War, identity, irony: how Russian aggression put central Europe back on the map | Jacques Rupnik

A 1980s essay by Czech writer Milan Kundera on the peoples trapped between east and west is enjoying a new lease of life

Are you a dissident?", a journalist asked Milan Kundera, when he had became exiled in France from his native Czechoslovakia in the mid-1970s. No, I am a writer," replied the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Not that he was indifferent to the plight of those who were opposing the Czech regime from inside, but he was wary of a political label being attached to a novel, and more generally to literature with a message, to art in the service of a political idea.

Yet Kundera, who died last month, was a man of ideas, which he explored particularly in his essays, the most influential being A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, published in Paris in 1983 and republished in English earlier this year. Central Europe, Kundera argued, belonged culturally to the West, politically to the East and geographically in the centre". The predicament of the small nations between Russia and Germany was that their existence was not self-evident" but remained closely tied to the vitality of their culture, and historically intertwined with that of the west from which they had been kidnapped" in 1945.