A short collection of brilliant early essays that offers a fascinating context for the Milan Kundera’s subsequent career and holds a mirror to much recent European history.  It is also remarkably prescient with regard to Russia’s current aggression in Ukraine and its threat to the rest of Europe. “Offer[s] insight into contemporary debates. . . . We should welcome the context Kundera gives for the struggles between Russia and Europe, and the plight of those caught between them. His defense of small languages, small cultures, and small nations feels pressing.”—Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine “Kundera focuses on the relationship of Europe’s central ‘small nations’ like Czechoslovakia and Ukraine to Western culture and argues that their cultural identities were increasingly threatened.”—New York Times Book Review