REFLECTIONS

Mr. Kundera, The European

The Unbearable Lightness of Being seemed a fitting title for a novel by . In Kundera's fiction, experience is elusive, never quite what it seems: The grim political realities turn out to be laughable and the jokes to have terrible consequences. Although readers automatically identify Kundera with Eastern Europe, in his new novel, , not even the characters come from there. Ivan Sanders uncovers what is unchanging in Kundera: his exploration of what it means to be a writer today-especially a European writer.

by Ivan Sanders

astern Europeans have so of- feel vindicated by even a single Eastern ten bemoaned the lack of rec- European literary breakthrough may look ognition of their cultures that askance at the celebrity scoring the suc- when one of their artists does cesses. Writers from small countries who achieve world standing, they make a name for themselves abroad are are quick to proclaim him a frequently accused by their countrymen of genius who speaks for the entire region. A "internationalizing" their art, of blurring Yugoslav writer, Dubravka Ugregik, re- their deepest, most authentic creative im- cently recalled attending a lecture in Bel- pulses. And it is hard to say whether the grade by a "world-famous" American au- hostility stems from national insecurities, thor who, when asked if he had ever heard genuine concern, or plain envy. of Ivo Andrik, Miroslav Krleza, or Danilo For years Czechs have had an uncom- KiE (all three of them widely translated, fortably ambivalent relationship with Mi- and Andrik is a Nobel laureate), replied lan Kundera. What they seem to resent is with a calm "No." And how about the not the fact that he left his native land Czech Milan Kundera? his hosts inquired. some 16 years ago and chose France as his The much-admired visitor smiled confi- new home. Nor are they primarily both- dently: "Why yes, of course." "The audi- ered by the anticommunism of a writer ence breathed a sigh of relief," reports who was himself a vocal party member in UgreEik. "As a matter of fact, they would the late 1940s. After all, a number of noted have agreed right then and there to change Czech emigres have a similar history. It is the name of their country to Yugoslovakia, his unprecedented success in the West that just so they could continue to claim they have a hard time coming to terms Kundera as their own." with. A Czech journalist, in a New Yorker Paradoxically, the same people who report last year on the scene,

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lashed out at Kundera in a by now familiar zart to Kafka. Prague has long been a Eu- manner: "His books are famous. Every- ropean cultural capital, and its residents body reads them and thinks they are true." believe there is a unique "spirit of Yet he "writes completely outside of real- Prague," which Kundera characterized ity here.. . . Actually, Kundera is not a thus: "An extraordinary sense of the real. Czech author anymore. He's become The common man's point of view. History something like a French wit. He should seen from below. A provocative simplicity. write about France rather than about A genius for the absurd. Humor with infi- ." (Interestingly enough, as nite pessimism." we shall see, Kundera does just that in his When Kundera arrived in Prague in latest novel, Immortality.) 1948, however, its spirit was under siege Clearly, though, not everyone in by the new Stalinist regime. He took the Czechoslovakia is hostile to Kundera's art. surprising step of enrolling in the Prague Another urban intellectual in the same National Film School. Music and poetry Prague report defends Kundera by quoting were too close to his heart, he later said; Oscar Wilde: he studied script writing and film directing precisely because they didn't exert such an 'The only thing that cannot be forgiven is attraction for him-because cinema was talent.. . .' They also cannot forgive him an "art which serves the people." Kundera for having had a life for 16 years. They had joined the Czech Communist Party at profess to prefer the novels of [Josefl the age of 18 in 1947. Although he contin- Skvorecky, who hasn't a tenth of ued writing poetry, the three volumes he Kundera's talent but has devoted his life in exile to the cause of dissident Czech published in the 1950s adhered, more or writing. . . . This is admirable, of course, less, to the Marxist tenets in literature: The and Skvorecky is a splendid fellow, of Last May (1955), for example, celebrated a course, but it doesn't make him a great Czech communist hero who had opposed writer; it doesn't even make him a 'truer' the Nazis. Yet Kundera had already begun writer than Kundera. his quarrel with socialist realism in art, and even these early volumes, which were Actually, Milan Kundera is an atypical deemed cynical, barely escaped the cen- Czech novelist, and he would have re- sor's disapproval. mained atypical even if he had never left In the early 1960s Kundera returned to his native country or his native city of the film academy as a professor of litera- Brno (Bri.inn). There he was born in 1929 ture; among his students were budding on April first-a rather suitable birthday filmmakers such as Milo: Forman (direc- for a writer whose first novel is tor of Amadeus and One Flew Over the and who has two other books with the Cuckoo's Nest) who would bring about the word "laugh" in the title. The influences that helped shape his writing career were, from the start, un- usual. His early interests were not literary but musi- cal. His father was a pianist and a well-known musicol- ogist, the foremost expert on Czech composer Leo: JanEek. Janhcek and other musical influences like jazz would shape Kundera's conception of the novel. After his schooling in Brno. Kundera went to study in Prague, the city of A candidate for Immortality? This photo of Kundera, taken by his writers and artists from Mo- wife, shows the author in a bearably light mood.

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extraordinary resurgence of Czech cin- man," "a magnificent novelist," a "com- ema. Prague in the late 1960s was begin- plex, cerebral artist," but then added with ning to feel the liberalizing effect of Al- coy modesty: "I live in another world. . . ." exander DubEek's attempt to establish Although Kundera feels a definite kinship "socialism with a human face." By 1968 with the great Central European modern- the Czechs were behaving independently ists-Kafka, Robert Musil, Jaroslav HGek, enough to cause the worried Russians to Hermann Broch-his true literary fore- send tanks into Czechoslovakia. "Prague bears are more removed, both in space Spring" was a seminal event in Kundera's and time. life as it was in the life of his country. For Kundera has often said that the reason his participation in the events leading up he feels so much at home in France is that to it-most notably, for his speech to a he is enamored of French culture-but writers' congress in which he lamented not its contemporary culture so much as the fate of Czech culture under Stalin- older French literature. His real inspira- ism-Kundera was stripped of his position tions are the prose writers of the Renais- at the film institute. A year later he lost the sance and the Enlightenment-Rabelais, right to publish in his own country. All of Diderot, as well as England's Laurence his previous works were removed from Sterne. What Kundera admires in them is bookshops and library shelves. the relish with which they experimented For the next seven years Kundera was, with the malleable building blocks of a by his own description, "a corpse, some- still-new literary form. The novel to these one who no longer existed." Earnings left writers was a free-for-all, a "wonderful over from his enormously successful The game with invented characters." As its for- Joke (1967) helped him scrape by. His wife mal components solidified and the genre Vera gave English lessons, and Kundera itself became more respectable, it lost this wrote a play and radio scripts using other zaniness. Realism, to Kundera, is simplis- authors' names. Meanwhile, he finished tic; romanticism, the source of all kitsch. two novels in Czech ( and Still, unlike many literary critics, he does The Farewell Party), convinced no Czech not for a moment believe that the novel would ever possibly read them. "But I was has exhausted its possibilities. Indeed, happy," Kundera later said and explained Kundera has helped revitalize fiction by why: Czechoslovakia was like a village, and being true to the brazenly inventive spirit he no longer needed to worry what the vil- of its 17th- and 18th-century innovators. lagers would think. Yet even as Kundera disappeared from the Czech literary world, undera's innovation is already evident he became more and more known in the in his first novel, The Joke, where he West, where The Joke in translation had al- uses a familiar narrative device with a new ready established his reputation. In 1973 twist. The central occurrence of the novel Life Is Elsewhere won France's Prix Medi- is the sending of a jocular-though in its cis for the best foreign novel of the year. In consequences disastrous-political mes- 1975 he was allowed to accept a guest lec- sage on a postcard: "Optimism is the tureship at a French university. He did not opium of the people.. . . Long live Trot- return to Prague. "My stay in France is fi- sky!" This event is recounted by the nov- nal," Kundera has said, "and therefore I el's various characters, and as each indi- am not an 6migr6." vidual narrative completes and contradicts Certainly Kundera is a more "interna- the other, it becomes clear that Kundera's tional" writer than, say, Bohumil Hrabal, ultimate aim is not to piece together parts the man considered to be the greatest liv- of a puzzle (as it is when most writers uti- ing Czech storyteller and a far more down- lize multiple narrators). Rather than arrive to-earth literary figure. Hrabal has praised at an objective "reality," he offers different Kundera extravagantly as a "great gentle- tantalizingly plausible interpretations of it.

Ivan Sanders holds the Soros Lectureship in Hungarian Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous essays on Eastern European literature, translator of novels by George Konrhd and Milan Fiist, and co-editor of Essays on World War I: A Case Study of Trianon (1982).

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This subjective understanding of experi- tion hits him. The truest reason he has to ence is a far cry from official Marxist destroy all evidence of his affair with this dogma, in which history has one meaning ugly, rigid woman is that he had in fact and one meaning only. been in love with her. Each possible moti- Already in The Joke, and even more in vation is highly believable and also highly Kundera's later fiction, the influence of suspect. As in The Joke, the meaning no cinema and music is on display. He bor- longer adheres to the event itself but in- rows the quick cuts and montage of film stead resides in the individual who must editing, and he relies on the musical de- interpret it fittingly. vices such as theme and seven-part inven- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is tions to break up the narrative of conven- also Kundera's most political novel. In it tional fiction. Too many novels, Kundera he illustrates the effects of totalitarian rule, has complained, are "encumbered by in particular the brainwashing, the 'technique,' by rules that do the author's "lobotomizing" of an entire nation. He work for him: present a character, de- quotes a famous Czech historian: "The first scribe a milieu, bring the action into its step in liquidating a people. . . is to erase historical setting, fill up the lifetime of the its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, characters with useless episodes." its history. Then have somebody write new Kundera has adapted a style based on books, manufacture a new culture, invent modern musical composers such as Jan&- a new history. Before long the nation will Zek, who created "brutal juxtaposition, in- begin to forget what it is and what it was." stead of transitions; repetition instead of In public statements, too, Kundera has variation-and always [went] straight to been quite specific about the evils of state- the heart of things: Only the note with inspired mind control, of "organized for- something essential to say is entitled to ex- getting." Since the post-1968 crackdown, ist." "My purpose," Kundera said, "is like he reminded Philip Roth back in 1980, JanGek's: to rid the novel of the automa- "Two hundred Czech writers have been tism of novelistic technique, of novelistic proscribed. One hundred and forty-five word-spinning." Czech historians have been dismissed Kundera has perfected the novel of from their posts. History has been rewrit- broken narratives, discontinuities, and ten, monuments demolished." contradictory exposition. In The Book of And yet Kundera cannot resist taking a Laughter and Forgetting (1978), Mirek is a skeptical attitude toward political pieties character who lives in a world governed or challenging firmly held views. In an epi- by none of the old novelistic certainties. In sode in The Book of Laughter and Forget- 197 1, in a halfhearted attempt to avoid offi- ting, a woman in her seventies experiences cial harassment, Mirek tries to retrieve a disturbing memory lapses and begins to bundle of love letters written to a one-time shift her order of priorities in odd ways. girlfriend, Zdena, whom he had known When Russian tanks occupy Czechoslo- when they were both young and ardent vakia in 1968, all she can think about is the communists. He believes the real reason pear tree in her garden, which because of he wants these letters back, in addition to all the commotion remains unpicked. Her avoiding possible arrest, is that he is angry son Karel and her daughter-in-law are in- at Zdena for remaining an orthodox com- furiated. "Everybody's thinking about munist, while he gave up his illusions tanks, and all you can think about is pears, about the system long ago. But after seeing they yelled. . . . But are tanks really more her again in Prague he realizes he wants to important than pears?" the narrator erase all traces of their relationship be- muses. "As time passed Karel realized that cause Zdena is-and always was-an in- the answer was not so obvious as he had credibly ugly woman. As the story pro- once thought, and he began sympathizing gresses, though, Mirek discovers that his secretly with Mother's perspective-a big affair of old was motivated by mere self- pear in the foreground and somewhere off interest: At the time he was a young man in the distance a tank, tiny as a lady bug, on the make and she was useful to him. ready at any moment to take wing and dis- But then an even more devastating realiza- appear from sight. So Mother was right af-

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IMAGOLOGY From Immortality: ger than reality, which anyway has long ceased to be what it was for my grand- Imagology! Who first thought up this re- mother, who lived in a Moravian village and markable neologism?. . . . It doesn't matter, still knew everything through her own ex- after all. What matters is that this word fi- perience: how bread is baked, how a house nally lets us put under one roof something is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the that goes by so many different names: ad- meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what vertising agencies; campaign managers of the priest and the schoolteacher think about politicians; designers who devise the shape the world; she met the whole village every of everything from cars to gym equipment; day and knew how many murders were fashion stylists; barbers; show-business stars committed in the county over the last 10 dictating the norms of physical beauty that years; she had, so to say, personal control all branches of imagology obey.. . . over reality so that nobody could fool her by All ideologies have been defeated: In the maintaining that Moravian agriculture was end their dogmas were unmasked as illu- thriving when people at home had nothing sions and people stopped taking them seri- to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time in ously. For example, communists used to be- an office, then he sits in his car and drives lieve that in the course of capitalist home, turns on the TV and when the an- development the proletariat would gradu- nouncer informs him that in the latest pub- ally grow poorer and poorer, but when it fi- lic opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen nally became clear that all over Europe voted their country the safest in Europe (I workers were driving to work in their own recently read such a report), he is overjoyed cars, they felt like shouting that reality was and opens a bottle of champagne without deceiving them. Reality proved stronger ever learning that three thefts and two mur- than ideology. And it is in this sense that ders were committed on his street that very imagology surpassed it: Imagology is stron- day.

ter all: Tanks are mortal, pears eternal." ist poet before the communist takeover, It is precisely such provocative per- and afterward he turned out volumes of spectives that have moved Kundera's crit- (almost) correct Marxist-Leninist verse. ics to label him brilliant but frivolous. His Kundera would soon do a volte-face, op- Czech detractors are especially disturbed pose communist rule, and eventually be by his unrelenting irony, his deracink rel- forced into exile. Yet-unlike less sophisti- ativism and cynicism. To them Kundera is cated writers-he never repudiated that just too clever, too cool a writer, too youthful version of himself. Instead he at- caught up in his cerebral games. tempted to understand the initial appeal of We ought to find Jaromil, the artist- communism in Czechoslovakia. The liter- hero of Life Is Elsewhere (1973), for exam- ary critic Jan Kott has said that commu- ple, downright despicable. He is an oppor- nism "was that most diabolical of tempta- tunist, a hack, who after the communist tions-to participate in history, a history takeover in Prague turns from flaming for which both stones and people are only avant-garde poet to Stalinist versifier with- the material used to build the 'brave new out missing a beat. Yet Kundera has his world.'" But Kundera recalls, besides anti-hero express some rather profound such temptations, the idealism. The com- ideas on revolution. He even suggests that munists took over in Czechoslovakia, he propaganda literature can be deeply felt reminds us in The Book of Laughter and and that the Stalinist period in Czechoslo- Forgetting, "not in bloodshed and violence, vakia "was not only a terrible epoch but a but to the cheers of about half the popula- lyrical one as well: It was ruled by the tion. And please note: The half that hangman, but by the poet too." cheered was the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half. Yes, say what f course, Jaromil is a fictional charac- you will, the communists were more intel- 0ter and Life Is Elsewhere a novel. But, ligent. They had a grandiose program, a like Jaromil, Kundera was a young surreal- plan for a brand-new world in which ev-

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eryone would find his place. The commu- agonizing "lightness of being." One would nists' opponents had no great dream; all have thought that Kundera, the puckish they had was a few moral principles, stale ironist, would have a deeper affinity for and lifeless, to patch up the tattered trou- unfettered, free-floating existence. But sers of the established order. So of course Kundera, after all, comes from Czech- the grandiose enthusiasts won out over the oslovakia where-as in Poland and Hun- cautious compromisers." gary-culture is not free-floating but is Other commentators have pointed to rooted in quite specific local and national some such combination of idealism and conditions. The Unbearable Lightness of opportunism to explain the initial appeal Being anticipates, in a sense, the events in of communism in Eastern Europe. But Eastern Europe not of 1989 but of 1990, Kundera has gone further and discovered when freedom could not in itself provide something not only about himself but the answers. about the 20th-century European intellec- In his new novel, Immortality, tual. Recalling a debate in his Brno gymna- Kundera, while p1ayfi.d as ever, is bent on sium, Kundera remembered arguing that advocating the chastening proposition that he would support socialism even if the freedom is no guarantee against spiritual consequence was a transitional period of impoverishment. Human values can cultural darkness. Coming from a politi- shrive1 in a democracy, too: They can be cian, such a remark would sound like utter trivialized by a different kind of crassness cynicism; coming from a student totally and coarseness, like the popular media. devoted to culture, as Kundera was, the His emancipated, urbane characters can words suggested something else. They sig- experience the same sense of abandon- nified mistrust of oneself, and intellectu- ment, the same Angst, as can the harried als, Kundera said, are very good at doubt- subjects of political dictatorships. (In the ing and rejecting themselves. But, in this past, Kundera has been taken to task by case, the intellectual was soon to find him- American neoconservatives for not mak- self rejected not only by himself but by the ing the proper distinction between the op- new communist regime; "rejected theoret- pressed life in Eastern Europe and the free ically, practically, even economically." And life in Western Europe.) so this particular Eastern European writer The plot line of Immortality involves a finally had "no alternative but to begin to curious game of musical chairs played understand his own importance, his own with incestuous infatuation. A graceful and lot, to start defending his own liberty." enigmatic Parisian woman named Agnes In The Unbearable Lightness of Being discovers that the important man in her (1984)) Kundera describes an astern Eu- life has been her taciturn father and not ropean world where the possibilities for her gregarious lawyer husband. The hus- human action have become flat and lim- band in turn is erotically attracted to ited, yet Kundera, through his style, slyly Agnes's sister, the high-strung Laura, adds to that flat world nuance and multi- whom he winds up marrying after his dimensionality and irony. The novel is the wife's death. What could have been, in story of Tomas, a modern-day Don Juan other words, a conventional French com- whose hedonism is tempered, made more edy of manners is made into something somber, by the realization that constancy else by the interruptions of an intrusive and commitment can be as irresistible as and unabashedly manipulative narrator. the pull of total freedom. Of his two loves, He tells stories and anecdotes and injects Sabina is associated with lightness, uncon- bon mots of his own, which supply varia- ventionality, playfidness, but also lack of tions on such themes as the impoverish- commitment, rootlessness, and sterility; ment of contemporary culture, the pre- the earthbound Tereza connotes inertia, eminence of "imagologues" (i.e. image- rootedness, and provincialism. Tomas ulti- makers and propagandists), and above all, mately chooses not the self-sufficient immortality. Kundera uses "immortality" Sabina, a kindred spirit, but the hopelessly not in any religious sense but to refer to faithful Tereza. For all his worldliness, fame, the afterlife of the famous and not- Tomas, unlike Sabina, cannot endure the so-famous in posterity's memory. He even

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ers who swerve their vehi- cles to avoid hitting her. Today, there is a feeling abroad that after the revolu- tionary changes in Eastern Europe the works of hith- erto dissident writers have lost their urgency, their lus- ter, indeed their very reason for being. In Kundera's novels (at least until Immor- tality)-the argument goes-so much creative en- ergy is spent on the absurd contortions of the oppres- sors and the sly evasions of the oppressed that one can't help wondering if all of that is not pass&.For many read- Art imitates terrible reality. The film The Unbearable Lightness of ers, the once breathtaking Being portrays the 1968 Russian invasion of Prague-an impor- r)ronouncements of Eastern tant event in the novel and the crucial event in Kundera's life. European. - intellectual heavyweights such as invents a meeting between Goethe and Na- Bronislaw Geremek, George Konrhd, and poleon and, in a sheer flight of fancy, a dia- Jhnos Kis are now mainly of historical in- logue on immortality between Goethe and terest. Communism may in retrospect turn Ernest Hemingway. out to have been (in the words of Polish In Immortality, even more than in his critic Jaroslaw Anders) "little more than other recent works, Kundera the intellec- another cruel, but also vulgar and stupid, tual, the man of culture, often obscures political system-no longer a subject, that the novelist. One need not be a devotee of is, for great moral drama." old-fashioned realism to be bothered by Certainly if Kundera's novels are the thinness of novelistic textures. When read-as many of his new readers in his plot and character are pretexts, a means to homeland now read them-less as fiction an end, as they are in Immortality, reading than as political expos&, they are, or soon becomes an abstract pleasure, and we find will be, pass& Yet as the precarious new ourselves longing for the denser air of be- democracies of Eastern Europe reveal a guiling fiction. worrisome degree of inward-turning and And for all its playfulness, the new xenophobia, Kundera may prove pertinent novel seems grimmer than Kundera's for a different reason. other fictions. The central character, Ag- Kundera has always viewed his writ- nes, gradually discovers that for her the ings as contributions not just to Eastern world is an alien place: She feels her soli- (or Central) European life but to the cul- tude when confronted by the ugliness and ture of Europe generally. The great mod- unlivability of 20th-century urban life. ern age in Europe which began with Des- Whereas the heroine of The Book of cartes and Cervantes-when cultural Laughter and Forgetting suffered from that values filled the place left vacant by reli- awful lightness of being, Agnes realizes gion-is now, Kundera argues, in danger that "what is unbearable in life is not being of coming to an end. He indicates what but being one's self." Agnes is driven to shall replace it in Immortality: the tissue- suicide when she becomes convinced that thin world of "imagology," a pseudo-real- her life has reached a dead end. She sits ity created by media executives, political down on a busy highway and stays there campaign managers, and ad agencies. until killed by a speeding car, though not This "bowing out of culture" is why before she causes the death of several driv- Kundera thinks that the fate of Prague

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spring in 1968 was, ultimately, a tragedy over the Russian writer Dostoevsky. To be less of Russian oppression than of Euro- a European writer, Kundera argued, pean indifference. Because Europe no means holding a playful balance between longer valued its own culture, it could feeling and rationality; it demands enough blithely concede the loss of a key element skeptical detachment so that emotion in it, its eastern realm-the one-time doesn't supplant rational thought. "What home of Kakfa, hike, Husserl, and Bar- irritated me about Dostoevsky," he said, t6k-as though it had never mattered. "By "was the climate of his novels: a universe virtue of its cultural history," Kundera where everything turns into feelings; in wrote in The New York Review of Books in other words, where feelings are promoted 1984, Central Europe "is the West. But to the rank of value and of tmth." Brodsky since Europe itself is in the process of los- mistrusted any definition of culture that ing its own cultural , it perceives in would exclude Dostoevsky. But he had no Central Europe nothing but a political re- doubt that "Mr. Kundera is a Continental, gime." Kundera, the novelist-historian of a European man," in fact trying "to be the Russian tragedy in Czechoslovakia, is a more European than the Europeans": dated writer; Kundera, the cultural com- "These people are seldom capable of see- mentator, who discounted the old political ing themselves from the outside," Brodsky chasm between Eastern and Western Eu- said. "If they do, it's invariably within the rope, and who now dismisses Dostoevsky context of Europe, for Europe offers them as a non-European mystifier, remains as a scale against which their importance is controversial a-critic ai he ever was. detectable." In Immortality Kundera again returns In any case, one thing is certain: to the notion of "Europe," by focusing on Kundera-the writer from whom many the grand figure of Goethe, who was al- Western readers took their sense of ways better appreciated in Central Europe Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe under than, say, in the Mediterranean or the An- communism-is obviously no longer in- glo-Saxon world. Kundera is not the least terested in speaking for his "region." He bit interested in offering an idealized por- demands to be judged as a European trait of the German Doet.A, but he is cer- writer. The old objection that he has inter- tainly wistful about Goethe as a nationalized his art he would hardly con- quintessentially European phenomenon. sider a criticism at all. Several years ago he "Goethe," he writes, "is a figure placed even had his novels removed from Pen- precisely in the center of European his- guin Books' prestigious "Writers from the tory.. . . Not the center in the sense of a Other Europe" series. When Kundera emi- timid point that carefully avoids extremes, grated to France, he was 46-an age, he no, a firm center that holds both extremes said, when one's time and energy are lim- in a remarkable balance which Europe ited, and he had to choose: Either he could would never know again. . . . Goethe was live looking over his shoulder, to where he the greatest German of all, and at the same was not, in his former country with his for- time an antinationalist and a European.'' mer friends, or he could make the effort to profit from the catastrophe, starting over s there an implied comparison in Im- at zero, beginning a new life right where mortality? Not that Kundera would he was. "Without hesitation," Kundera claim to be a contemporary Goethe, but said, "I chose the second solution." rather that he too would write from the What Milan Kundera wished for has, same central point in European culture. with Immortality, come to pass. In France, What Kundera means by Europe-and and now in the United States, he is no writing from the central point of it-he longer seen as an author in exile, an East- made clear in his stormy debate in 1985 ern European 6migr6, but as a writer who with Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Brodsky is at home in Europe and in the world.