2023-07-12 18:52:23
“I’d rather live as an optimist and be wrong than live as a pessimist just to have the satisfaction of being right.” – Milan Kundera
The title of his most famous novel became a dictum: “The unbearable lightness of being”. Milan Kundera wrote it in exile in Paris in 1984, nine years after he was no longer allowed to work in his homeland, the CSSR. The book quickly became a bestseller and made Kundera known worldwide.
The erotic crackle of the main characters – against the background of the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 – apparently struck a chord with many readers. Fraud, lust, seduction and politics on 301 pages: The surgeon Tomas comes into conflict with the party, has to give up his job and work as a window cleaner. The love-hungry doctor’s relationship with the waitress Teresa suffers because he keeps having new affairs. The sizzling film adaptation five years later, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, was also a hit.
Now the writer is dead. He was 94 years old.
Milan Kundera 1963 in Prague
Photo: CTK/Frantisek Nesvadba/via REUTERS
Kundera didn’t like being suddenly world famous. He rarely gave interviews, if at all, only in writing. He was a man who preferred to be in the shadows. Subtle, but also ambiguous.
Reckoning with the totalitarian regime
The father, pianist and university director, taught his son the piano from an early age. In Prague, Kundera changed majors from music and literature to directing and screenwriting and joined the Communist Party at an early age. But again and again he caused offense because he had publicly committed himself to reform communism. He was even temporarily expelled from the party.
In novels like “Farewell Waltz” he settled accounts with the totalitarian regime – and practically put himself on the hit list. He was finally expelled from the party and was no longer allowed to publish.
“The erotic scene is the focal point”
“Kundera saw sex as an act of redemption and liberation from oppressive regimes,” writes the New York Times in its obituary of Kundera.
On the subject of sex in his novels, he once said to US writer Philip Roth: “I feel that a scene of physical love creates an extremely sharp light that suddenly reveals the nature of the characters and summarizes their life situation.” He added: “The erotic scene is the focal point where all the themes of the story converge and where the deepest mysteries reside.”
“The years I spent in France were the best of my life”
Kundera followed the call to France. There, in the land of his dreams, he began a new life with his wife Vera. He received French citizenship in 1981 and later confessed: “The years I spent in France were the best of my life.” With his newly won lightness, in freedom, without political pressure, he was able to write his world bestseller “The New Lightness of His”.
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But once his past caught up with him dramatically. In 2008, a historian accused Kundera of having denounced a young anti-communist to the police in 1950. He was then sentenced to 22 years of forced labor.
Kundera vehemently denied this: It could never be clearly proven whether the signature on the document incriminating the young man actually came from Kundera himself.
The great writer Kundera, who died in Paris and himself loved to stand in the shadows, was never able to cast off this shadow entirely at the end of his life.
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