleasure to see a publisher giving oxygen to learned discourse, and while both texts are as urbane and erudite as you would expect, we have moved on a great deal. A Kidnapped West needs to be filed under intellectual history.
Not that everything has changed, how-ever. In his 1967 address to the Czech Writers’ Congress, Kundera laments the ‘provincialism’ of Czech teachers who know little about European literature (and this is 1960s Czechoslovakia, where, like in Hungary and Poland, reading a good book was just about the only form of non-sexual entertainment available).
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