French writer Milan Kundera, author of 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', has died

French writer of Czech origin Milan Kundera, one of the greatest novelists of the 95th century, has died at the age of XNUMX. with the BBC.

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For many years he was promised a Nobel Prize, which he never received. But it has received widespread recognition. His books have been translated into dozens of languages. He found himself in the wonderful company of Vladimir Nabokov, Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges and other intellectual writers of the last century who were left without the highest literary award.

Milan Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, into the family of musicologist Ludwik Kundera, a student of the famous composer Leos Janacek.

Kundera learned to play the piano, and as a young man wrote a cycle of songs to poems by Apollinaire. Music was very important in his literary works.

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In early 1952, Milan Kundera, together with Jan Trefulka, translated into Czech the poems of the Ukrainian poet Pavel Tychyna.

"Joke"

Thus, in Kundera’s first novel, “The Joke” (1967), folk music allows the main character to forget about the past.

This is Kundera's only novel published in Czechoslovakia and only thanks to the support of the French communist poet Louis Aragon. He wrote the preface to the French edition, which appeared before the Czechoslovak one. Aragon considered The Joke one of the best novels of the twentieth century.

The story in the novel is told on behalf of four characters - the protagonist Ludwik, the folklorist musician Yaroslav, the doctor Kostya and the journalist Helena.

The novel is based on the story of Kundera himself. He joined the party at the age of 19 immediately after the Communists came to power in 1948. However, the following year he was expelled from there, when in one of his letters he joked about a party functionary (Kundera was reinstated in the party in 1956 during the period of de-Stalinization, he was expelled again in 1970).

In the novel “The Joke,” in the 1950s, the main character Ludwik sent his communist girlfriend a humorous postcard: “Optimism is the opium of the people. A healthy spirit smells of stupidity. Long live Trotsky!”

The postcard ended up in the party committee, Ludwik was expelled from the party, expelled from the university and sent to a penal battalion. A key role in the sad fate of the hero is played by his former comrade Pavel Zemanek.

Ludwik will eventually take revenge on Zemanek by sleeping with his wife Helena. She falls in love with Ludwik, but only disgusts him.

Kundera himself saw in his four heroes “four individual communist microcosms, split four varieties of the European past”: “Ludwik: communism growing out of the destructive Voltairian mind; Yaroslav: communism as a desire to resurrect the patriarchal past embodied in folklore; Kostka: a communist utopia transferred to the Gospel; Helena: communism as a source of joy homo sentimentalis. All these microcosms are recorded at the moment of their disintegration.”

Kundera shows the collapse of communism as the fall of four European adventures of the past.

The publication of “Jokes” occurred during the thaw period. But the Prague Spring was short-lived and ended with the introduction of troops from the Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia.

Kundera participated in protests against the Soviet invasion, for which he was deprived of the opportunity not only to publish his works, but also to teach. He left the country and lived in France from 1975 until the end of his life.

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

While in exile, he wrote his most famous novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1984). The main events there take place in 1968. The Prague Spring first serves as a background, and then has a direct impact on the fate of the heroes forced to flee abroad.

Even those who have not read the novel are familiar with its title.

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The film adaptation by Philip Kaufman, released in 1988, contributed to the fame of the book. The film starred future stars, still young actors Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin. The tape received two nominations for an Oscar and a British Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

But Kundera himself did not like the film. He believed that everything in the tape was reduced to a love triangle - the history of the relationship between the surgeon and lover of women Tomasz with the artist Sabina and the waitress Teresa.

And this damaged the philosophical component - for Kundera himself, the novel was primarily important as an artistic saying about freedom of choice, its fatalism, and existential absurdity. The novel begins with reflections on the ease of human existence. The narrator, and from his personality Kundera himself, argues with the late Nietzsche and his philosophy of the Eternal Return, for which every human decision and every event is doomed to be constantly repeated.

Kundera contrasts it with the German Einmal ist Keinmal (“once is the same as never”, “once does not count”). A person lives only once, and therefore this life does not have much weight - that same lightness that is paradoxically unbearable due to existential absurdity: having chosen one thing, we lose the alternative and will never know whether the choice was right.

“It is impossible to check which solution is better, because there is nothing to compare with. We live for the first time and without preparation. Like an actor playing a role in a play without rehearsal. But what is life worth if its very first rehearsal is already life itself?” "- writes Kundera.

Life is not here

Kundera remained in France for the rest of his life. The Czechoslovak authorities revoked his citizenship. And since 1981 he has been a French citizen. There he was considered a French writer of Czech origin. He visited his homeland on short visits and always incognito.

Kundera wrote ten novels, four of them in French. And he even insisted that he was a French writer, and his books should be sold in the “French literature” section.

Only at the end of 2019 did Milan Kundera and his wife Vera again receive Czech citizenship. Kundera was then 90 years old.

The writer believed that it was possible to return to his homeland after two to five years of departure, when this could be perceived as a long vacation or a protracted illness. But when separation is measured in decades, “new obligations appear, new friends appear, emigration becomes your new home.”

The theme of emigration was central to Kundera's works. This dynamic can be traced from “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The Book of Laughter and Oblivion” to “Ignorance” (2000).

Since the mid-eighties, Kundera has not given interviews, arguing that “the private life of a writer does not belong to the public.” And the writer’s task is to destroy his own house, building a new one - “the house of his novel.”

Charge

Kundera adhered to this rule and broke his silence only once - in 2008. Forced.

The Czech edition of Respekt published an article in which the writer was accused of denouncing a friend of his colleague. Pilot Miroslav Dvořáček worked for the American intelligence services and arrived in Prague in April 1950 on a secret mission. He was arrested and sentenced to 22 years in prison, 14 of which he served.

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In confirmation of the denunciation, the Kunders published a report from the archives of the Prague police.

After that, Kundera called Czech television, called the accusations false and said that he knew nothing about this story at all.

The first Czech president, Václav Havel, stood up for Kundera, and world-famous writers wrote an open letter in his support, including Nobel laureates Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Maxwell Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Salman Rushdie.

Inner Odyssey

Together with Pamuk, Rushdie and other European intellectuals, Kundera signed an open letter in early 2019 calling for Europe to be protected from populist politicians and Vladimir Putin.

The fate of Europe worried Kundera as a truly European writer who never limited himself to a narrow national theme. He admired Kafka, Cervantes and Rabelais. Especially the latter's humor.

Kundera found it funny when his own literary jokes were taken at face value. One of the heroes of his novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” a professor of philosophy, says that “after James Joyce, the greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventures. “Homer’s Odyssey has moved inward,” he notes.

Kunder later saw these words in the epigraph to a French novel. And he admitted that it was pleasant and strange at the same time, since he considered them “sophistic nonsense ... university chatter of the 1970s, which consisted of structuralism and psychoanalysis.”

The writer's last novel, The Triumph of Insignificance (2014), about four Parisian friends, did not become a major literary event. Critics received the novel with mixed reactions. The New York Times reviewer called it unconvincing: "Instead of a deep analysis of political and psychological freedom, Kundera created insignificant reflections on the human weakness to syphilis, lies and perverse choices."

And the Guardian described the short book (just over 100 pages) as a funny and elegant novel in which an "incorrigible scoffer" recalls with surprising candor a life in which there is no need to look for deep meaning.

Kundera concluded one of his speeches (as well as the collection of essays “The Art of the Novel”) with brilliant self-irony: “It’s time for me to finish. Otherwise, I almost forgot that God laughs when he watches my thoughts.”

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