In the spring of 1972, fascinated by the life and work of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth decided to visit Prague. He returned the following year to see how writers were managing to work under “conditions that were utterly alien to my own writing experience.” In preparation, he read as much as he could find of the work of contemporary Czech writers. He met and became friends with several writers, which led him to look for works in English translation by novelists working throughout Eastern Europe — still behind the Iron Curtain — since the end of World War Two.
from this, he was able to interest Penguin Books in starting a series of reprints called “Writers from the Other Europe,” for which he served as general editor. Between 1976 and 1983, the series published a total of 17 books, starting with Kundera’s Laughable Loves and Ludvík Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs. As Roth wrote,
The purpose of this paperback series is to bring together outstanding and influential works of fiction by Eastern European writers. In many instances they will be writers who, though recognized as powerful forces within their own cultures, are virtually unknown in America. It is hoped that by reprinting selected Eastern European writers in this format and with introductions that place each work in its literary and historical context, the literature that has evolved in “the other Europe” during the postwar decades will be made more accessible to an interested American readership.
Roth’s reputation and significant network of contacts enabled him to get an impressive range of authors to write introductions. Contributors included Carlos Fuentes, Irving Howe, Joseph Brodsky, Heinrich Boll, Angela Carter, Czesław Miłosz, Leszek Kołakowski, Jan Kott, John Updike, Josef Škvorecký.
In most cases, the books had already been published in English translations, usually by academic presses. Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, for example, had been published in Michael Kandel’s translation by Walker and Company in 1963; Konwicki’s Dreambook was published by the MIT Press in 1969; neither attracting any real notice.
Among other things, the effort led to the discovery of the work of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz after the publication in 1977 of his two books, The Street of Crocodiles and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. When Roth learned that Isaac Bashevis Singer had been one of the few to review The Street of Crocodiles when it was originally published in 1963, he contacted Singer and the two men had a long conversation about Schulz that was later reprinted in the New York Times. Singer confessed to Roth,
The more I read Schulz — maybe I shouldn’t say it — but some of the stories, when I read him, I said he’s better than Kafka. There is greater strength in some of his stories. Also he’s very strong in the absurd — though not in a silly way, but in a clever way. I would say that between Schulz and Kafka there is something that Goethe calls Wahlverwandtschaft, an affinity of souls which you have chosen for yourself.
Cynthia Ozick, who went on to write a novel (The Messiah of Stockholm) based on the rumor that Schulz, who was killed in the Holocaust, had been survived by a son who himself became a writer. Ozick called Schulz one of “the most original imaginations in modern Europe’; John Updike, who wrote the introduction to The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, rated Schulz as “one of the great writers, one the great transmogrifiers of the world into words.” Jerzy Kosinski initiated an annual literary prize in Schulz’s name, to be awarded by a PEN American Center jury to a writer considered “insufficiently known.”
Long after the series ended, its reputation lived on. In 1993, Herbert Mitgang called it “indispensable.” In their New York Times “By the Book” interviews, both William Vollmann and Nicole Krauss mentioned it. Vollmann singled out Konwicki’s A Dreambook for Our Time as an “underappreciated masterpiece,” “one of the many treasures from the late, lamented” series. Krauss said, “I’m a sucker for that entire ‘Writers from the Other Europe’ series that Penguin and Philip Roth published in the ’70s and ’80s.”
Even better, virtually all of the books are still in print nearly 40 years later — in a few cases, from Penguin itself.
The 17 titles in the “Writers from the Other Europe” series are:
- The Guinea Pigs, by Ludvík Vaculík
- Ferdydurke, by Witold Gombrowicz
- The Joke, by Milan Kundera
- The Farewell Party, by Milan Kundera
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera
- Laughable Loves, by Milan Kundera
- The City Builder, by George Konrád
- The Case Worker, by George Konrád
- The Polish Complex, by Tadeusz Konwicki
- A Dreambook for Our Time, by Tadeusz Konwicki
- A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by Danilo Kiš
- Ashes and Diamonds, by Jerzy Andrzewjewski
- Closely Watched Trains, by Bohumil Hrabal
- This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski
- Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, by Bruno Schulz
- The Street of the Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz
- Opium and Other Stories, by Géza Csáth