Reading List
Timothy Snyder
Historian and Author
Timothy Snyder is a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, for many years the Levin Professor of History at Yale. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin treated the territory where both regimes killed as a single field of study rather than two national histories, and won the Hannah Arendt Prize. Black Earth reread the Holocaust through the destruction of states, and On Tyranny compressed the lessons of the twentieth century into twenty short chapters that sold in the millions.
He reads a dozen European languages and works from sources in most of them, which is what allows the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and Yiddish material in his books to sit alongside the German. His later work, including The Road to Unfreedom and On Freedom, turns to Russia, Ukraine and the question of what freedom actually requires.
The Power of the Powerless
by Vaclav Havel
“The answer is that for an individual there would be very nasty consequences. But the open question of the essay is, what if everyone took all of the signs down? Havel is suggesting that if possible one ought to try to live authentically. That authenticity – not lying to oneself, even little lies such as the sign on the window – is the first step towards individual freedom.” — Source
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
by Milan Kundera
“So he knows what it was like to be on the inside, to have certainty about the rest of the world and to believe that everyone who didn’t share that certainty was a fool. To know where things were going and what you wanted from society – that glowing, overwhelming sense that one is young and the world belongs to you. Kundera really gets that sense across, and I think that’s incredibly important.” — Source
The Church and the Left
by Adam Michnik
“What I find interesting here is the recognition of unpredictability. On the left you tend to think your allies will be the world left, the working class or the welfare state. But Michnik says you have to be observant about what history offers up for you, such as a Church which is reforming itself, which is sympathetic to many of their goals, and might be a bastion of human rights.” — Source
The Captive Mind
by Czeslaw Milosz
“It’s an interesting argument because it gives people an alibi, which is what Milosz’s publisher in Paris – Jerzy Giedroyc, also a very important Polish intellectual – recognised. He felt that this was all bunk – that people collaborated because they were scared and needed money, and that what Milosz was arguing was just superstructural nonsense.” — Source
Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell · 1938 · Memoir
“It is to do with the immediate violence of Soviet means which were visible to Orwell at that time and place. That’s the second thing which I find important about the book as a precursor to dissident literature. To the end of dissident literature, in the seventies and eighties, people defended themselves by making observations and elementary distinctions, preserving certain concepts, not allowing things to be vague.” — Source