Unesený Západ

The Abducted West, the eighth volume of Milan Kundera's essays, contains two texts: the Unselfconsciousness of the Nation , a speech by Milan Kundera at the 1967 congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers, and the French-language essay The Abducted West (1983), translated by Anna Karenina.

The text for the bookmark was written by Jiří Brabec:
The Communist Party responded to Milan Kundera's opening speech at the 1967 Writers' Congress, contained in this book under the title The Impossibility of the Nation, by accusing him of having created a "political and philosophical platform" for opposition. Kundera was not, however, aiming only at the space of politics at the time. He raised the problem of self-evidence, i.e. the threat to the culture of the nation, as a European problem. He interpreted the transcendence of national cultures as a distinctive feature of Czech existence in history, as a liberating spiritual dimension; and the return of Czech culture to European values as the only possible alternative.
The second text, the French-language essay The Abducted West (1983), is an appeal to protect European spiritual identity, including the countries "in the middle". Kundera begins by recalling 1956: he sees the invasion of Hungary by Russian tanks not only as a tragedy for central Europe, but also as a tragedy for the self-absorbed West. A tragedy of a Europe that no longer "feels itself as a value" and where "culture has already given way".

Czech edition