Planned topics

“We are dying for Hungary and for Europe.” Milan Kundera based his famous article published in the magazine Le Debat in November 1983 – “The West Kidnapped or the Tragedy of Central Europe” – on this sentence from a cable from the Budapest director of the Hungarian Press Agency, a telegram sent a few minutes before his office was shelled in September 1956 during the Russian invasion of the Hungarian capital. It has been translated into most European languages and was – for years – on the one hand an inexhaustible source of inspiration (e.g. Jacques Rupnik attributed to it “the mental transformation of the map of Europe”), on the other – controversies (these were formulated recently by Przemysław Czapliński – nota bene the author of an interesting attempt at a synthesis of literary cultural cartographies concerning the place of Polish contained in the book The Altered Map – distinguishing, among others, exclusivism, selectivity, and wishful thinking of Kundera). “Her [Central Europe’s] tragedy (...) is (...) Europe. Europe, the Europe that embodied, for the director of the Hungarian Press Agency, the value for which he was ready to die and for which he died. Behind the Iron Curtain, he did not suspect that times had changed and that Europe was no longer regarded as a value in Europe. He did not suspect that the sentence he had sent by telex beyond the borders of his lowland country sounded old-fashioned and would never be understood,” Kundera wrote in the last sentences of the aforementioned essay. More than forty years after the publication of “The Kidnapped West...,” in the forthcoming issue of Tekstualia, we would like to make Kundera’s text (and, also polemical, a reflection on it) a starting point for reflections on the attempts to sketch maps of Europe, its diagnoses, evaluation and situating, which have been currently undertaken by 20th- and 21st-century authors of literature.

Deadline for submissions: 15 August 2026.