Jason Wirth’s Commiserating with Devastated Things is a wonderful book tracing themes in the novels of Milan Kundera—not to mention the resonances of these themes with Virgil, Cervantes, and Hermann Broch (among others). I’ve learned about St. Francis joyously embracing a leper, about Holy Fools in Russian Orthodoxy and in Dostoevsky (in the person of Prince Myshkin). And I’ve learned about the systematic slaughter of dogs by the Soviets as they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to install civil terror. Kundera […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: cruelty, Czechoslovakia, dogs, fiction, Milan Kundera, Russia