Culture

Understanding Milan Kundera: The Bridge Between Two Europes

It is difficult to say if Milan Kundera will be remembered in the pantheon of great European authors. Will future Europeans see him as a second-tier important writer of his time, or perhaps as simply one of many fashionable authors the continent has known? Estimating Kundera’s legacy and cultural impact is complicated. One thing is certain, though: for a very particular period of time, the transition of Eastern Europe from the Warsaw Pact towards the West, and all the soul-searching and the at times contentious search for a new identity that went with it, found its voice in Milan Kundera. He tried his best to build a bridge between the burden of history and the uncertainty of the future that awaited Eastern Europe.

Kundera In The East: A Life Across A Divide

Milan Kundera was born in Brno, in south Moravia, Czechoslovakia, now Czechia, in 1929. A committed Communist, he joined the party in 1947, shortly before enrolling at Charles University in Prague. A youthful indiscretion, apparently praising Trotsky, resulted in his exclusion from the Party in 1950, and he had to spend the remainder of his military service working in Czech coal mines.

During this time, Kundera also began work on his first two books, both poem collections, titled The Vast Garden of Man, and Last May. These garnered a positive reception, while critically not falling afoul of the Communist authorities. During the destalinisation programme of 1956, the Party rehabilitated Kundera, who gained much inspiration from the events of the following decade, and particularly the Prague Spring. He sang the praises of the independent Czech spirit in several works, like Miracle in Bohemia, The Pleasantry, and Laughable Loves, the latter two considered anti-totalitarian in outlook.

Kundera
Warsaw Pact tanks in Prague, during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Credits to Engramma.it.

The Soviet invasion of 1968 – conducted with half a million men in arms, tanks, and a serious complement of artillery – put an end to unchecked freedom of expression in Czechoslovakia. In 1970, Kundera was again excluded from the Party, losing his teaching position in the Higher Institute for Film Studies, with the authorities going so far as to purge the libraries of his books. Having obtained a two-year visa to France, he left Czechoslovakia by car with his wife in 1975. Continuing literary success allowed him to stay in France, motivated by the jeopardy his continued existence in Czechoslovakia placed on his friends and all those who had assisted him in any way.

Kundera In The West: Bridging The Divide

Kundera’s stay in France allowed him to rise from merely national to continental relevance. Writing first in Czech and then in French, as well as receiving several important French literary prizes, he rapidly established himself as one of the most widely known writers of the period, from the late 1970s until the fall of Communism in 1989.

Kundera was first and foremost an avant-garde writer, exploring human sexuality and the evolution of gender relations in an environment where the women’s liberation movement was taking its first decisive steps forward. His position straddling East and West fascinated his newfound Western audience. He was – and remains today – an intellectual writer, heavy with reflections on the meaning of things, citing Nietzche and Ionesco, analysing his characters’ motives and feelings. But is he really an East or even Central European writer, aside from his geographic affiliation?

Reservations Of His Countrymen

Kundera was and still is a popular author in the West, and his work has been translated into many languages. In his own Czechia, this appears to not be the case. Aside from the question of how atypical a Central European writer Kundera is, there is one incident that goes a long way to explain his compatriots’ lack of interest in his literary production.

In 2008, a document emerged from a local police department. Dated 1950, the document detailed how Milan Kundera had denounced a fellow soldier, Miroslav Dvořáček, to the police. The accusation was one of desertion, accompanied by the presentation of false papers. Whether the accusation truly originated with Kundera or with someone else, the authorities’ investigation resulted in a long prison sentence for Dvořáček.

To this day, Kundera vehemently denies having made any such statement, or even knowing the man personally. At the time the documents surfaced, police forgeries were known to be used as a political tool to bring down individuals the government did not like. Kundera would be a big name to take down, and international personalities rallied to his defence. Whether or not Kundera had done this in his youth is not definitely known. What role the incident should play in judging the man and his literature is another question. Even before the accusation, Czech readers seemed to have some reservations about him and his work.

Is Kundera’s lack of wide following in the Czech Republic an indication that the writer has left his roots behind? Without having some intimate knowledge of the Communist period first-hand, or access to anecdotes from the generations involved, it’s difficult to venture an opinion – even more so when his Czech works have seen less attention than those he produced in the West.

There are reasons, however, to think this might be the case, as unusual as it might be. Czech and Eastern European readers will chafe at the Marxist label petite bourgeoisie in art, and yet there are many bourgeois elements in Kundera’s work that seem to transcend his upbringing or harken back to another time. His psychological understanding of human behaviour is profound and occupies the main focus of his work. Yet though he talks of couples, threesomes, sexual and romantic attractions, hardly any families figure in Kundera’s work. Society would not ‘reproduce’, to use a near-Marxist term, without families.

His characters live, like all bourgeois characters in similar microscopic dissections, in a world of sexual impulses, devoid of thoughts or even a word about contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, or abortion. And of course, nobody really works very much in his novels and stories. The focus lies entirely with their emotional life, suspended beyond any material considerations. Early in his life, Kundera had criticized ‘social realism’. It is clear he didn’t like it. Yet, still with all this, Milan Kundera is a marvellous and insightful writer. The only question that remains is if there is a Central European Czech writer named Milan Kundera, or only a French writer in the making.

Why Read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting gives the reader ample occasion to judge Kundera’s vocation as a writer. The English translation by Aaron Asher for Harper is very readable, and available in paperback. Written late in his life while in France, there are in this collection of short stories many which deal with the period when Kundera still lived in Czechoslovakia under communist rule. They are seen through the lens of memory – another main theme in his works – of a man, now successful and living in the West. Yet much of his early experience remains.

Other stories explore gender relationships. These are more typical of his vocation as an avant-garde writer of contemporary mores. Here, like Nabokov, the sharp incisive knife of his pen dissects the characters’ motives. The writing is clear, without excess; the human drama is seen in a world in which God has been dead for a long time. But other things have died and been buried for this post-modernist. Whether looking at Kundera’s communists, unrelentingly bad, or his heroes and heroines, unrelentingly coupling, Kundera’s experience of communism has led him to replace the political project with the mundane. Life is the sum of its daily sorrows and joys. All projects have long ago been defeated and forgotten.

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