Quote of the Day (Milan Kundera, Defining ‘The Small Nation’)

“The small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it.”— Czech-born French novelist and short-story writer Milan Kundera, A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, translated by Linda Asher (2023)

That definition applies to Ukraine—and, indeed, any country in the vicinity of Russia, in case Vladimir Putin’s invasion and human-rights violations go unchecked.

(The image of Milan Kundera accompanying this post was taken in 1980 by Elisa Cabot.)

Quote of the Day (Milan Kundera, on the ‘Struggle of Man Against Power’)

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."--Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated by Michael Henry Heim (1979)