GOODBYE MILAN KUNDERA ( 1929-2023)
“And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn
in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy:
happiness is the longing for
repetition.”
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being’)
Milan Kundera died in Paris on July 11, 2023. Perhaps best known for his novels, he was also a poet, playwright, and essayist, and wrote several collections of short stories. During my recent visit , I found Kundera's books quite popular in France. One finds people reading him in trains, parks, and buses and to my surprise, I found a lady cashier in a grocery store reverting to Kundera's book after finishing dealing with the customer across the counter. He is read, talked about and loved in France . Not France alone, Kundera swept the world of literature with his style, breaking all barriers and borders. To his readers, he offers a cocktail of fiction, imagery, experimentation, existentialism, humour, philosophy, sex, absurdity, nostalgia and many more things through the characters that he creates. His readers in the communist world were equally swept by the power of his pen and presentation. Kundera also impressed the Chinese writers by adopting an ironic and playful style instead of a head-on depiction of the sharp reality, while his depiction of personal relationships and deconstruction of grand narratives depicted the alienation of human existence under the system in the context of Eastern Europe.
Possibly after Albert Camus, Kundera has somehow entered the Parisian hearts. And Gallimard ( Paris ), the publisher of Albert Camus, became his publisher as well. Like Camus, Kundera repeatedly insists on artistic independence. Kundera also shares Camus’s aversion to “commitment literature”. Like Camus , Kundera also has a serious engagement with Truth . “Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being,” he said in the interview. “To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.”
Kundera started his literary journey with “The Joke”, which was published to acclaim in 1967, around the time of the Prague Spring Movement. He completed his final novel, “The Festival of Insignificance” (2015) when he was living in Paris. He is the author of many other novels like , Life is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and of the short-story collection Laughable Loves - all originally in Czech. His first novel as an émigré was ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)’ , a story written in seven parts that showed the power of totalitarian regimes to erase parts of history and create an alternate past. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works ‘The Art of the Novel’ and ‘Testaments Betrayed’, were originally written in French. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times but never won. This is what Daniel Gueorguiev, Senior Librarian, at New York Public Library writes about Milan Kundera:-
“Kundera, however, cannot be positioned only in the political aspect of literary creativity: he mastered “the art of the novel,” polyphony, and farce to perfection. He wrote essays and plays. He meditated on how his works should be perceived, and that it is not advisable to read novels only as psychological manifestations. But seriously, though, why read Kundera? For those of us who flatter ourselves by thinking we belong to the non-conformist camp, Kundera's witty experimental style gives us some of that rebellious woomf enriched by inimitable irony, metaphysical reflections, and philosophical mind games. We read Kundera because we want to be Kundera, or perhaps because we were Kundera at some point in our lives. Each of Milan Kundera's books is a personal experience. We read them because we do not want to be told what to do—because we despise being told what to do.”
Born on 1 April 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Kundera grew up during the Nazi occupation of his homeland and joined the Communist Party in Prague after the second world war. His father was a famous pianist. He studied in Prague, where he joined the Communist Party, translated the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (of Polish descent ) and began his literary journey with poetry. He also taught at a film school where his students included the future Oscar-winning director Milos Forman. He was expelled from the party in 1950, rejoined in 1956 and was expelled a second time in 1970 after the Prague Spring Reform Movement – in which he was seen as playing a role. The movement was crushed by the Polish government of the period.
Kundera’s first novel The Joke, a work of dark humour about the one-party state published in 1967, led to a ban on his writing in Czechoslovakia while also making him famous in his homeland. In 1975, he and his wife Vera went into exile in France, where he worked for four years as an assistant professor at the University of Rennes. They were stripped of their Czech nationality in 1979. He became a French citizen and some of his later works were first published in French rather than Czech. Once Kundera left Czechoslovakia for the West, he was able to use the critical faculties he gained from his encounter with communism to compare and contrast the Western and the Eastern and Central European experience to elucidate important aspects of contemporary human existence. In 2019, his native country restored his citizenship and recognised the power of his pen.
It was the publication of 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' in 1984 that confirmed his status as an international star. Set in the heady atmosphere of Prague in 1968 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the novel follows two couples as they struggle with politics and infidelity, examining the tension between freedom and responsibility. The fact that Kundera himself experienced the Prague Spring as well as the Soviet takeover lends special poignancy to the story. Kundera uses his setting for several important purposes. Not only the question of morality but even the categories of ideological imperatives have also been emphatically interrogated by Kundera in the novel. Through the main characters of the novel – Tereza, Tomas, Sabina and Franz , Kundera problematises the essentialised notions of ethics and morality both in the spheres of private and the public life. Philip Kaufman’s 1988 film adaptation, ensured Kundera’s ascension into the literary stratosphere. Long back I read this book and found something new and unique. In this work, Kundera also reminds his readers to examine the definition of contentment. He asserts that meaning only emerges alongside mourning. ‘In every culture, meaningless happiness usually gets equated with contentment’, he asserts.
On his death, The New York Times wrote this:-
“He had a great gift for subversive humour. In “The Joke”, for example, a woman tries to kill herself by ingesting painkillers, only to find they were laxatives. Kundera’s humour had a deeper purpose. It was often irreverent and mocking; it had an underground quality, and it sprang from his innate distrust of authority. Kundera’s novels, especially his later ones, could be abstract and heavy-handed. His characters, at times, were little more than chess pieces. Their author could be pretentious. His work is filled with observations such as: “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” But his best fiction retains its moments of sweep and power.”
Kundera was certainly influenced by many Western philosophers. He also admitted his liking for ancient Indian philosophy, especially the Upanishads. The well-known Indian scholar V V N Rao writes this:-
" There are numerous examples of digestion of Indian literary, philosophical and scientific ideas across the Czech Republic. One, hitherto obscure, example is that of the Czech National Motto. “Truth prevails” (Czech: Pravda vítězí, Slovak: Pravda víťazí, Latin: Veritas vincit) is the national motto of the Czech Republic.There is ample evidence that the source of this motto was not Jan Hus, but the ancient scripture, Mundaka Upanishad. ‘Pravda Vítězí’ (Truth Prevails), is a near verbatim translation of ‘Satyameva Jayate’ (Truth Alone Prevails) ."
I need to add that Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk(1850-1937), as the first President of Czechoslovakia, selected ‘Pravda vítězí’ as the National Motto of Czechoslovakia shortly after independence from Austria-Hungary. Masaryk was a lover of Sanskrit and Upanishads. This topic, I shall deal in a separate write-up later. Till then RIP Kundera. You will be missed.
( Avtar Mota )
Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.
