Milan Kundera saw himself as a knife-blade, cutting through the sweetish rose-tinted art and literature of Czechoslovakia’s Soviet regime to show the reality—and the mystery—beneath. His writing landed him in a lot of trouble
The novel, his first, sold well. But when later that year Soviet tanks rolled in, forcing his country back into line, “The Joke” disappeared from bookshops. He himself was kicked out of the Communist Party and was fired from his lecturer’s job at the Academy of Fine Arts. Since no one was now allowed to employ him, he played dance gigs in the taverns of mining towns. Eventually, though, there was nothing doing in Czechoslovakia, so he and his wife Vera left for France, and stayed.
Tomas, like his creator, made a bad decision to defy the party. He lost his post as a surgeon and became a window cleaner. He also decided, for good or bad, to stay with Tereza. But all through the novel he had wrestled with his creator’s favourite theme, the weighing of opposites. The Greek philosopher Parmenides had stated, in particular, that lightness was positive and heaviness negative.
The question applied especially to Czechoslovakia, in its highly vulnerable position on the map. How could it survive without remembering its past great men, Hus, Comenius, Janacek, Kafka, or without the language they had spoken? Memory gave it identity, and gave Czechs themselves the only power they had against the states that oppressed them. In 1967 Mr Kundera appealed to fellow-writers to seize the moment with their pens. But he still resisted the thought of enclosing cultures within borders.
He had been one for a long time. His youthful reading was mostly French: Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but especially Rabelais and Diderot. French wit and experiment wonderfully foiled the socialist realism imposed on art and literature by the post-war Soviet regime. He fed it into his writing to defy the kitsch all around him.
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