Farewell to Milan Kundera, the unbearable lightness of being free

Farewell to Milan Kundera, the unbearable lightness of being free

The lesson the Czech writer leaves us: "I live in terror of a world that has lost its sense of humour".

by Spartaco Pupo

Source: https://www.barbadillo.it/110334-addio-a-milan-kundera-linsostenibile-leggerezza-di-essere-liberi/

Milan Kundera, who died yesterday at the age of 94, was the most famous Czech writer of the second half of the 20th century. It had become tiring to read his latest novels, which were increasingly abstract and far removed from those that had made him famous. His old warhorses, then, were completely out of fashion.

His indulgence in the 'spirit of complexity' was ill-suited to the 'simplification' of our times. His heterodox intelligence was now incompatible with today's spasmodic quest for moral purity. Her sometimes deviant explorations of female sexuality could not be tolerated in the age of #MeToo. Yet it was precisely sex that was the main legacy of the communist period of Kundera's production, when it was elevated by him to one of the few means by which individuals could assert their freedom in the face of the repressive state. His dedication to form reached such an impressive obsessiveness that he once fired a publisher for replacing his colon with a full stop. He always banned Kindle editions of his books. In short, he was now too out of date.

No one ever managed to label him. To those who interviewed him to ask if he was left-wing, he replied: 'I am a novelist'. Right-wing, then? 'I am a novelist'. Yet almost all his novels were a mix of politics, psychology, history, philosophy and sex, with one common thread: anti-communism. By the age of 40, he had already experienced the Nazi occupation of his country, the subsequent surrender to Stalinism, the liberalisations of the Prague Spring and the Soviet repression that followed.

In "The Joke" (1967), Kundera told the story of a young communist expelled from the Party for an ill-judged joke. He, who had been expelled from the Party in 1950 for his 'non-conformist' ideas and his 'anti-communist activity'. "Life is Elsewhere" (1973) is about the evolution of the character of a young poet obsessed with his mother and his subsequent switch to left-wing student politics. In the short story included in 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' (1979) he imagines a group of communist 'faithful' dancing in a circle and joyously levitating over the rooftops of Prague. 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' (1984), as it is known, is set in the climate of aversion to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The early communist period in Prague, apart from its atmosphere of giddy utopian psychosis, was marked by horrors, many of them surreal. There was the fatal defenestration of Jan Masaryk, son of the former president, who pandered to the new regime and realised his monstrous mistake too late. In 1952, amid farcical trials and purges, the brightest minds of communism were executed and incinerated. But Kundera's dancers continued their joyous fast pace, prancing with double fervour. They were on the right side of history and their hearts were pure. He called them 'angels', and envied their up-to-the-minute movements.

Kundera knew that communist fundamentalism was incompatible with humour, which was an alternative reality made up of its own rules, which trivialised the seriousness of ideologues and mocked them to the point of 'evaporation'. Humour was a philosophical system that 'illuminates everything' and therefore those who practised it had to be annihilated. In a 1980 interview with Philip Roth, he said that he was able to recognise an 'anti-Stalinist' by the way he smiled: 'A sense of humour was a reliable sign of recognition. I have been living in terror ever since about a world that has lost its sense of humour'.

In the hands of another, more conventional writer, the recipe might have proved indigestible, but with Kundera levity prevailed in everything, even in the tragedies of politics.