Died writer Milan Kundera: “I’m not a communist, I’m a novelist”

All that’s left is the lightness of being

Died Milan Kundera – a famous writer, author of the novels “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, “Farewell Waltz”, “Immortality”. From the late 1980s, Kundera almost disappeared from view: he basically stopped giving interviews, led a rather closed lifestyle in Paris, where he was forced to move in the early 1970s. However, in 2014 he released his last book, entitled The Triumph of Insignificance, after which he did not write anymore.

For participation in demonstrations in 1968 and novels against the backdrop of the Paris Spring, Kundera was banned from teaching in Czechoslovakia and publishing, his books were withdrawn from libraries. And later, already in exile, they were completely deprived of citizenship – for the “Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (1978). The writer came to his homeland all these years incognito. However, four years ago the Czech citizenship was returned to the novelist.

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929. Probably, this interweaving of dates played a fatal role in his life and work. Humor has always been a running theme in the writer’s novels. However, there is little gaiety in his irony; humor is built on the contradictions of reality and describes quite real events.

Kundera graduated from high school in 1948, just as the communists came to power in Czechoslovakia. Then he joined the CPC. Like many of his peers, he was fond of socialist ideas: he translated Mayakovsky, wrote a poem about the communist Julius Fucik, and considered the October Revolution of 1917 “the cradle of a new era in the history of mankind.” But in 1950 he was expelled for “anti-party activity and individualist tendencies.” The reason was a joke written in a personal letter about one party leader. Later, this story formed the basis of his debut novel, which was called “The Joke”. This item was only published in 1967. And in 1969, together with film director Yaromil Yiresh Kundera, he wrote a screenplay based on his novel, and they made a film that was wildly popular with Soviet youth. In an interview with the author of these lines, the artist Konstantin Khudyakov said that in his student years he filmed his parody based on Kundera’s “Joke” and showed it at the Moscow Institute of Architecture, for which he was also almost expelled from the institute. In a word, the work of the Czech writer resonated vividly in the minds and hearts of the Soviet intelligentsia.

The next novel after The Joke was published by Milan Kundera in France. Life Is Not Here (1970) is written in a grotesque-surrealistic form and tells about the fate of a young poet in an era of terror, when “poet and executioner ruled hand in hand.” The novel was translated into Russian only in 2008.

But Kundera’s main book is considered to be The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where love twists and turns unfold against the backdrop of the events of the Paris Spring. Philosophical reflections on the meaning of life and the search for oneself here are mixed with ironic grotesque and heavily seasoned with sexual details of the characters’ adventures. The novel was a huge success and was filmed.

However, it is a mistake to think that Kundera is a political satirist. In a collection of essays, Broken Wills, he describes a revealing dialogue: “Are you a communist, Mr. Kundera?” “No, I’m a novelist.” “Are you a dissident?” “No, I’m a novelist.” “Are you right or left?” “Neither one nor the other. I am a novelist.” That is, the author has developed his own method for “digesting” the “unbearable being”, and this method is lightness.

However, it seems that with age, humor has ceased to help. In his latest book, The Triumph of Insignificance, published in 2014, one of the main characters, after drinking a little, argues: “We have long understood that the world cannot be changed, it is impossible to remake, it is impossible to stop its unfortunate course. There is nothing left but one and only way to resist: not to take this world seriously. But I admit that our jokes are losing their force … “

And yet the continent of lovers of Kundera’s “unbearable lightness” only grows over the years. New generations are reading it excitedly. Perhaps because the formula – not to take this world seriously – cannot be outdated.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29069 dated July 13, 2023

Newspaper headline:
All that’s left is the lightness of being