Kidnapped West, Milan Kundera, Linda Asher

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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 W