 Today, in world literature, we turn to Eastern European fiction, Professor Nikos Telefokus' on two writers, Poland's Czeslaw Miloš and Czechoslovakia's Milan Kundera. Recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, Miloš is considered one of the world's greatest contemporary poets. Joseph Brotsky had said that he has no hesitation whatsoever in stating that Czeslaw Miloš is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest. Since 1951, Miloš has lived in exile from his native Poland, where his work was banned by authorities. Influenced by his youth in Lithuania and his experiences during World War II, Miloš work addresses the harsh world created by humankind, but nevertheless celebrates nature and ordinary life. English translations of his poetry appear in selected poems, 1973, and his collected poems, 1988. Czechoslovakia's Milan Kundera is perhaps best known for the 1984 publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which gathered praise and was adapted into a film. Born and raised in Czechoslovakia, the son of a famous composer, Kundera, studied script writing and directing and taught cinematography. After battling with the censorship of the Communist Party after Czechoslovakia was invaded by Soviet forces in 1968, his government revoked his citizenship. He lives in Paris. As is the case with an earlier famous Czechoslovakian writer Franz Kafka, Kundera is interested in the value of truth and beauty in a chaotic world. To speak of Eastern European literature as a single entity is to speak of a fiction. The countries between Austria and the Ural Mountains that divide Europe from Asia are inhabited by peoples of different ethnic origins, speaking different languages and adhering to different religions. Poles, Albanians, Croats, Hungarians, Serbs, ethnic Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Bosnian Muslims, and Gypsies, among others, all call this area home. The Magyar population of Hungary has little in common genetically without of Romania, last bastion of the Roman legions. The Aryan occupants of Vilnius in Lithuania are quite different in linguistic background from the Slavs in Poland, their brothers in Catholicism. And the Poles, who by language and race are so close to the Russians, are removed from them by tradition, by religion. The Russians, like the Serbs, follow Orthodox Christianity, while the Poles, custodians of Roman Catholicism for many centuries, consider themselves the guardians of Western intellectual tradition and have rarely been pan-Slovak in their aspirations at all. So Eastern Europe is an imaginative construct. But this construct bears some relation to reality. There are similarities between and among these peoples, sometimes because they stem from a single tree, and sometimes simply because they inhabit a single piece of territory. Think of the fiction then as psychologically an extended family, a wide-ranging clan, mostly peaceful, and yet, as you know from the papers in the case of the former Yugoslavia, capable of the most terrible infighting and atrocities. Like a family, as I say, the cultures and literatures of Eastern Europe share certain characteristics. Some of the following, an intensity and passion that is seldom found in the 20th century West. Eastern Europe has been a veritable crucible of political ferment given to World Wars, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and the dissolution in our own time of Tito's tenuous union of the Southern Slavs. A heightened political awareness has also given rise to much satire, the Czechs being more playful and the former Yugoslavs more sardonic. And learning occupies a central place in national life. Subsequently, the literary intellectual plays a prominent role. The president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, is a writer. The peoples of Eastern Europe take literature seriously, and literature, in turn, has been a source of great strength to them. The Eastern European country that has contributed the most to world literature, if such a thing can be measured by the number of Nobel Prizes awarded and translations made, is Poland. Adam Gillon and Ludwig Kurzanowski, in their introduction to modern Polish literature, stress Poland's Western bias from the beginning of its recorded history in the second half of the 10th century to the present. I quote, based with the choice between the Western Christian culture of Rome and the Eastern Christianity of Byzantium, Poland decided in favor of Latinity. This spiritual orientation made her distinct from many other Slavic nations to which she was related by race and language, but who were molded by Byzantine influence and tradition. Thus the Poles do not fit into the popular notion of a Slav spirit, which imputes to the Slavic nations characteristics that properly belong to the Russians. The Poles have undergone and participated in all the great movements of the West, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism, and the great Polish poets today could not be better versed in the history and mythology, the mores and manners of the West. The intensity, however, with which they hold these ideas seems to me to be a particularly Eastern one. The Polish writer and poet best known in the West is Shestiaw Mielosz. An erudite and scholarly man, a professor for many years at the University of California at Berkeley, Mielosz left his native land in 1951. He suffered, as your book tells you, under fascism and Stalinism, fought in the Polish underground against the Nazis, and in his exile continued a centuries old Polish tradition of maintaining a love for his country at a considerable distance from it. What has sustained him in this exile is a belief in humanism, perhaps an inheritance from the time in which Poland itself was a stronghold of Renaissance philosophy and art. In Campo di Fiori, translated by Adam Gillon, the poet juxtaposes the pagan sensuality of the unthinking multitudes with the spiritual ascendance of the great philosopher Giordano Bruno, martyred in his search for truth. The ashes of this intellectual giant in Italian are compared with those of the martyrs of the Warsaw ghetto. Although bestiality, selfishness, and indifference prevail in the present, at the end of the poem, the fires of the spirit rise from the flesh to conquer the barbarian within us that strives to put them out. Campo di Fiori, the field of flowers. In Rome, on the Campo di Fiori, baskets with olives and lemons, the pavements spluttered with wine and broken fragments of flowers, the hawkers pour on the counters the pink fruits of the sea and heavy armfuls of grapes fall on the down of peaches. Here, on this very square, Giordano Bruno was burned. The hangman kindled the flame of the pyre in the ring of the gaping crowd and hardly the flame extinguished. The taverns were full again and hawkers carried on heads, baskets with olives and lemons. I recalled Campo di Fiori in Warsaw on a merry-go-round, on a fair night in the spring by the sound of vivacious music, the salvos behind the ghetto walls were drowned in lively tunes and vapors freely rose into the tranquil sky. Sometimes the wind from burning houses would bring black kites along and people on the merry-go-round caught the flying charred bits. This wind from the burning houses blew open the girls' skirts and the happy throngs laughed on a beautiful Warsaw Sunday. Perhaps one will guess the moral that the people of Warsaw and Rome trade and play and love passing by the martyr's pyres and other perhaps will read of the passing of human things, of the oblivion growing before the flame expired. But I on that day reflected on the loneliness of dying men, on the fate of lone Giordano, that when he climbed the scaffold, he found no word in your human tongue with which to bid farewell to those of mankind who remain. Already they were on the run to pedal starfish, gulp their wine. They carried olives and lemons in the gay hum of the city and he was already remote as though ages had passed and they waited a while for his flight in the fire. And those dying alone, forgotten by the world, their tongue grew strange to us like the tongue of an ancient planet and all will become a legend. And then after many years, the poet's word shall stir a revolt on the new compel de fiori. The tragic mask is not the only one on the Eastern European, the Eastern European news recognizes. The comic mode is also prominent. The best known of Czech writers in the 20th century is Franz Kafka. Kafka's sense of the ridiculous in human affairs, his morbid and trenchant humor was rooted in the realities of Eastern European life, the bureaucracy that attended the remains of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, the conquests, the lowering Nazi power, somehow leavened by the fun-loving Czech temperament. All right, so the trial is not your idea of comedy but compare it to the brothers Karamazov. Nor is it an accident, I think, that the partition of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia was accomplished without bloodshed. Perhaps it is a reflection of being educated in the ways of the good soldier Schweik Karl Chopik's reluctant soldier of World War I that schooled the Czechs and Slovaks in dovishness. Pacifism is one thing, however, and passivity another. In most of his works, Miloš Kundera chronicles the spiritual and intellectual deliriums of the communist period. His work details an ennui and a sense of alienation that stops just a little short of tragedy. Social commentary that reflects the stifling nature of the modern present rather than the horrors of the Nazi past. Edward and God, which is in your textbooks, is one such satire, a scathing indictment of conformity that manages to be both highly serious and hilariously funny. The story reveals what happens when human beings distort their feelings in the service of some abstract concept, whether that concept is a God or the future good of the state. And also shows how the opportunist in each of us tries to gratify his senses at the expense of his ideals. Edward is an agreeable young man, too agreeable in fact. He really has no self and takes his cues constantly from others. What he does have are instincts. He wants to secure a teaching position and sleep with a prettiest girl in town. His older brother, a man of principle who jinxed his own career by laughing at the wrong person at the wrong time, lives at peace with himself and with nature. He's a farmer. Edward, however, has no such intentions of going back to the soil. He is willing to claim he believes in God in order to seduce the virtuous but cold-blooded Alice. And when someone reports that he has crossed himself in public, he is willing to sleep with a school directoress in order to keep his job. Alice, the pretty girl, is using her faith to justify rebellion against the state that confiscated her father's property. The ugly school mistress is using her communist ideology to blackmail Edward into fulfilling her thwarted sexual desires. And Edward rationalizes his willingness to be a hypocrite, a liar, and eventually a prostitute by claiming that somehow he is being forced to do so. When word of Edward's profession of faith, in quotes, gets around town, Alice suddenly capitulates to his desires. She thinks he has made a genuine avowal of faith and is thus going to be persecuted. Edward is first amazed, and the narrator tells us, quotes, he hadn't sufficiently realized how very useful he was to his fellow countrymen who, as is well known, do not really like heroes, men who struggle and conquer, but rather martyrs, where such men soothingly reassure them about their loyal inactivity and corroborate their view that life provides only two alternatives, to be submissive or to be destroyed. In the end, our spineless everyman, a shadow of a shadow, is thoroughly disillusioned. Even the people he believed had beliefs are simply using the beliefs to further their own personal ends. How could Alice's God, for example, whom he calls the God of no fornication, suddenly permit her to caper around before him in the nude? How could the director's communist ideals permit her to kneel in the Our Father in order to get Edward to fling her on the couch? Having been disabused about human idealism, per se, Edward develops a more realistic assessment of human nature. And now that he has accommodated the directorous and has had his fill of other women, too, a kind of spirituality sets in. Going for solitary walks in the country, he now and again visits a church where, quote, even if he was almost certain that God did not exist, after all, felt happy and nostalgic entertaining the thought of him, unquote. Of course, is our ironic narrator. Ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously. And that is why Edward longs for God, for God alone is relieved of the distracting obligation of appearing and can merely be. And so Edward occasionally sits in church and looks thoughtfully at the cupola. Edward is sitting in a pew tormented with sorrow because God does not exist. But just at this moment, his sorrow is so great that suddenly from its depth emerges the genuine living face of God. Look, Edward is smiling. He is smiling and his smile is happy. Please keep him in your memory with this smile. Translator Suzanne Rappaport. Here, in a playful and loving way, is commentary on politics that goes to the heart of human destiny. So while much of the art of Western Europe and the United States has become entertainment, amusement, diversion, even serious artists seduced by Disney associates, in Eastern Europe, the poet or writer has remained closer to the seer, the visionary, the voice of conscience, someone crucial for the health and well-being of all. In Eastern Europe, Professor Stiller tells us, the poet takes on the role of seer without which the sunna cannot hold. The nature of this seer is described in a famous passage from a 1961 poem of Miloche throughout our lands. If I had to tell what the world is for me, I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole and place him in a theater seat one evening and bring my ear close to his human snout would listen to what he says about the spotlights, sound of music, the movements of the dance. As a renowned critic Helen Vendler put it, no other poet has wanted to bring ear to snout for epistemological information. In this sense of laughter, clever, guarded, smart, ever contemptuous, this is a key attribute of the poet in Eastern Europe and beauty. The poet is one who knows the mountain ridges where the heavenly forest where beyond every sentence a new essence awaits and hope. As he once wrote, Miloche said, Polish literature is energy incessantly renewed against all possibilities.