"How to define "provincialism"? As the inability (or the refusal) to see one's own culture in the large context. There are two kinds of provincialism: that of large nations and that of small ones. The large nations resist Geothean idea of world literature because their own literature seems to them sufficiently rich that they need take no interest in what people write elsewhere. Kazimierz Bradys says, in his "Paris Notebooks: 1985-87," that the French student has greater gaps in his knowledge of world culture than the Polish student, but he can get away with it, for his own culture contains more or less all the aspects, all the possibilities and phases, of the world's evolution.

Small nations are reticent toward the large context for exactly opposite reason: they hold world culture in high esteem but feel it to be something alien, a sky above their heads, distant, inaccessible, an ideal reality with little connection to their national literature. The small nation inculcates in its writer the conviction that he belongs to that place alone. To set his gaze beyond the boundary of the homeland, to join his colleagues in the supranational territory of art, is considered pretentious, disdainful of his own people. And since the small nations are often in situations where their survival is at stake, they can easily present this attitude as morally justified."

Milan Kundera, "Die Weltliteratur," The New Yorker, January 8, 2007, p. 30.