Volume 35, Number 9 · June 2, 1988
Witness
By Al Alvarez
Czeslaw Milosz: The Collected Poems, 1931–1987
Ecco Press, 511 pp., $30.00
Four years ago Milan Kundera published in these columns an essay called 'The Tragedy of Central Europe.'[*] The tragedy in question was not so much war and occupation, the massacres, destruction, and humiliation at the hands of ignorant invaders; it was, instead, the loss of what Central Europe once embodied: European culture. Central Europe, for Kundera, was not just a collection of small and vulnerable nations with difficult languages and tragic histories; it was the intellectual and artistic center for the whole of Western civilization and the last stronghold of the intelligentsia, a place where essays counted for more than journalism, and books had more influence than television.
Review, 2544 words
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