Testaments Betrayed

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Well, you know,” he reasoned, “a lot of our editorial board members are Jewish. There are just some issues we don’t touch.” Praxis International‘s American editors were not particularly perturbed that, with the exception of Supek, they had lost the Zagreb contingent. Says Seyla Benhabib, “The question of ethnicity was irrelevant. They were all Yugoslavs. To us outsiders, it wasn’t even like asking, ‘Are you Italian American or Irish American?’ It was more like asking, ‘Are you Bavarian or from Berlin?'”

Testaments Betrayed | Faber / 2002 AP English Language and Testaments Betrayed | Faber / 2002 AP English Language and

For Kundera, the novel is far more than a literary genre. It is a way of viewing the world which, when it is practiced by a great novelist, leads readers to think in fresh ways, to question some of their assumptions, to put aside their prejudices. In one interesting passage, Kundera speaks of the ways in which lyricism has been used in the service of totalitarianism. He mentions as an example the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, a true artist who placed his verse at the service of the Russian Revolution. Kundera writes, “Lyricism, lyricization, lyrical talk, lyrical enthusiasm are an integrating part of what is called the totalitarian world; that world is not the gulag as such; it’s a gulag that has poems plastering its outside walls and people dancing before them.” In the world of the true novel, such lyricism is anathema, the enemy of clear thought. Repelled by the totalitarian lyricism he saw around him in the communist Czechoslovakia of his youth, Kundera turned to the novel. Award-winning photographer Riboud (The Three Banners of China) and Chaine, a journalist and author of children's books, reconceptualize the alphabet book into a moving photographic journey around the Continue reading » Virtually all of Praxis’s Western collaborators remember Stojanovic as the most ideologically flexible of the Belgrade group. While Markovic cleaved to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, Stojanovic explored the possibility of a limited free market. He was the only Praxist seriously to investigate liberalism, and in a 1971 Praxis essay , he had dared to criticize Tito as a “charismatic leader.” Remembers Arato, “Stojanovic was more talented than Markovic, and Markovic was the boss.” I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires understanding its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty—there's the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a musical form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of the Sacre, the "Danse sacrale" ("Sacrificial Dance"): it does not dodge the horror. It is there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But if it were denounced—stripped of its beauty, shown in its hideousness—it would be a cheat, a simplification, a piece of "propaganda." It is because it is beautiful that the girl's murder is so horrible.”Why? After all, according to the Harvard political theorist Seyla Benhabib, “the name Praxis has a distinguished history. It was used by dissidents against Stalinism and identified with the project of democratic socialism.” Sher’s dissertation, later published as Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Indiana, 1977), explored what seemed a promising strain of humanist thought emerging from the University of Zagreb and the University of Belgrade. In the 1960s and 1970s, a glittering roster of Western intellectuals attended the Praxis group’s yearly retreats on the Adriatic island of Korcula: Jürgen Habermas, A.J. Ayer, Norman Birnbaum, Lucien Goldmann, and Herbert Marcuse were just a few of those who gathered around the Yugoslav group and served on the editorial board of its eponymous journal. Strange, then, that today the term “Praxis” and the names of some of its leaders are just as often associated with the notoriously anti-humanist rhetoric of Serbian nationalism and the murderous politics of Slobodan Milosevic. Whereas the history of the novel (or of painting, of music) is born of man's freedom , of his wholly personal creations, of his own choices

Testaments Betrayed - Milan Kundera - Google Books Testaments Betrayed - Milan Kundera - Google Books

Lost Letters introduces the theme of man and history in its basic version: man collides with history and its crushes him Dostoevsky's aesthetic: his characters are rooted in a very distinctive personal ideology, according to which they act with unbending logic Lo que puedo decir es que , es una obra muy informativa, explicativa e inspiradora. Me ha llevado a desear leer algunos libros, especialmente leer un poco más al buen Kafka. In his 1997 book, The Fall of Yugoslavia: Why Communism Failed, Stojanovic wrote that the revolution in his thinking occurred in 1990, when mass graves from Jasenovac, Croatia’s World War II­-era concentration camp, were disinterred for reburial. Stojanovic found himself confronted by his children’s anger: He had never talked to them about Jasenovac before. After all, such memories were suppressed during the Tito years. From that moment on, Stojanovic declared, he decided that his political work should be dedicated to the memory of Jasenovac.

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Kundera begins with a riff on Rabelais and leads us on a wild tour of European literature from Cervantes to Gombrowicz, with special attention to authors that I love including Musil and Broch. I found his continual focus on the ideas of literature attractive enough; but he assays music as well including a wonderful chapter on Janacek.

Testaments betrayed : Kundera, Milan, 1929- : Free Download Testaments betrayed : Kundera, Milan, 1929- : Free Download

The subject of this flow is modern European culture we recognize in the novel and symphonic music. Kundera conveniently teams them together as the novel form. His concern is whether we owe more allegiance to the artist or to his body of work. Betrayal, as I read Kundera, can fall on both sides of the fence. He begins with Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses, a novel he says is decidedly European in style and focus. One of the problems with the famous fatwa placed on Rushdie by Middle Eastern religious Diktat was that the whole dustup showed the west unable to defend its culture from unreasonable ideas. This is the opening salvo of Kundera's criticism that we're betraying our cultural aesthetic. Failures such as this, failures to support artistic work, can take many forms. His essay leaves Rushdie to discuss several other composers and novelists whose work has been amended or otherwise abused by critics and performers. So we learn that the great Jeffrey Meyers biography of Hemingway (the only non-European subject, if I remember correctly) caused the entire body of novels and stories to be erroneously viewed as roman a clef. We learn that the conductor Seiji Ozawa deflated a Mahler symphony by including a movement the composer has decided was inferior and had earlier deleted. We're convinced that Nietzsche and Beethoven can be paired together as novelists. More blurring occurs when we're faced with deciding when the novel becomes philosophy (Sartre) and philosophy becomes the novel (Nietzsche). And we learn that on the gradual shift from culture to journalism (an observation even more surprising when you remember the book was published in 1993), as Kundera seems to see cultural development in the 20th century, many masterworks like those of Hermann Broch and Robert Musil have been pushed to the margins of distinction by the aesthetic shift, which is another betrayal. Along the course of the essay's flow the discussion slows and pools around such subjects as Stravinsky, Leos Janacek, Thomas Mann, and Tolstoy. We leave them and return to them again and again. Milan Kundera has this rare ability of finding the perfect words to describe anyone and everything with razor-like precision and clarity. I'm so embarrassed that I just have to delete my review of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" wherein I called Kundera "pretentious." He is far from it. What makes these essays so good is actually their cold-blooded honesty. The way he reveres Kafka is also endearing. I can't wait to read more of his books now that I have been enlightened. I may actually reread Lightness of Being one of these days. In part 1, “The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh,” Kundera speaks of the importance of humor in the novel. He loves the fact that the early novelists, such as François Rabelais and Miguel Cervantes, reveled in humor and delighted in allowing their characters to make fools of themselves. He also writes that the history of humor is closely connected to the history of the novel. The historical and psychological exploration of myths, of sacred texts, means: rendering them profane Originally published in 1976, Kundera’s delightful but powerful novel proves endlessly entertaining in this audio production helmed by the gifted Richmond Hoxie. Telling the tale of eight locals in a Continue reading »

That is to say, timeless habits, archetypes, which — having becomes myths passed on from one generation to the next — carry an enormous seductive power and control us (says Mann) from "the wall of the past" even be conceivable today? Is the epic of return pertinent to our own time? When Odysseus woke on Ithaca's shore that morning, could Continue reading » Publishing Markovic’s Kosovo article, Benhabib says now, is the one editorial decision she truly regrets. The piece, which appeared in 1990, begins in an eminently reasonable tone. Nationalists on both sides of this debate, Markovic declared, have failed to listen to each other’s arguments. It was time to evaluate the facts. This was particularly evident when Puhovski himself edited a special issue of Praxis in 1973. He received a submission from the well-known Serbian novelist Dobrica Cosic. It was a short piece that argued that true socialism was not possible in an unenlightened society and that faith in the people — of which Cosic claimed to have little — was the “last refuge for our historically defeated hopes.” Which people and what hopes? The article did not specify. But Puhovski detected a disturbing nationalist message all the same. Nor was he impressed with the article’s argument or its rigor: “I had the junior approach of believing that philosophy and sociology were specialized fields,” he recounts with a touch of sarcasm. “I didn’t think Cosic’s piece was up to the level. It was bad nationalist propaganda.” He turned it down.