2023-07-12 11:47:05
A music band in Prague, spring 1968. Conventional dance floor blaring, before the melody and rhythm suddenly change, almost transitioning to Beatles songs under the clarinet hand.
The erotically recalcitrant doctor Tomás: now also in musical nirvana, surrounded to his own astonishment by his conformist colleagues, who are now also discovering the joys of spontaneity.
After the Soviet invasion on August 21, they crawled back into their corsets just as quickly and refused their solidarity with Tomás, who was forced to emigrate and leave his Czech homeland in his blue Skoda.
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But what if the young doctor had also fled from the sexual chaos of his life so far, since the purely political, even in extreme cases, is nothing essential could be granted?
World fame in exile
The world fame of the exiled Czech novelist Milan Kundera is due in no small part to those scenes from Philip Kaufman’s 1988 film adaptation of “Intolerable Lightness of Being” – although the author rejected the cinema adaptation and preferred the flatness.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”: Production design from the 1987 film adaptation
Quelle: picture alliance / United Archiv
Nevertheless, the American director had found suggestive images for East Central European complications, so that from now on not only a circle of insiders knew about this writer, who had lived in France since 1975 and who had even inspired Philip Roth (his short novel “The Prague Orgy” is downright kunderaesk). .
Up until the end of the 1990s, it seemed essential in student circles to have a copy of “Intolerable Lightness” with you, a flashing weapon of distinction and a guide to flirting in one. Of course, its author, who was born in Brno in 1929, had long since ceased to be the striking young man on the back cover of his novels, which had been translated into almost every language of the world.
The subversion of laughter
On the other hand: How could someone who, in 1967 with his debut novel “Der Joke”, gave subversive laughter a home again in (socially critical) literature, ever grow old like an anti-totalitarian Casanova and become a settled gentleman? Impossible.
At the same time, the coquettishness and mischievousness that emanates from Kundera’s books to this day has nothing at all to do with strained youth mania – on the contrary. No other author of his generation and Eastern socialization had reflected so lucidly on the frailty of the body and the arbitrariness of desire from an early age.
The young poet in “Life is Elsewhere” is anything but a lucky child, and the book with which Kundera finally said goodbye to his Soviet-occupied homeland could not be surpassed in terms of expressiveness: “Farewell Waltz”. In addition to the love story, a betrayal story was also told here: the forty-year-old protagonist doesn’t tell his girlfriend, who is two decades his junior, that her adored father was once not only a victim of Stalinism, but also an accomplice.
Sensual experimental setups
This dimension may have remained hidden from adolescents in western countries; they read Kundera’s prose vignettes and sensual experimental arrangements in the “Book of Ridiculous Love” or in the “Book of Laughing and Forgetting” with a different gain of knowledge: Look, one could reflect on eroticism without getting into that strained rambling that the Marquis de Sade had begun, continued with Klossowski, Bataille and Henry Miller, leaving many a pretentious trail to the present day.
Spring in Prague: Milan Kundera in May 1968
Quelle: Pavel Vacha/CTK/picture alliance
On the other hand, Milan Kundera: “Erotic relationships can fill an entire adult life. But if this life were much longer, wouldn’t boredom suffocate excitability long before physical strength flagged? Because there is a huge difference between the first, the tenth, the hundredth and the ten thousandth coitus.”
Passages that Kundera, of course, already wrote in French, only to come to a conclusion in his concise tribute to Diderot “Jacques and his Lord” that was anything but pessimistic: “The only true freedom comes from being aware of repetition – the only freedom and also the only wisdom.”
longing for paradise
The writer, who here ties in with the sentimental sensuality of the libertarian eighteenth, pre-revolutionary century, with his fondness for the “thinking novelists” Witold Gombrowicz, Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, in no way fitted the clichéd image of the exiled, possibly bearded dissident who, even in the West, was painfully attached to hope – and the potential for violence in Marxism.
Instead, Kundera let the knowing Sabina, one of the playmates of the doctor Tomás in the “Intolerable Lightness of Being”, muse subversively: “You can live in a really communist world. In the world of the communist ideal made real, on the other hand, in this world of smiling idiots with whom she could never have exchanged a word, she would have died of horror within a week… Longing for paradise is human longing, isn’t it to be human.”
Did the coolly disillusioning message get through to all the enraptured Kundera readers? One may doubt it – and does not do so without melancholy. Eroticists curious about life as dedicated anti-utopians – except for solitaires like Kundera (or Mario Vargas Llosa and Philip Roth) such a mood was and is rarely found among writers.
self unleashing
So was there a life’s work to be admired here that had left the anachronistic small-small and gray-on-grey of totalitarianism behind with verve in order to turn to the really decisive concerns of our physique and psyche?
Hadn’t Kundera, who once described himself as “a hedonist trapped in a deeply politicized world,” brilliantly succeeded in unleashing himself? A reading of both the early and the later books suggests this, the joy in their dancing transparency, their lightning-fast as well as libidinally approachable staff.
After 1989, some people in the Czech Republic grumbled that the non-returner Kundera had long been writing “only” sophisticated prose with no connection to Mother Earth – the author, who lived in seclusion in Paris, continued to avoid media publicity and only let his novels and essays do the talking.
A day in October
Then, on that October day in 2008, everything changed. A policeman emerged from the labyrinths of the past Deeds trademarkan introductory sentence like in Kafka: “On March 14, 1950, at 4 p.m., the student Milan Kundera, born April 1, 1929 in Brno, living in the dormitory in Prague 7, came to the department to report him. “
At the end of the story, a young anti-communist activist named Miroslav Dvorácek is sentenced to 14 (!) years in prison under harsh conditions in the country’s uranium mines. So the individualistic bon vivant as a hasty informer, the later scoffer at ideology as a lifelong repressor?
Kundera denied any involvement in the case, but admitted to his party-believing early phase. However, Prague intellectuals who were not in favor of him recalled that, even at the beginning of the 1970s, Kundera was primarily thinking of himself and viewed Václav Havel’s commitment to petitions and civil rights from a cold Olympic distance.
An additional truth
Nevertheless: Who else besides Kundera had described the aesthetic and moral impertinences with which everyday totalitarianism teased its citizens so precisely and sketched a possible way out with knowing laughter?
But after the “revelation” one began to suspect that that laughter was probably also mixed with a degree of diabolical despair: the novels – in any case often revolving around the theme of betrayal and far from being merely entertaining – now revealed their additional truth.
Milan Kundera died on July 11, 2023 at the age of 94. This was announced by a spokeswoman for the Moravian State Library in Brno.
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