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The Rediscovery of Central Europe
| Article
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11654 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
5,182 Words |
| Author
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David J. Levy
David J. Levy is professor of sociology at Middlesex
Polytechnic in London. He has written widely on social
theory, including two books, Realism (1981) and Political
Order, which is still in press. |
My purpose in this essay is to offer a few reflections on Milan Kundera's article "The Tragedy of Central Europe," which appeared in the New York Review of Books in April 1984. It is a piece that has already provoked considerable response, for it raises, directly or by implication, issues of vital importance to the future not merely of the Soviet-dominated heart of Europe but to the continent as a whole and all who claim or seek to be heirs to its civilization. In reflecting on Kundera's words, I shall not confine myself to his work alone. Kundera is a Czech, one of a small nation that has contributed a disproportionate amount to the sum of European culture; a nation now politically estranged from the free states of the West, but which, through its exiled, persecuted, or pseudonymous writers continues to testify to its Western identity.
Over the last half century, the Czechs have suffered in turn the tyrannies of Nazi and communist dictatorships. There is nothing unique in that. It is the common lot of the peoples of the eastern half of what is geographically - and has been at times culturally - the center of the continent. What is perhaps peculiar about the Czech experience is the interaction between the force of monolithic ideologies and the ironic, deceptively detached character of a people not given to ideological enthusiasms or political histrionics. In that encounter lies the source of the welcome mood of disenchantment with every form of ideological consciousness, which is characteristic of recent Czech writing. It is typical of the Czechs that some of the best accounts of that tragic experience are to be found in the high comedy of the novels of Josef Skvoreccky and, at times, of Kundera too.
Kundera has lived in France since 1975, and his works are banned in Czechoslovakia. He is one of the most fluent and psychologically astute novelists of our time-a master of what has been called "magic realism." His books have found a wide readership wherever they are allowed to be published. It is not, however, Kundera the novelist who concerns me here but Kundera the teller of another sort of tale, the tale of what he calls the "tragedy of Central Europe."
As any reader of his novels would know, the two are not truly divisible. The characters in the tales embody human archetypes, psychological, erotic, and metaphysical; but the relationships in which they stand one to the other occur and ring true in the context of a particular culture subject to particular historical pressures. Since the communist coup in 1948, and more especially since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the pressure is
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