The novelist must be eclipsed behind the pages. This could be the “artistic mantra” of the elusive, elusive and brilliant Milan Kundera, the Czech writer who mixed the comic and the heartbreaking, the serious and the light, reason and nonsense, as only his idolized Kafka did. The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a classic of literature from the second half of the 20th century, died on Tuesday at the age of 94 in Paris, the city where he went into exile in 1975. After the Prague Spring, the first revolt against communism, Kundera suffered ostracism Due to the prohibition of his books, he was barely surviving as a jazz pianist when he decided to head to France, the land of his admired Rabelais and Diderot, knowing almost nothing of French. The “cold war” began when his Czech citizenship was withdrawn in the late 1970s. He then obtained French citizenship, adopted French as a literary language from 1994, and refused to review Czech translations of his work . His relationship with his native country—then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, in his novels Bohemia—was complex and open-ended.
“If when I was a boy someone had told me: ‘One day you will see your country disappear from the face of the earth’, it would have seemed silly to me, something unimaginable to me,” Kundera confessed to the writer Philip Roth, in a dialogue they had in 1980. “Men know we are mortal, but we take it for granted that our country has a kind of eternal life. But after the Russian invasion of 1968, every single Czech was faced with the idea that their country could safely be wiped out of Europe, just as over the past five decades forty million Ukrainians had been forced to watch it disappear. his country in the world, without the world paying the slightest attention”, added the Czech writer, son of the famous pianist Ludvík Kundera, who was born in Brno on April 1, 1929.
“Optimism is the opium of the people.”
He studied Literature at the University, but dropped out to complete his studies at the Film Academy of the Prague Academy, from which he graduated in 1956. Like many young people of his time, Kundera joined the Communist Party. The illusion of that militancy soon cracked. The story of her disappointment was narrated in her literary debut, in the novel The joke (Cert, 1967), a comic and devastating treatise on the manifest incompatibility between Stalinist totalitarianism and a sense of humor. Ludvik Jahn, sort of the writer’s alter ego, has the idea of sending a postcard to a classmate in which he makes fun of the situation in Czechoslovakia. “Optimism is the opium of the people!” writes the young Ludvik. The result of this “daring” is obvious: Jahn is expelled from the university, his party colleagues withdraw their greetings and he ends up working in the mines; experience suffered by Kundera, who became a renegade from the communist paradise.
After the Prague Spring in 1968, Kundera experienced the first most painful exile for a writer, the ban on his books, which were withdrawn from public libraries and bookstores. He was also fired from his position as a professor at the Film Academy and was barely making ends meet as a jazz pianist. He chose to go into exile in France, where he worked as a professor of literature at the University of Rennes first and then at the School of Higher Studies in Paris. His novels found an increasingly favorable reception at the end of the 1970s and a good part of the 1980s, with life is elsewhere (1972), distinguished with the Medici Prize in France; The farewell (1973), with which he won the Mondello Prize, and The book of laughter and forgettingido (1979).
“The experience of living in other countries is the greatest of joys,” Kundera told Roth. “One can only understand the world by looking at it from various points of view. Those events that took place in Prague are described from the perspective of a Westerner while what happens in France is analyzed from the perspective of a Czech. It is the meeting between two worlds. My home country, in the course of less than half a century, has experienced democracy, fascism, revolution, Stalinist terror and the disintegration of Stalinism, German and Russian occupation, mass deportations and the death of the West in their own territory”, the Czech writer enumerated the convulsions of that historical period. In that same interview with the American writer, Kundera explained that he learned the importance of humor during the time of Stalinist terror, when he was twenty years old. “I was always able to recognize people who were not Stalinists, that is, not to be feared, by the way they smiled. A sense of humor was a sure sign of recognition. Since then I have lived in terror of the thought of a world that is losing its sense of humor.
The eternal return and lightness
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), a scathing reflection on sexuality, freedom and love, sold millions of copies around the world. The novel, set in Prague in 1968, in the year that Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, begins with a short essay on Nietzsche and the eternal return. “If the French Revolution were to repeat itself forever, French historiography would be less proud of Robespierre. But since it speaks of something that will never happen again, the bloody years become mere words, in theories, in discussions, they become lighter than a feather, they are not scary,” Kundera compared in this novel that was published in the Czech Republic only in 2006. “There is an infinite difference between the Robespierre who appeared only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returned to cut off the heads of the French. Let us say, therefore, that the idea of eternal return means a certain perspective from which things appear differently from how we know them: they appear without the extenuating circumstance of their transience. This extenuating circumstance is what prevents us from pronouncing any condemnation. How is it possible to condemn something fleeting? The twilight of disappearance It bathes everything in the magic of nostalgia, everything, including the guillotine.” The success of the adventures of Tomás, Sabina, Teresa and Franz, the protagonists of the novel, was amplified in the 1988 film directed by Philip Kaufman, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin, and Erland Josephson.
He did not feel comfortable in the role of the dissident he was assigned. “I don’t like to reduce literature and art to a political reading. The word dissident means to assume a thesis literature, and if I hate something it is precisely thesis literature. What interests me is the aesthetic value. For me, pro-communist or anti-communist literature is, in that sense, the same thing. That’s why I don’t like to see myself as a dissident,” the writer clarified.
In 2008 the Czech magazine Respect accused him of having betrayed in his youth, when he was 21, a classmate from the Kolonka university residence in Prague, Miroslav Dvorácek, who was about to be executed and who served 13 years of forced labor in a uranium mine. The article, signed by Petr Tresnak and Adam Hradilek, reported that Dvorácek, then living in Sweden, had a stroke and lost his speech shortly after learning that an Interior Ministry document pointed to Kundera as the informant who I report. But the record that would prove his work as an informer was not signed by Kundera himself. “They are pure lies,” the Czech writer dismissed the information published by Respect.
The return to the motherland
At the age of 91, he donated his library and archives to Brno, his hometown, which now preserves the different editions in more than forty languages of the Czech writer’s work, articles written by Kundera himself, texts that have been written about him, reviews of his books, many newspaper clippings, authorized photographs and drawings made by the Czech writer, among other materials. The return of his books could be the epilogue of an old disagreement, which began when the communist regime withdrew his nationality, which he only recovered in 2019. Vera, the writer’s wife, specified that the idea appeared to him while he was sleeping, during a dream in which the American writer Philip Roth told him: “Milan was born in Brno, so he returns there.”
Kundera’s “artistic mantra” perhaps reached perfection: his books returned, including those novels he published in French between 1995 and 2014, such as the slowness, The identity, The ignorance y the party of insignificance, but the novelist did not return to the homeland of his childhood. The curious thing about his relationship with his native country is that in his novels he never used the word “Czechoslovakia.” “This compound word is too young (born in 1918), lacks roots in time, beauty, and betrays the compound and too young (not yet tested by time) character of the named thing. Although one can, strictly speaking, found a State on such an unsound word, one cannot found a novel on it. For this reason, to designate the country of my characters, I always use the old word Bohemia. From the point of view of political geography, it is not exact (my translators frequently rebel), but, from the point of view of poetry, it is the only possible denomination ”, he founded.
Although his name was mentioned from time to time, included in the list of those who deserved this recognition, Kundera died without having received the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is not a minor compensation to have achieved what many French writers do not achieve: an edition of The Library of the Pléiade, by Gallimard, a reference in terms of prestige and literary recognition. “Kundera may be of Czech origin and may have adopted French nationality, but his work is neither French nor Czech. It belongs to another territory, to another history, to another corpus than the languages in which it has been written”, argued François Ricard in the Pléiade edition. The Czech writer won the Grand Prix of the French Academy for his body of work in 2001, the National Prize for Literature of the Czech Republic in 2007 and the Reino de Redonda prize in 2010, among other international awards and recognitions.
Heir to Cervantes
Perhaps the last chapter of an old disagreement was written when Kundera won the Franz Kafka Prize in 2020 because “his work represents not only an extraordinary contribution to Czech culture (…), but also to European and world culture,” said the jury of the award granted by the Franz Kafka Society of Prague. This recognition implied the definitive reconciliation between the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and your country of origin. “Thanks to the fantastic that he knew how to perceive in the bureaucratic world, Kafka achieved what seemed unthinkable before him: transforming a deeply anti-poetic matter, that of an extremely bureaucratized society, into great novel poetry; transform an extremely trivial story, that of a man who cannot get the promised position (which, in fact, is the story of the castle), in myth, in epic, in beauty never seen”, wrote Kundera in one of the texts that make up The art of the novel.
The writer who managed to make himself more visible in its pages has been erased from the public sphere, like an ascetic who embraces customary seclusion in his Parisian apartment and turns his back on journalists, the media and social networks. “If the future does not represent a value for me, to whom or to what do I feel linked?: to God? to the homeland? to town? to the individual? Kundera asks himself in an essay. My answer is as ridiculous as it is sincere: I don’t feel tied to anything except the discredited legacy of Cervantes”.
