2023-07-12 11:26:50
by Antonio Carioti
The author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was 94 years old. Born in 1929 in Czechoslovakia, he moved to France in 1975. he Combined the legacy of great Central European literature with the Enlightenment spirit
The writer Milan Kundera, who died at the age of 94, had two homelands. The first was Czechoslovakia, where he was born in 1929: a land that had become unlivable for him after the Soviet invasion that in 1968 had crushed the generous experiment of “socialism with a human face” attempted by Alexander Dubcek. Then he came to France, where he had moved in 1975 and had settled in to the point of adopting the language to write his books, starting in the 1990s. In some ways this dualism also applies to his works, currently published in Italy by Adelphi: a refined heir of the great Central European literature, from which he had been able to take up and rework themes such as the sense of precariousness and randomness in the human condition, Kundera however also had the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment writer (he was an admirer of Denis Diderot), very skilled in weaving deep philosophical reflections into the story, even if never pretentious, and knew how to build plots capable of chaining the reader to the pages with a narrative talent worthy of the great French names of the nineteenth century, such as Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo.
From this last point of view, his first novels were undoubtedly more significant: The joke (1967), Life is elsewhere (1969), The farewell waltz (1972). Masterful works for how they stage the futility of every human project and the divergence of points of view between individuals through the well-modulated rhythm of the events by which the characters are overwhelmed, in a succession of misunderstandings and vanished illusions, with various strokes of scene. Instead, the side of reflection clearly prevails in the 1984 bestseller The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by far Kundera’s most famous book. Here the plot proceeds smoothly, in a rather linear manner, but the author chisels psychological introspection, with moments of excruciating anguish and frequent digressions in the political, sociological and philosophical fields, calling into question Parmenides, Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Nietzsche. Exemplary the “Little dictionary of misunderstood words” nestled in the middle of the novel.
Kundera was born on April 1, 1929 in Brno, in the current Czech Republic, capital of the Moravian region. Milan’s father, Ludvík Kundera, was a well-known pianist and director of the local musical academy: there is ample evidence of this in his son’s works, in which we sometimes find the staff of the notes. A student in the phase in which the communists had seized power, the young Kundera had joined the party in 1948, but was then expelled in 1950 for some criticisms of the Stalinist cultural line. The document, brought to light in 2008, according to which Kundera reported to the police the clandestine presence in the university dormitory of Miroslav Dvorácek, a deserter from the Czechoslovakian army, dates back to the same year and was thus arrested and sentenced to forced labour. The writer had always denied having ever carried out that denunciation and certainly did not know the victim, but the doubts had not been dispelled, even if the episode must be correctly framed in the climate of suspicion and fear of the Cold War.
In 1956, with the de-Stalinization, Kundera was readmitted to the Communist ranks. He had already begun to write poetry, then he had moved on to stories. After even working as a laborer, he had found a teaching position at the Prague Institute of Higher Film Studies. And in 1967 he had published Lo scherzo (Mondadori, 1969), which was also a courageous denunciation of the poisons inoculated into society by the repressive narrow-mindedness of Stalin’s communism. The Czech Writers’ Union prize awarded to his novel, which was followed by the short story collection Ridiculous Loves (Mondadori, 1973), had made Kundera one of the symbols of the Prague Spring and then transformed him into a target of “normalization”. following the Soviet invasion of August 1968. He had been expelled from the party again in 1970, had lost his job, his books had been withdrawn from commerce and from libraries. He had made a living writing under a pseudonym with the help of less exposed friends than himself, he had also compiled horoscopes for a youth magazine. The release in France in 1973 of the novel Life is elsewhere (Mondadori, 1976) even more ruthless in putting the stupidity of communist totalitarianism in the pillory through the tragic and grotesque figure of the protagonist Jaromil, consecrated Kundera’s fame in the West and put him in an even worse light with the authorities of his country, who however preferred to get rid of him allowing him to emigrate. Thus the writer landed in 1975 at the University of Rennes and in 1979 he moved to Paris, always accompanied by his wife Vera Hrabánková.
In 1976 his book Il valzer degli addii (Bompiani, 1977) was published, a sort of farce with a tragic ending, with little political implications, but full of questions about the destiny of mankind, starting with the burning issue of paternity. Then came in 1979 The book of laughter and oblivion (Bompiani), harder to digest for the rulers of Prague, who deprived Kundera of Czechoslovakian nationality. In 1981, President François Mitterrand granted him the French one. And later the author of Czech origin had the rare honor of entering alive among the authors of the prestigious series of the Pléiade.
Undoubtedly, however, the general public, especially the Italian one, had begun to love Kundera with The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Adelphi, 1985), which had as its main reason the always frustrated aspiration of man to free himself from the constraints that condition him. existence, but contained other penetrating observations, more current every day. The critique of political kitsch as a “dictatorship of the heart” is very acute, the artificial removal of everything that appears unpleasant in concrete life: the narcissistic selfies of some of our leaders are a good example. Then the pages on the kitsch of left-wing intellectuals, on the childish idea of history as a “Great March” towards progress and universal brotherhood are incomparable.
A reserved character, Kundera did not associate with the Czech opposition abroad: “What unites those people is only their defeat and the reproaches they address to each other”, notes the painter Sabina in the Unbearable Lightness of Being. Nor had the fall of communism brought him closer to his homeland: by now he considered himself French, although in 2009 he had accepted the honorary citizenship of Brno. On the other hand, he also blamed the West: in the first of his books written in French, La slowness (Adelphi, 1995) targeted the frenzy in vogue in capitalist countries. If the direct collision with Soviet despotism had taught him to distrust utopias, he was however well aware of how painful reality is everywhere: “A novel – we read in Kundera’s best-known book – is not a confession of the author, but an exploration of what human life is like in the trap that the world has become.” However, he was repelled by the idea of the intellectual preacher, who sets himself up as the supreme judge. He preferred to ask questions in an ironic key: «My life’s ambition – confessed Kundera – is to unite the seriousness of the questions with the lightness of the form». Perhaps no one, in our time, has succeeded so effectively.
July 12, 2023 (change July 12, 2023 | 2:29 pm)
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