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Mr. Kundera, the European

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Mr. Kundera, the European REFLECTIONS Mr. Kundera, The European The Unbearable Lightness of Being seemed a fitting title for a novel by Milan Kundera. 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, Immortality, 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 Prague scene, WQ SPRING 1991 102 KUNDERA 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- Czechoslovakia." (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 The Joke 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. WQ SPRING 1991 103 KUNDERA 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 (Life Is Elsewhere 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.
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