Milan Kundera - People Thinking About Him

 From The Guardian's Milan Kundera: ‘funny, experimental, worldly’:

Maybe there’s a way to rewrite that cold war public image and its authority. We are now in a new era of Russian colonial invasion, and it was Kundera’s experience of that earlier Russian invasion - of suddenly being forced to believe in the “eternity of the Russian night” – that was for him indelible. His defence of his small country became a defence of an ideal Europe as a collage or ecosystem of small elements, a Europe to which he once gave the wonderful definition: “maximum diversity in minimum space”. And the art of the novel he defended was therefore also based on maximum diversity: an international bricolage that could link Martinique and Colombia to Prague or London. It meant that he found a way of defending the international while in no way dissolving the local, and could at the same time refuse the idea that a writer’s identity should exist in a single language. Famously he eventually stopped writing in Czech and wrote in French instead. And in a short piece on the exiled Czech poet Věra Linhartová – who also left Prague for Paris, and also began writing in French – he gave a description of the new territory they had discovered: “When Linhartová writes in French, is she still a Czech writer? No. Does she become a French writer? No, not that either. She is elsewhere.”

That “elsewhere” was the territory he was forced into by the Russian invasion, where all forms of identity were revealed as potentially fluid. It was from that place of radical instability that he once described himself as a “hedonist trapped in a world politicised to extremes”. But perhaps this isn’t entirely precise. It was more that his disillusion at the human capacity for cruelty and self-deception was so absolute that his ideal became a definition of pleasure as a space of pure playfulness and tenderness. This space, in his eyes, was also precarious, so precarious that Kundera’s deepest fidelity, perhaps, was to the non-human world of animals and forests.

Ugliness, we have seen all too much of it. Instability, we have had it all our lives. Here is where we can start to fight back, using our God-given creativity. If you have not read Kundera, start. As well as his novels, I recommend his The Art of the Novel.

From The New Republic's Milan Kundera’s Stubborn Struggle for the Survival of Literature:

The great theme that runs through his writing is the way in which the individual is drawn, unwillingly, into macro-historical affairs. The pair of essays that make up his most recent collection, A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, locate Kundera at two important moments in his life, when his standing as an author would change: “The Literature of Small Nations” finds him in 1967, on the eve of the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia; “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” in 1983, shortly before he would make the decision to disappear from public life. In both, the author is a besieged intellect: menaced by ideology, philistinism, commercialism, censorship, cultural and linguistic imperialism—finally, forced into exile.

Yet two developments threaten a pristine legacy. One is that, despite Kundera’s disdain for publicity, two biographies of him—both unsanctioned—have appeared in the last four years. The first, Milan Kundera: A Writer’s Life, by Jean-Dominique Brierre, mentions little of Kundera’s private life (and even earned Brierre a thank-you note from his subject). The second, Milan Kundera: His Czech Life and Times, by Jan Novák, is far less courteous, portraying Kundera as a scoundrel, a “moral relativist,” and at times, a collaborator, desperate to cover up the scandals of his past. But perhaps an even larger problem is the one that Kundera himself identifies in A Kidnapped West: the marginalization of literature in the culture and the precariousness of its future.

At the center of the West’s cultural history is its literature, which the West has turned its back on. The same grievance reappears in Kundera’s later nonfiction, especially in his three book-length essays on the state of literature—The Art of the Novel (1986), Testaments Betrayed (1993), and The Curtain (2005)—which situate themselves in the twilight of the novel’s cultural centrality. “Has not the novel for some time already been living on death row?” Kundera posits in Testaments Betrayed. In the same piece, written in response to the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, he writes of “Europe’s incapacity to defend and explain” the novel from its enemies: “Europe, the ‘society of the novel,’ has abandoned its own self.”

For the condemnation made by some in my lifetime of Western culture, of white males, of a literary canon, we have arrived at a place where human creativity and imagination is shuffled off to one side. If the novel disappears, what does that say about the capacity of our humanity?

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