2023-07-12 19:00:13
On April 1, a space dedicated to Milan Kundera opened its doors in the Moravian Regional Library, in Brno, his hometown. The writer, on the idea of his inseparable wife, Vera, had decided a few years earlier to give 3,000 of his works and documents to the establishment: translations of his texts, articles on his novels, drawings but also rare editions of Montaigne or Rabelais, reports Radio Prague International. Last fall, they were loaded into a car in Paris before a long drive to central Europe.
Back to basics
For Milan Kundera, donating his archives is not just about emptying his shelves. It is a return to the sources, if not the final stage of its reconciliation with a Czech Republic which left in 1975, when it was still an integral part of Czechoslovakia. “Milan Kundera felt this very human need to come home, notes Jiri Hnilica, director of the Czech Cultural Center in Paris. One cannot be a permanent exile. »
Go back. In 1975, the author of Joke is 46 years old and, for some years, no longer enjoys his status as a leading writer in his country. A convinced member of the Communist Party since the age of 18, he believed, unlike his compatriot, opponent and future president Vaclav Havel, that the system could be reformed from within. But, after the fearsome repression of the Prague Spring in 1968, his faith in the existence of a third way combining socialism and democracy was no longer enough to protect him from the hardening of the regime. He is simply banished from public life.
Alas, Milan Kundera left Prague for Rennes – he taught comparative literature there at university – then Paris, was stripped of his Czechoslovak nationality and, in 1981, became French. This is the beginning of a long heartbreak with his country, where love and spite mingle, which will only subside in 2019. The exile then regains Czech nationality, proposed a year earlier by the Prime Minister Andrej Babis during a visit to Paris. Here at last are the identities re-established after decades of hesitation and misunderstanding.
“French writer of Czech origin”
“In France, Milan Kundera first became known as a writer exiled from a totalitarian regime in Central Europe”, recalls Jiri Hnilica. A status that he does not like, he who does not want to be a dissident, but only a writer, and did not join Charter 77, this manifesto signed by Czech and Slovak intellectuals and workers to demand respect for the Constitution and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Then, as the years passed in France, he mastered the language so well that he was able to translate his novels himself. He will even write the last four directly in French (1). “He then became a French writer of Czech origin”continues Jiri Hnilica.
This tour de force takes him a little further away from his country, whose intellectual heritage nevertheless irrigates his works. He becomes all the more an enigma there as his novels often do not appear there until many years after their publication in France (like The Unbearable Lightness of Beingpublished in 1984 in Paris and in 2006 in Prague). “The fact that he cut ties created a Kundera phenomenon,” adds the director of the Czech Cultural Center. The phenomenon swells when, in 2008, he is targeted by accusations of informing the secret police in the 1950s. A painful controversy, where some defend him and others boo him. It will not prevent, as soon as his death is announced, a unanimous tribute to the great Czech writer of the 20th century.
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