Milan Kundera believed that reality lay in countless questioning

Just earlier than the Prague Spring in 1968, when the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia appeared briefly to chill out, Milan Kundera managed to publish a novel a few joke. The joke, despatched by a younger man to a girlfriend on a postcard, learn: “Optimism is the opium of the folks! A ‘wholesome’ environment stinks of stupidity! Lengthy stay Trotsky!” It landed the younger man in a number of bother.

The novel, his first, offered properly. However when later that yr Soviet tanks rolled in, forcing his nation again into line, “The Joke” disappeared from bookshops. He himself was kicked out of the Communist Get together (he had been expelled earlier than, in 1950, for being important, however had reapplied) and was fired from his lecturer’s job on the Academy of High quality Arts. Since nobody was now allowed to make use of him, he performed dance gigs within the taverns of mining cities. Ultimately, although, there was nothing doing in Czechoslovakia, so he and his spouse Vera left for France, and stayed.

On reflection, writing “The Joke” had been a foul determination. But it surely was good on the time. That was life. You had just one, with no second or third possibilities to take a distinct course. His novels had been filled with characters struggling, like him, to unpick the previous, predict the long run and, on the premise of that, leap the appropriate method. In essentially the most well-known of them, “The Insufferable Lightness of Being”, the protagonist Tomas first appeared standing at a window, ruminating. Ought to he invite the beautiful bartender Tereza to his room, or not? Would he get too concerned? If that’s the case, how would he get out of it? After spending the night time along with her, the questions solely multiplied.

Tomas, like his creator, made a foul (or good) determination to defy the celebration. He misplaced his put up as a surgeon and have become a window cleaner. He additionally determined, for good or dangerous, to stick with Tereza. However all by way of the novel he had wrestled along with his creator’s favorite theme, the weighing of opposites. The Greek thinker Parmenides had said, particularly, that lightness was optimistic and heaviness unfavorable. Lightness was the realm of the soul, house, separateness and freedom; heaviness was to be earth-and-body-bound, rule-bound and constricted. Clear sufficient.

However not so quick. Lightness additionally made each historical past and life insubstantial, ethereal as a feather, the happenings of a day. It justified betrayal, irresponsibility and breaking ranks (as he from the celebration), the place heaviness confused responsibility and obedience. Most essential, lightness was about forgetting, and heaviness insisted on remembrance. What was the self, however the sum of reminiscences? In “The Ebook of Laughter and Forgetting” the heroine, Tamina, clung consistently to the reminiscence of her lifeless husband even when making love with different males. Was {that a} good or a foul factor?

The query utilized particularly to Czechoslovakia, in its extremely susceptible place on the map. How may it survive with out remembering its previous nice males, Hus, Comenius, Janacek, Kafka, or with out the language they’d spoken? Reminiscence gave it identification, and gave Czechs themselves the one energy they’d towards the states that oppressed them. In 1967 Mr Kundera appealed to fellow-writers to grab the second with their pens. However he nonetheless resisted the considered enclosing cultures inside borders. Borders between concepts had been there to be crossed.

In Paris after 1975, residing in an attic flat on the rue Récamier, feasting on frogs’ legs and finally writing a trio of novels in French, it appeared to him that notions of “residence” and “roots” is likely to be as illusory as the remainder of life. His Czech citizenship had been revoked and, although he nonetheless principally spoke Czech, he was nearly detached when, in 2019, he bought it again. Like Goethe, he noticed literature changing into world and himself as a citizen of the world.

He had been one for a very long time. His youthful studying was principally French: Baudelaire and Rimbaud, however particularly Rabelais and Diderot. French wit and experiment splendidly foiled the socialist realism imposed on artwork and literature by the post-war Soviet regime. He fed it into his writing to defy the kitsch throughout him. Sadly, it was kitsch he had fallen for himself when, at 18, he eagerly joined the celebration: all these heavy, emotional pictures of wheatsheaves, moms and babes, hero-workers brandishing spanners, the glowing brotherhood of man. He noticed himself as a knife-blade, chopping by way of the sweetish rose-tinted lies to indicate the shit—and the thriller—beneath.

As a result of reality was mysterious. And novels had been a wide-open territory of play and hypotheses the place he may query the world as a complete: digressively like Sterne in “Tristram Shandy”, or adventurously, like Cervantes’s Don Quixote. No solutions, questions solely; solutions (upfront) had been what kitsch offered. He performed with philosophical musings, psychological evaluation, investigations of misunderstood phrases, irony, eroticism and desires. It may make a mish-mash for readers, particularly Anglophone ones, and no different novel did in addition to “Insufferable Lightness”, although “Laughter and Forgetting” and “Immortality” offered respectably. The Nobel discuss got here to nothing, and he was glad, as a result of he most popular reclusive delving to any kind of fame.

He appreciated to name his novels “polyphonic”: a phrase realized from his father, a live performance pianist and musicologist. The various voices, components and motifs in his work had been united by “novelistic counterpoint” right into a single music. His chief hero within the enterprise was Janacek, whose photograph hung beside his father’s within the Paris flat: a composer who had refused to jot down by the principles however made straight for the center of issues. He doubted he himself had bought anyplace shut. Because the world couldn’t be stopped in its headlong rush, it was greatest simply to chuckle at it. The satan laughed, as a result of he knew life had no which means; the angels, as they flew over, laughed too, understanding what the which means was.

As a baby he usually sat on the piano taking part in two chords fortissimo, C minor to F minor, till his father furiously eliminated him. However as these chords grew to become heavier he felt himself develop lighter till, in a second of ecstasy, he appeared to drift freed from time. If that was insufferable lightness, he—and plenty of others—spent an terrible lot of their transient, insignificant lives looking for it once more. ■