European writer Milan Kundera dies

The life of Milan Kundera, one of the most significant writers of Central Europe and in many ways its creator, has ended.

The easiest way to say who died on Tuesday in Paris at the age that will be given to everyone was for the previous – almost it was said “penultimate” – generation of intellectuals in Russia. Milan Kundera was 94 years old, and here, according to the Soviet-post-Soviet awkward habit, they would call him “Eastern European” and get better – “Central Europe”, a tracing paper from the German Mitteleuropa, since the English Middle Europe somehow did not take root here. Kundera, in general, was for very many this Central Europe, the embodiment of a statehood that never existed and even a political union, but an unconditionally existing and existing country, territory, way of being – the enemy of the enemy of the Moscow intelligentsia and therefore – the best friend and also therefore – eternal an opponent in a dispute that began either in the interwar period of the 20th century, or immediately after the Second World War, but continues, never-ending and has acquired the character of a tragedy, a catastrophe in the last two years. It is impossible not to hear this choir, and during the last years of Milan Kundera’s life he could not but hear it, although he could no longer write anything about him.

Few writers can seriously consider themselves one of the creators of a cultural region, but in the case of Milan Kundera, this is apparently justified.

But he wrote about the rest, and largely for this reason, Central Europe exists for Russian society not as an unknown legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not as a “former Council for Mutual Economic Assistance” (but who remembers him, this CMEA? some boots, tights , Rubik’s Cubes, Lake Balaton, Zucchini 13 Chairs, Polish fashion magazines – what was it all about?), but as a cultural space that Russians have always aspired to and which was so strange and generally alien to them, but which is unbearably attractive . After all, Central Europe is also an invariable French literary language, something that Moscow forgot a century and a half ago, and Kundera wrote a significant part of his life in French. This and the art of translation is different than in the Russian literary tradition: Kundera translated a lot, but we don’t know him at all as a translator, and for Central Europe this is the most important role that Russian translators lost back in the 1920s. This and another movie – Kundera’s main novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in Russia was first known as a movie. These are completely different verses. In general, all this can be put into the shaky concept of another language – it would be more appropriate to talk about a different metalanguage, a different aesthetic, about what makes Central Europe so attractive to Russia. She’d wanted to be that for so many decades, but in the end she didn’t—and then she pretended she didn’t want to. Whether for a long time lost desire – God knows.

To describe this country at least in contours (and there is not only the Czech Republic, but also Poland, and Hungary, and Romania, and Ukraine, and Slovakia, and the Baltic countries, and the Balkans, and partly Germany, and in many respects France, and somewhere then the States, and there are definitely more cities in this country than can be found on any map), the work of Milan Kundera, apparently, will be enough, at least for the first time. There is nothing more stunning than the difference you see in a close relative. This is an abyss that you do not expect and which, with its suddenness, makes you realize how unique, and therefore lonely, any culture is.

Critics of the novelist Kundera, a man with more than a complex character – and this complexity of characters is generally a very distinct Eastern European feature – was constantly accused of being essayistic. But, in my opinion, this essayistic sensitivity and subtlety was the main thing in it.

Milan Kundera’s essays were often disguised as novels, and they absolutely convincingly demonstrated the true power of this literary genre – the cultural and political history of Central Europe can be presented simply as a sequence of such essays, and wars, repressions, coups, the stale air of official life and creative drafts that always end in emigration (of course, Parisian – and this Paris for Central Europe is always closer to Moscow) – this is just a background. The weather, which in this region is always partly cloudy with clearings, places of precipitation. Often – bitter, often – banal. Apparently, nowhere in the world could an author be formed like Kundera, who so clearly and convincingly proclaimed that private life with all its ridiculous intimacy, the contrast of being and metaphysics, material shabbyness and the frightening airy contours of something that appeared behind all this nonsense that It is impossible to understand, but the attraction to which cannot be suppressed, first of all in oneself, is the only reality. And she, this reality, is stronger than imperial copper and stone.

What was it about Milan Kundera that couldn’t happen here? We can say that 1968 did not exist for Russia. Rather, in Russia, 1968 is simply the suppression of the Prague Spring, a spring that did not happen here in its time and that happened at that time all over the world – but not in Russia.

Kundera is at the same time a participant in the heyday and explosive complication unknown here, and a specialist in its anthropological measurement and description, and a critic, and its poet, screenwriter, playwright, translator, publicist. The post-spring, autumn social optics of “The Book of Laughter and Oblivion” and “Immortality”, which continues and completes the novel trilogy, as defined by Milan Kundera himself, has apparently strongly influenced both Russian post-Soviet prose and all European literature of recent decades.

And if only for prose! Central Europe, created in many ways by people like Milan Kundera, by their words, by their definitions, is now a reality that can neither be canceled nor destroyed by any other words or methods. It remains only to thank the author for this – it will continue to exist. And what without us – well, Kundera also rarely visited Prague after emigrating in 1975. Perhaps this is the historical fate of all Central Europe, not excluding Russia, to be created from exile, from the other side of the sea, in the tradition of Ovid and many others. Even too many.

Dmitry Butrin