Milan Kundera, incorruptible writer

The author The unbearable lightness of existence, one of the giants of European literature, died this Tuesday in Paris at the age of 94. In 1967, after being first expelled and later re-admitted to the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Milan Kundera published his first novel under the title Joke. Although it was apparently a frustrated love story, the background of the story is a sharp satire of Stalinism.

The data reveal the incorruptible character of the writer who for half a century was a great representative of Central European literature that refused to accept dogmas and that raised the flag of freedom above all others, even at the cost of bans and exile.

Kundera lived for half a century in France, the country whose citizenship he received and in whose language he wrote since 1990. The Czech Republic only returned his citizenship in 2020, and his most important work, The unbearable lightness of existenceit had to wait 22 years from its publication in France until it could be seen in the bookstores of that country.

Born on April 1, 1929 in Brno (Czechoslovakia), he was the son of a musician who ran the city’s conservatory. His father worked with Leos Janácek and his music was always an inspiration to the writer. So much so that it’s in the movie version The unbearable lightness of existence Directed by Philip Kaufman, on which he himself worked as a screenwriter, it makes several of his piano works and his quartets sound almost haunted.

Although he started studying literature in Prague, Kundera soon transferred to the film department. Those were the years of his first expulsion from the party, accused of acting against it. The experience will serve him well for his first novel. Later, he was reinstated and until his final fall from grace, he was a film professor at various university centers.

His literary vocation came relatively late. Before he sat down to write, as a teenager, he composed musical pieces in the style of Schoenberg, then played the trumpet and piano in several cabarets in working-class districts, then briefly dabbled in poetry only to stray again, this time towards painting. At the age of For 30 years, he wrote a story that he would later include in A book of funny love.

By the time Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, Kundera was already a famous writer thanks to only two books. He was then aware that he might not dare to stop him, but he could not publish what he wanted to write.

In addition, he was expelled from the Film Institute and again from the party, and had to live on savings and the minimum wage he earned playing the piano in small halls. When his savings ran out, he moved with his wife to France. It was 1975 and he was convinced that his writing career was over because he had nothing new to say. “Tyrannies often produce admirably brave men, but produce very little original thought,” he said in an interview with fellow writer Philip Roth.

A man without conviction

First in Rennes, and later in Paris, he enjoyed, as he himself said, the best years of his life. He saw his country from a new perspective, and he saw France as a foreigner. I guess that’s why he wrote again.

Those were the years in which he already spoke clearly against totalitarianism, especially about the danger of arguments that lead to them. “Today, people around the world unequivocally reject the idea of ​​gulags, but are still willing to be carried away by totalitarian poetry and even march towards new gulags,” he warned.

And his words have not lost their value. Nor is it his diagnosis of the path into the abyss that societies sometimes take. In his opinion, totalitarianisms are sold as a dream of a paradise of freedom, equality and harmony. That’s why they attract so many people. But when “the dream of paradise begins to come true” those who try to interfere appear and then “the rulers of paradise have to build a small gulag next door.” As the years pass, the gulag becomes bigger and more perfect, and the neighboring paradise gets smaller and poorer.

It was written by an author from a small country that in a little more than half a century experienced “democracy, fascism, revolution, Stalinist terror and the disintegration of that terror, German and Russian occupation, mass deportations and the death of the West at the hands of the territory. All this was the background which led him to “not believe in anything, to be a man without convictions”, as he often said. From there, his literature revolves around laughter and oblivion.

His books in Czech are the same as those written in French (slowness, Identity, Ignorance, party of insignificance) place characters before exile, identity, lightness of beingthe wickedness and absurdity of totalitarianism and fanaticism.

Awarded almost all major international literary prizes (Medicis, Kafka, Jeruzalem, Cino del Duca…), for years he was a very serious candidate for the Nobel Prize. His communist militancy at first and fierce criticism of the system later rejected him. He doesn’t care about me.

For no less than twenty years, he lived far from the literary world, without appearing in public or giving interviews. His friends say that he watched the current situation in Europe with concern. More than thirty years ago, he already reminded, almost with a foreboding character, that “in the last five decades, forty million Ukrainians disappeared from the world, and the world did not pay the slightest attention.”

In his books, he knew how to bring a smile out of totalitarian hell. “I lived in fear of the thought of a world losing its sense of humor,” he said. Milan Kundera, incorruptible writer.