CENTRAL EUROPEAN WRITERS
AS A SOCIAL FORCE
653
rope's geographical and historical marginality and -
pace
Jeane Kirk–
patrick, who popularized the distinction between authoritarian and to–
talitarian regimes - a recent history of dictatorship and the terror that
goes with it. The regions also share a strong Catholic tradition; they
thus have a close connection to the Baroque, which makes itself felt not
only in the architecture of their capitals but also in the primacy of the
illusion/reality dichotomy in literature. Surely, it is not by chance that
both Kundera and Vaclav Havel, who represent opposite ideological po–
sitions, refer repeatedly to Don Quixote. Kundera opens his study,
The
Art oj the Novel,
with a chapter on "The Depreciated Legacy of Cer–
vantes," and Havel, in a highly different vein and context, in his essay
"An Anatomy of Reticence," likens the dissident to the Don, demanding
"freedom and rights all alone, with nothing but a pen in his hand, face
to face with the gargantuan might of the state."
Central European writers also enjoyed the support of the Nobel
Prize for Literature, which was awarded to a trio of fine Central Euro–
pean choices - Czeslaw Milosz, Elias Canetti, and Jaroslav Seifert - dur–
ing the early eighties. Since then Milosz has been particularly active in
writing and lecturing about the cultural cohesion of the area.
Let us return to Kundera, whose name is still most closely associated
with the boom. Although he rightfully balks at being considered a
"political novelist," Kundera defined Central Europe for the West as
much in his essays and interviews as in his fiction . Most deliberations on
the Central European issue go back to his essay, "The Central European
Tragedy ," originally published in
Le Debat
and reprinted here, in April
1984, in
The New York Review oj Books.
In fact, he had made the main
points several years earlier in an interview with Philip Roth appended to
the paperback edition of his novel,
The Book oj Laughter and Forgetting:
"As a concept of cultural history, Eastern Europe is Russia, with its quite
specific history anchored in the Byzantine world . Bohemia, Poland,
Hungary, just like Austria, have never been part of Eastern Europe. From
the very beginning they have taken part in the great advance of Western
civilization, with its Gothic, its Renaissance, its Reformation - a
movement which has its cradle precisely in this region. It was here, in
Central Europe, that modern culture found its greatest impulses: psycho–
analysis, structuralism, dodecaphony, Bartok's music, Kafka's and Musil's
new aesthetics of the novel."
The results of the discovery of Central Europe on the part of the
American intellectual public are truly impressive. What I will call for
want of a better name the intellectual media -
Partisan Review
of course,
The New York Review, The New Yorker, Harper's, The New Republic, The
