Mere days after Milan Kundera’s death in France at the age of 94, the ghost of the Czech-born novelist was spotted on the front lines of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Writing in the German weekly Die Zeit under the title “The Man Who Knew the Russians”, Adam Soboczynski claimed the Ukrainian struggle as one Kundera would approve of: “a battle for enlightened central Europe against the irrationality of the east, comparable to the uprisings of Hungary and Poland in the time of communism”. Writing in Le Monde, the geo-strategist Jacques Rupnik opined that Ukraine faced the “Kunderian problem” of surviving in Russia’s shadow. At the foot of the same page, the American essayist Paul Berman held that “the largest conflict in Europe since the Second World War has proved a Kunderian war”, one that pits living against lying, and each day’s news from the Ukrainian front brings new proof that Kundera was “a man for our time, and even a visionary”.
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