Accepted by the Poles, both inside the country and abroad, as Poland's foremost contemporary poet, Czeslaw Milosz was well known in European letters before he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.
Central European writers have profoundly influenced the West in recent years. As a group they have captured many Nobel Prizes (one thinks of Ivo Andric, Elias Canetti, Isaac Singer, and others), and their ranks include other distinguished writers such as Milan Kundera, George Konrad, Milovan Djilas, the Danilo Kis. The prestige of this group is certainly one factor that accounts for its continuing significance.
It may be a measure of our provincialism that we speak of "Eastern Europe" when we really mean Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria. The peoples of that area think of themselves as Central Europeans, and this is not simply a matter of arbitrary definition or verbal fastidiousness.
Central Europeans are an important part of Western civilization. In fact, they think of themselves - again with justification-as that civilization's historic defenders. It was, after all, they who once bore the brunt of Turkish Muslim attacks on the West. And it is they who are forcibly engaged with a new anti-Western conqueror and crusading faith-Marxist-Leninist Russia.
Today Central European writers are considered in the West to be defenders not only of their own national cultures, but of Western culture and Western civilization generally. For many, they represent a last and best hope for Western Christian culture.
The Importance Of Culture And History
The Second World War, like World War I, began in Central Europe - more specifically, in Poland when Hitler and Stalin agreed in August 1939 to partition that long-suffering land. (Late in the eighteenth century, the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians had annexed Polish territories on three different occasions; with the third and final partition of 1795, they had temporarily erased the Polish state from the map.)
The following month, the combined military forces of the Nazis and communists overwhelmed the intrepid but vastly outnumbered Polish armies, and in 1940 the Soviets massacred 15,000 Polish officers and dumped their bodies into mass graves in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk in Byelorussia. The massacre has become common knowledge in the West only within the last ten years. During the war years, allied governments suppressed information about it out of misguided consideration for the Soviet Union.
Hitler broke his devil's pact with the Soviets when he attacked hi partner in crime in the summer of 1941. By the time the war ended four years later, the Red armies had occupied Central Europe, and the Russians and their minions proceeded to Sovietize Central Europe. During the Stalinist years (1945-1956) Central European history was one of tyranny, national subjugation, and incalculable misery - a re-enactment of the 1930s in the Soviet Union. After Khrushchev's famous de-Stalinization speech in 1956, long-suppressed national and political aspirations began to emerge in Central Europe and with them the inevitable series of crises that continue
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