In November 1956, the director of the Hungarian News Agency, shortly before his office was flattened by artillery fire, sent a telex to the entire world with a desperate message announcing that the Russian attack against Budapest had begun. The despatch ended with these words: ‘We are going to die…
A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out
Milan Kundera
Translated by Edmund White
'But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe.'
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Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929. His novels include The Joke, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. ‘The Great Return’, published in Granta 78, is taken from his novel Ignorance. His most recent work is The Festival of Insignificance was published by Faber in 2014. He lives in France.
More about the author →Translated by Edmund White
Edmund White is a novelist and literary critic. He has written some twenty-five books – novels, memoirs, travel books, biographies and essays. He has written on Sartre, Genet, homosexual desire and sex as well as on Proust and Paris. He teaches writing at Princeton and is a contributing editor at Granta.
More about the translator →