Identity and memory in Eastern and Central Europe: tracing Czesław Miłosz and Milan Kundera

ENIdentity and memory are two indispensable keywords of society and culture when we deal with Eastern and Central Europe in terms of their modernity and its predicaments. Put in the context of politics and literature, they allow a point of departure in a study of yet another Europe, that is, Eastern Europe on the mental map of Western Europe. They serve as an important trajectory in the history of consciousness of a significant part of Europe that has yet to be tackled, grasped, and appreciated by the political, academic, and educational mainstream of Western Europe with its innumerable clichés and stereotypes over Eastern and Central Europe. No theoretical or empirical analysis would match the depths and originality of exploration of this issue which we encounter in the essayistic writings and fiction of two major Central European writers – namely, Czesław Miłosz and Milan Kundera. This study in the history of consciousness and also in politics and literature offers an interpretive framework for a European scholarly debate on Eastern and Central European sensibilities. Keywords: Communism, dystopia, identity, imagination, Ketman, memory, modernity.