Treasure Trove: Eastern Europe

Others will tell me they knew it all along, but I'm just now getting my mind around the idea of how much really good literture there is from 20th-Century Eastern Europe.

This insight comes after back-to-back readings of The Brothers Ashkenazi by I.J. Singer, followed by Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori; both wonderful in a multitude of ways but still only variations on a theme. For a propert listing, we should perhaps begin with The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, perhaps a bit overrated but only insofar as it gets compared with Proust. Purists will observe that Musil writes about Vienna and that Vienna is not Eastern European but German, which is true only as far as it goes. Vienna was, of course, most prominently the seat of a patchwork multicultural empire. You get that point more clearly in the work of the other, perhaps more sataisfying, great Viennese, Joseph Roth, whose Radetzky March, about as effective an exercise as I've encountered in seeing the world in a grain of sand. Radetzky's career, including his exile and his sad death, is easily confused with Stephan Zweig, whose affection for the city ramifies (in novels like Beware of Pity) into a comprehension of its place in the larger empire.

For so small a nation, the Czechs have a literature that punches above its weight. I justl lately discovered Bohumil Hrabal, whose I Served the King of England captures a remarkable mix of light poetry and self-mockery that seems to suit a small nation surrounded by bigger and (therefore?) more dangerous powers. Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk is deceptively modest: while it reads like a narrative cartoon, it succeeds in placing the Czech experience firmly into the larger context. And Kafka. Kafka has appeared on enough school syllabi to qualify as a citizen of the world, but I don't think I really appreciated him until I went to Prague and got a chance to see put him in context on his native ground.

There is so much more that comes to mind, some read, some not. One major gap in my own understanding: Hungary, which offers, I gather, a formidable literature of its own, of which I have read almost none.

Afterthought: I see I wrote an earlier version of this same post a a number of months back. No matter; I see things a bit differently now, and in any event, the point is importnt enough to bear repeating.