Kundera article in New Yorker

[colkitto]

One comment that could be made on the Milan Kundera article is that the term
"Slavic" should primarily be thought of as purely linguistic, like "Celtic",
"Germanic", or even "Indo-European", referring to a group of fairly
disparate cultures that happen to speak historically related languages.

To take an extreme example of a similar phenomenon, the fact that American 
English and Farsi are
both Indo-European has not been cited as a factor suggesting that the US
might aspire to closer relations with Iran in the Middle East.

This approach should go some way to answering Kundera's concerns about being 
grouped with classical Russian writer, as a "Slavic
author."

Imagine grouping him with, e.g., Hafiz, or, at the opposite end, Dafydd ap 
Gwilym, as an "Indo-European author."

Meanwhile, for Canadians, there is a specially interesting passage:

"Given that the French are unused to distinguishing between nation and
state, I often hear Kafka described as a Czech writer.  Of course that is
nonsense."

Recently there has been some discussion in Canada as to the exact meaning of
the term "nation", and whether there can be nations within nations, etc.,
mainly centred (of course) on the position of Quebec.  Many  pundits have
tied themselves in knots over whether Quebec can be a nation within the
Canadian nation (or state) or not.  They should read Kundera's article.

Meanwhile Witold Manczak has an article in Bulletin de la Soiciete
Polonaise de la Linguistique (LVIII, 2002) titled Naród a jezyk, panstwo i 
religia,
which deals with some of the same issues, citing changing views of the 
status of Copernicus as an example.

Robert Orr

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