Central European Classics

Editor Simon Winder, the man behind such great ideas as the Great Ideas, explains the inspiration for our new series of Central European Classics, which are published today.

This series originates in a visit I made to Krakow last summer where I was talking to a Polish publisher who had known Czesław Miłosz and who berated me for the useless way in which Miłosz was published in English – it was his essays which were so valued and admired in Poland and yet these were virtually unknown in Britain. Suitably shamed I read lots of the essays and, indeed, they were amazing. So then the challenge became, how could a suitable frame be created for republishing them? I have always been obsessed with Central Europe so it didn't take a huge leap of imagination to see that it might be possible to create a series which would allow readers to come to a range of great writers - the series could tell a story (from before the First World War to the last years of the Cold War), it could usefully highlight the switch from Soviet 'Eastern Europe' to modern 'Central Europe', and it could be made out of all kinds of writing - essays, novels, memoirs, philosophy, short stories.

Colleagues at Penguin contributed important elements, not least the amazing little book How I Came to Know Fish by Ota Pavel, a rhapsodic but also deeply painful account of learning as a child to fish in Bohemia before the Second World War and then having to use that skill to survive the Nazi occupation. I used the opportunity of the series to throw together some of my favourite books: Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear, Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters and Karel Čapek's War with the Newts - books which in different ways repay endless rereading. Josef Škvorecký's Czech novel The Cowards had been for many years in Penguin Modern Classics and had gone out of print, so this seemed the perfect chance to revive it. György Faludy's great (and very funny) memoir My Happy Days in Hell turned out to be available - as did Sławomir Mrożek's little book of surreal stories The Elephant. We had received a proposal for a new translation of Gyula Krúdy's beautiful short stories about Habsburg Budapest, so that was a fun piece of luck. The series was finished up by a conversation with John Gray about Emil Cioran's searing collection of aphorisms A Short History of Decay - and suddenly we had ten absolutely fascinating and brilliant books.

Central European Classics does not pretend to be definitive or even particularly coherent - there are many other candidates who could not be included because of lack of space or copyright problems (I was personally particularly sad not to include Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, Handke's Repetition and Kis's The Encyclopedia of the Dead), but the ten books do give a sense of the atmosphere of a vast band of cultures across the 20th century - from the delights of Budapest in its pre-1914 heyday (Life is a Dream) to the acrid cynicism of neutral Vienna in the 1980s (Old Masters), and lying at its heart the terrible experience of the 1940s.

We decided to use very bright colours for the jackets as it had become a Cold War tradition to design jackets for so much writing from this zone of Europe in greys and blacks. Many of these books had been deeply tangled in arguments about the nature of the Iron Curtain and had fallen out of circulation when the USSR finally collapsed. By reimagining the books' appearance the hope is that people will look at them with fresh eyes and see them not as ideological documents, but as great and enduring works of art - sometimes grim, but often extremely funny and constantly surprising.

Simon Winder
Publishing Director, Penguin Press

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Comments

[John Self]

Great to read about the inspiration behind this terrific series. I've read three of them now - Mrozek, Capek and Bernhard - have loved them all and look forward to reading more. (I hope my blog reviews of them go a small way to bringing them to wider attention.) As to the covers, the three I've read so far are all extremely funny, so the bright primary colours and jaunty designs seem perfect in that sense alone.

[Michael Filippone]

These look amazing. I wish they were sold in the US.

[Hugo Brady Brown]

This is a fine list of books, but I wonder if a list of 10 books from Central Europe should have included even a token book by a woman writer.

[Andrew]

Why, Hugo -so as to be both patronising and neurotically self-conscious in all our actions?

[Hugo Brady Brown]

Not for those reasons, of course: that would be wrong and unworthy, but because one must assume that the ladies novelists of Central Europe must also have put pen to paper over the years. Yet, so far, not even a kitchen sink novel between Penguin covers in this series.

[Anna Clark]

I absolutely agree with Hugo. Seems odd that to have a ratio of 100:0 when it comes to gender. Certainly men and women have had different vantages and experiences of Central Europe in the 20th century; certainly a series that aims to be somewhat representative is diminished by including no perspective representing 50% of the population.

[Loraine]

Can someone suggest a sensible order of reading to maximise both understanding and learning. Is there a historical link or progression it would be useful to follow or are they a disparate bunch?
Loraine

[Jeremy]

I would be happy to buy the whole set of ten books at one go - does Penguin offer the set at a discount, I wonder? This would seem to be a logical marketing move.

[Frank Reade]

Any chance of these coming out in the United States?

[mehul]

i want to sell my science fiction,action story pl help me my id is patelmarcos@ymail.com

[Kris]

I've just picked up the book of Milosz essays, and while they're very fine the book isn't put together in a very good way. It seems the essays were taken from a pair of American volumes ("To Begin Where I Am" and "Native Realm"), but there aren't any dates or contexts. It doesn't make much of a difference for a few of them, but one wonders what prompted the Letter to Jerzy Andrzejewski (and most people left to wonder who Mr. Andrzejewski, a major writer whose thinly veiled portrait was scetched by Milosz in his book "The Captive Mind" in 1953, was), and when it was written (1943? 1963? such distinctions are important). All in all, happy to see the essays, would have liked to have an introduction, or at least a few footnotes, along with. On an unrelated note: only ten! Undoubtedly interesting selections, but the proverbial tip of the iceberg. I hope the decision comes to expand the series in the future, as there are too many great, languishing eastern and central European classics out there.

[jerry]

Any chance of these coming out in the United States?