读过《A Kidnapped West》 🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑
我身为粉丝却并不完全与昆德拉立场相同，但能够理解他在这两篇文章中有关中欧小国应如何建立并保存文化身份，以及如何在苏联的阴影下保持自己的“西方性”的表述；第一篇文章所述内容尤其与今日的中国相关。可是这些几十年前的文章这次结集的时间点表明了出版社在俄乌战争背景下冷饭热炒的态度。俄罗斯的侵略行为的确需被谴责，但是你在已经如此极端的年代里刻意混淆苏维埃政权与今日俄罗斯之间的区别、煽动读者对一个强权国家的想象与恐惧并将其文化也他者化和妖魔化，且以此牟利，这样的出版商真是令人不齿。
#沁云的书影音短评
A Kidnapped West [Book] Douban
A short collection of brilliant early essays that offers a fascinating context for the Milan Kundera's subsequent career and holds a mirror to much recent European history. It is also remarkably prescient with regard to Russia's current aggression in Ukraine and its threat to the rest of Europe.
Milan Kundera's early nonfiction work feels especially resonant in our own time. In these pieces, Kundera pleads the case of the "small nations" of Europe who, by culture, are Western with deep roots in Europe, despite Russia imposing its own Communist political regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Kundera warns that the real tragedy here is not Russia but Europe, whose own identity and culture are directly challenged and threatened in a way that could lead to their destruction. He is sounding the alarm, which chimes loud and clear in our own twenty-first century.
The 1983 essay translated by Edmund White ("The Tragedy of Central Europe"), and the 1967 lecture delivered to the Czech Writers' Union in the middle of the Prague Spring by the young Milan Kundera ("Literature and the Small Nations"), translated for the first time by Linda Asher, are both written in a voice that is at once personal, vehement, and anguished. Here, Kundera appears already as one of our great European writers and truly our contemporary. Each piece is prefaced by a short presentation by French historian Pierre Nora and Czech-born French political scientist Jacques Rupnik.
Milan Kundera's early nonfiction work feels especially resonant in our own time. In these pieces, Kundera pleads the case of the "small nations" of Europe who, by culture, are Western with deep roots in Europe, despite Russia imposing its own Communist political regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Kundera warns that the real tragedy here is not Russia but Europe, whose own identity and culture are directly challenged and threatened in a way that could lead to their destruction. He is sounding the alarm, which chimes loud and clear in our own twenty-first century.
The 1983 essay translated by Edmund White ("The Tragedy of Central Europe"), and the 1967 lecture delivered to the Czech Writers' Union in the middle of the Prague Spring by the young Milan Kundera ("Literature and the Small Nations"), translated for the first time by Linda Asher, are both written in a voice that is at once personal, vehement, and anguished. Here, Kundera appears already as one of our great European writers and truly our contemporary. Each piece is prefaced by a short presentation by French historian Pierre Nora and Czech-born French political scientist Jacques Rupnik.