2023-07-13 20:56:01
István Vörös’s writing about Milan Kundera, who died at the age of 94, about the freedom gained through thinking, the legacy of the Prague Spring, the writers who shape history, and why it will be different to live in a world without Kundera.
I don’t know what will happen to us now. Of course, everything goes on the same way, but it officially starts now Milan Kundera age without. What was Milan Kundera like? And what was his age? I lived almost sixty years of my life as a thinking and creative person who always dared to ask radical questions and give radically different answers than usual. Milan Kundera is one of the most significant figures of the highly influential Czechoslovak intellectuals of the 1960s, without him the Prague Spring would not have been the way it was, or even might not have happened at all.
Let us not believe that everything is determined by historical necessity. Personality matters a lot. And Milan Kundera was a large-format personality, with all its bright and dark sides. Greatness is annoying, greatness is terrifying, greatness is impossible to follow, and yet from the quality of greatness we can learn, we can draw strength to overcome our fear, and it sets an example, even if we can’t walk this path afterwards. Or, if we walk through it, only in thought.
Prague ’68 was primarily a revolution of intellectuals in their forties. A revolution without blood and violence, to refer to the title of Milan Kundera’s emblematic novel, a revolution of jokes. A revolution without blood and violence, which was then defeated with little blood and a lot of mental and physical violence, smothered in compromise, denied and lied about.
PhotoQuest / Getty Images Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia, 1968.
Kundera’s career has been long and winding up to that point. Brünni comes from a family of intellectuals, he is preparing to become a composer, and his knowledge in this direction can also be felt in his later literary work. He continues as a surrealist poet, who, with an unexpected twist, sides with the surrealist and socialist transformation of society. His first books (of poetry) were mildly critical works of social realism, but in the 1950s they still represented a search for historical alternatives, although their aesthetic value was debatable. He later refused to accept his very first volume, and he rewrote the second and third volumes several times before finally refusing.
About his bumpy start to his career Life is elsewhere gives an ironic picture in his novel. In this novel, he says goodbye to poetry, which he declares to be an immature human activity, and this is also true for his own career. His volumes of poems in the 1950s were considered a brave undertaking with their critical and questioning tone. From the beginning of his career, quite a lot of attention was directed at Kundera, which was always understandable and justified in his time, but was often explained and justified only by his later performance. In the 1950s, he also taught at the Academy of Cinematography in Prague, and almost all of the later generation of great directors were his students. Jiří Menzel, Vera Chytilová, Evald Schorm and others. At that time, his interest was already turning to prose, about the great Czech writer between the two world wars, Vladislav Vančuraról Irish monograph The art of the novel at address. He would later use this title again for his first volume of essays in French. He also starts writing short stories, and the Ridiculous loves plays, then begins his great novel examining the 1950s, a Get a treeba. This is one of the most important critical presentations of the Stalinist universe of the fifties, not only in Czech literature, but also at the level of world literature. The book is of world literary importance because it is not merely a document and fact-finding, but also a renewal of the poetics of the novel, a fugue-like alternation and interweaving of the first-person narrators of some numbers, which is also accompanied by essays on music theory without it all falling apart, and thus a kind of anthology would be
Milan Kundera is a master of composition, and continues to compile his novels from story pieces, essays, essays transposed into prose, as a kind of collage. Like a composer, Kundera divides his novels into movements and even assigns opus numbers to his works. He was one of the most important speakers and actors of the great Czechoslovak era of the 1960s, and a defining intellectual. In addition to literature and film, he played a major role in the development of Prague’s theater life, which was also in its heyday, as a playwright, and also had a great influence on politics.
One of the keynote speakers of the 1967 Czechoslovak Writers’ Union Congress, who can and dares to speak not only about current political and literary policy issues, but also about decisions that affect the fate of the Czech nation. It calls into question the linguistic and national cultural development that the Czech people and thought have been following since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Later on in his own career, he gave the radical answer to this question that from the turn of the eighties and nineties he no longer writes in Czech, but in French. After all, he has long been a French citizen, emigrant, refugee, meanwhile a respected French thinker and writer, who in the second half of his life searches for and finds his new place in French society.
AFP Czech writer Milan Kundera walks past a cafe in central Paris in 1975.
He did not move home after the regime change – or the Velvet Revolution as it is called in Czech – he says that he was not really transplantable even in his forties, but certainly not after sixty. He returns to Czech literature only with slow and deliberate steps. Its return has been reassuringly settled only in recent years. As a Czech, Milan Kundera is primarily a novelist, and as a Frenchman, he is primarily an essayist. Although his novels are always essays, his essays have always had epic power and great narrative momentum.
Kundera is one of the last writers who really had a strong influence not only on the history of literature, but also on the development of history. The last figure of the Czech writer and cultural generation of the 1960s, he is now gone, reassuringly for many, ’68 has now become history for good, which can be interpreted or misinterpreted as we like it, or others don’t like it. Milan Kundera is an emblematic figure of the freedom gained through thinking. A long creative and intellectual journey led him to freedom, he was able to give an aesthetically valid form to his experiences, thereby powerfully shaping the Czechoslovak cultural life in the 1960s, this cultural life powerfully shaped Czechoslovakian and through it Central European history.
Milan Kundera is a writer who has an impact not only on readers, but also on history. Because history was still reading books at that time. Of course, he could give very good answers to whether writers have become worse since then or history has become lazier, but from now on we can no longer hope for such answers.
Nevertheless, Kundera is not only the number one writer of Central European freedom reforms, but also an emblematic figure of the Czech external and internal dissidents of the 1970s. the Czech Arnošt Lustig, Josef Škvoreckýthe Czechs To Tamas Czech it can be said Karel Kryl singer-guitarist, the Polish Zbigniew Herbert obsession Adam Zagajewskithe Russian Joseph Brodsky or the 56-year-old great Hungarian intellectual emigrant generation, the Magyar Műhely in Paris and the Mikes Kelemen Kör society.
Kundera’s prose is smart, a bit dry, essay-like, but as such, often frivolous, built from pieces, but radically unified, obsessive about composition, striving for linguistic minimalism. His essays are light, witty, discuss important issues, are Czech, European and Central European at the same time. His biography belongs to the best of world literature, precisely because it is very consciously structured as a biography. And a life work of world literature level and interest also deals with global issues, while never forgetting his local interest, which sometimes connects him to Prague, sometimes to Paris.
Francois Lochon/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images Milan Kundera in Paris on August 2, 1984.
Kundera was an undisputed intellectual authority. In other words, it was possible and worthwhile to argue with him, because his claims, even if they were radical and even possibly wrong, were certainly thought-provoking and fresh. Otherwise, he was rarely, if ever, wrong in his essays. But he forced me to argue, and then forced me into such a position that the one arguing with him would realize in what error he himself was living. Kundera was not a gentle writer – not even with himself, although there was a lot of self-love in his male image and self-image. Many felt his critical impulse was cynical, but perhaps he was just brave. The fact that he was brave in a different way than the majority was justified and accepted by his high level of intellectual and professional abilities.
And as he performed it. His style is simple and concise. His courage is impudent, his impudence is large-format, his format is unenviable, his path is untraceable, because it is difficult, bumpy, and burdened with many, many successes. He strictly controlled his translators, and the characters he captured gained their full depth only by fitting them into a thought situation. He didn’t write the way others did, although others might not have wanted to write the way he did. What a writer’s trick that he did have followers (for example Jiří Kratochvil), but there could be no imitators, because his work seemed to be a parody of a work of art or a literary direction that never existed, a self-referential parable about how different it could have been if it didn’t have to be like that, because let’s say Czechs are not like that history, nor Central European, literature is not like that, philosophy is not like that. Unfortunately, it will only be like this from today.
That leaves us. A world without Kundera, we can no longer expect new works from him, but it will be worth picking up a book of his essays and one of his best novels and re-reading them! They will shine like a military searchlight scanning the sky. Or the reflector of a landing plane that hits the ground. Or as if the earth were scanning something with its long shadow and groping along the moon. Lunar eclipse.
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