The Enigmatic Life and Controversial Legacy of Milan Kundera

In the year in which Stalin died – it was 1953 and Czechoslovakia was under the strictest communism – Milan Kundera published his first book of poetry. It was entitled Clovìk, zahrada širá, “Man vast garden”, and collected texts written between 1949 and the year of publication, some of a more polemical tone, others bordering on the banal; the book was a young poet’s homage to the figure of Stalin: «Always higher, higher and higher with Stalin / behind him towards the future time», reads a line of those poems. Milan Jungmann, an important literary critic who died in Prague in 2012, looking back on those times wrote: «Clovic, zahrada širá aroused a passionate debate and Kundera’s third collection, Monology (1957), had the effect of a tornado on Czech literature… Today – Jungmann continued sternly –, re-reading this trivial poem, we would be surprised that it stimulated us so much then and that it gave us the magical feeling of an exceptional work of art. But it only shows how pitiful the standard of Czech poetry was…».

The poems of those years, which Kundera defined as the era of the Idyll, or, we would say, of ideological infatuation, have never been translated, either in France or elsewhere, and Kundera has done everything to hide them. Now that the Moravian writer (and not Bohemian, as has been repeated for a long time: he was born in 1929, on April 1st, in Brno) died in Paris at the age of 94, the hiding and, at times, the ambiguity that characterized his life even when he arrived in France in 1975 – aided by intellectuals such as François Furet and Pierre Nora, who made him obtain a professorship (and also had Houellebecq among his students) – seem buried forever within a sort of a hyperbaric room where the world is excluded, only the fictitious universe that Kundera has built around himself, like a mausoleum, with his literary work counts.

To tell the truth, he was the one who repeated several times that it is not the author who must find immortality, but his work. And when I talk about the mausoleum I don’t play with an imaginative metaphor, but I refer to that monument to himself that Kundera built while editing the two volumes of the Pléiade which, released in 2011, collect the works according to the author worthy of surviving them and, at the Instead of a biography of the author, it presents an anthology of quotations from his books under the title C’est l’oeuvre qui parle. Not only did he choose what was to end up in the two volumes, but he retranslated everything he had written in Czech and also rewrote the French translations that others had done and with which he was almost never happy. Many viewed this operation with suspicion, but translation is a fundamental topic of Kundera’s literary theory, who already in 1967, at the Congress of Czechoslovakian writers, noted that «on balance, the greatest literary personalities of the century preceding the Montagna Bianca were translators, .. it is through literary translation that the Czechs have founded their European literature in the Czech language and that literature has formed European readers who read Czech». Lexical precision as the foundation of a culture, one might say. But the writer also adds: «Czech literature is very little aristocratic; it is a plebeian literature strongly tied to its broad national audience. In short, language as the soul of the nation. In 1983, in one of the last interviews before forever keeping silent, Kundera identified the effects of Soviet communism in the denial of the nation through the purge of the Czech intelligentsia.

Kundera’s last fifteen or twenty years were a time of silence and misanthropy. His wife Vera, who was for a long time his literary manager, explained this hiding of her husband thus: «he is like an old Indian who fears being robbed of his soul». On the indiscretion of journalists who were posting in front of their house in Paris to try to break that isolation, speaking with the journalist of “Le Monde” Ariane Chemin, Vera declared: “Those sniffer dogs of journalists should be hanged” . A phrase that recalls the pitiless and scathing frankness with which Louis-Ferdinand Céline greeted journalists who came to his home in Meudon after the war. In fact, Kundera showed towards Western journalists, guilty according to him of misrepresenting the meaning of his words, the same irritation with which he blamed the spies of the Soviet regime who, starting in 1968, began to keep an eye on him by setting up various dossiers. Thus Kundera, from the Prague Spring onwards, suffered, all in all less violently, what other opponents of the regime paid with prison or with their lives, for example Havel and Patocka even after Kundera’s departure for France.

After 1968 the writer had become the bearer of an idea of ​​socialism with a human face. Of course, Moscow did not like this. Little by little he will be deprived of his university assignments, his books will be rejected and his wife Vera will lose her job on state television. To make ends meet, Milan will also be a taxi driver and write horoscopes under a pseudonym. Yet, according to another Czech writer now 92 years old but very prominent at the time, Ivan Klima, Kundera enjoyed privileges dictated by “his status as enfant chéri, favorite son, of the communist regime until 1968”.

When did this ideal liaison with Soviet communism begin? At the age of sixteen, in 1945, Milan read Marx in depth and two years later enrolled in the communist youth. Recalling the coup d’état of 1948, organized by Moscow, Kundera in 1981 told the newspaper “Liberation”: “I too praised the Revolution”. And three years later in “Le Monde des Livres” you will explain that “communism fascinated me as much as Stravinsky, Picasso and surrealism”. Throughout the 1950s, even after Stalin’s death, Kundera enjoyed a certain amount of trust: he taught the history of world literature and the “theory of the novel” at the film faculty in Prague, where he also held a seminar on screenwriting. When in 1963 a congress of communist literary critics was held in Prague to “rehabilitate” Kafka – Moscow considered that symposium the seed of Spring – Kundera will not be among the speakers (yet Kafka was one of the cornerstones of his theory of the novel), however in the same year he collects the award in the name of Klement Gottwald, the head of Czech communism, zealous executor of the Stalinist ratio with purges and assassinations.

We will have to shed light on those years of Kundera, which he tried in every way to purge from his past. In 2020 the Czech critic Jan Novák edited a 900-page monograph on the Czech years of the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where, insinuating various doubts, he writes that in the 90s in Paris Kundera borrowed from his publisher, Gallimard, a paper shredder and «destroyed all his manuscripts, unpublished texts, all radio plays and television scripts (which he had sold under someone else’s name in Prague during the neo-Stalin ‘normalisation’ of the 1970s), all his notebooks and all his correspondence. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, an admirer of Kundera, says he is convinced that Milan and Vera have also destroyed the correspondence between them».

What could possibly be so embarrassing? In 2008 a document conserved in the archive of the totalitarian regimes came to light which accused a young man named Milan Kundera of having denounced a Czech in the service of the British as a spy in 1950, a certain Miroslav Dvorácek. There was talk of Kundera informer, the Buchmesse was nearby where his latest book was due to be presented: great clamor and endless suspicions. Too many details seemed to match, even the place and date of birth of the “informer”. It is the beginning of the slow “death” of Kundera who since then has in fact also lost the possibility of receiving a Nobel for which he had long been given as a candidate. And it was also the beginning of France’s estrangement from Kundera, which had already begun in part with the criticisms of reviewers of his latest novels, from Identity to the Feast of Insignificance (Philippe Sollers wrote that «his books make money translation”).

In fact Kundera lived the final part of his life as the wandering Jew. If in 1977 the regime had taken away his citizenship, however, on 28 November 2019 Prague returned it to him, and the following year awarded him the Kafka prize. The 2008 affair had made the Kundera couple despair of reconciliation with the Czechs. The last few years have been tough for Kundera, also due to a fractured femur and possibly an illness. The writer died in Paris yesterday, where in reality he is less and less loved, and he hasn’t had time to repatriate, as he recently wanted. History has certain malign fatalities of its own.

2023-07-12 20:03:45
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