(How should society deal with controversial monuments that bear testimony to a difficult past? Matt Black provides a photographic meditation on relics of Communism.)

The late Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel-prize-winning Polish poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat, engaged with ideas surrounding Central and Eastern Europe’s history in living memory. In his 1980 Nobel lecture, Milosz considered how “a certain equilibrium” could be achieved with the perspective offered by space and time: “A distance achieved, thanks to the mystery of time, must not change events, landscapes, human figures into a tangle...