Author Milan Kundera dies at 94
[Hat tip: Commenter “Barry Meislin.”]
RIP Milan Kundera.
Long-time readers here probably recall that Kundera has been one of my favorite authors and almost certainly was my favorite living author, someone I’ve quoted time after time on this blog. You can find a list of these posts here; I highly recommend this one.
For me, Kundera defies description, but of course I’ll try to describe him. He was an expat Czech who had been a Communist in his youth but was a political changer. As a writer, he had one of the most distinctive “voices” ever, and that voice often stepped out of the storyline to make a point that was philosophical or historical or most likely both. Everything he wrote reflected the working of an unconventional mind and spirit, uncategorizable, playful, thoughtful, ironic, and deep.
I first read Kundera before he became famous, when excerpts from one of his works – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – appeared in The New Yorker, which I used to read assiduously. I only had to read one or two paragraphs to realize that this was a writer like no other, someone who was going to matter to me in terms of the evolution of my thinking about life and about politics and history. And so it was.
This interesting profile of Kundera, who was an elusive guy, appears in – of all places – The New Republic. I think Kundera defied all attempts to explain him.
Here’s another profile of Kundera that’s worth reading, with this quote from a 1985 interview:
“For me, indiscretion is a capital sin. Anyone who reveals someone else’s intimate life deserves to be whipped. We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it,” he told the writer Olga Carlisle. “Life when one can’t hide from the eyes of others — that is hell.”
I’ll close with a couple of quotes from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that I’ve used on this blog:
…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.
Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
Kundera died yesterday in Paris at age 94. I saw the obit. and immediately thought of Neo. But she already knew as her post makes clear! Hard to believe he was a communist when young, but that is a common failing of youth.
not really, say he turned 18 around 1947, this was the time when stalin was pushing against mazaryk, chalk it up to youthful indiscretion,
like soltzhenisyn, he quickly ran afoul of the party bosses, when he was in the army
Given that Kundera lived in France following his guest professorship in 1975, and became a French citizen around 1979, I’m wondering whether he ever wrote anything about the vast changes in France over the past few decades– particularly the demographic change.
A genius, and in you, Neo, he had the reader he deserved.
The last paragraph is great. These days, add social media to the mix. People wanting to be wanted, even if anonymously.
The internet is full of people looking for that little hit from an upvote, or a reply to a comment, or even acknowledgement of a comment, whether good or bad.
On the plus side, plenty of good people on the ‘net can be a positive.
Internet, wonderful, as well as the worse thing ever.
Kundera exposes some of the inner motivations of the Marxists.
“human beings have always aspired to an idyll, ………….”
This description applies to some religious seekers and to Marxists. Both seem to seek an Earthly paradise.
I’m not sure why, but I realized quite early that we are all fallen and while we can seek to establish a life of harmony with other people and nature, paradise is beyond our reach.
I saw life as a series of challenges that we can try to meet or avoid. How we meet or avoid those challenges is the story of our lives. Some life stories will be tragic, some acceptable, some wonderful, and some glorious. We would all like life to be glorious, but thus far the nearest thing we have come up with is democracies with free markets and private property laws backed by courts. They offer the most opportunities for more people to live wonderful or glorious lives. Not paradise.
“Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. ”
We lived next door to a Jewish couple who introduced us to dancing the Hora. Yes, there is a magic to dancing together in a circle. It gives a sense of unity and closeness. But we can’t dance forever. We eventually have to face life as an individual and tackle our challenges by ourselves.
But the myth of a possible utopia on Earth continues to attract followers, and that is one of the challenges that we humans continue to face.
There’s a long but perceptive tribute to Kundera just posted at Quillette—
from the conclusion: “How should one remember Kundera, now that his own end, after 90 years of history, has arrived? As a supreme anatomist of power? For his irony and playfulness, his cynical—though never unromantic—dissections of love? The strange sparse music of his books, his hatred of kitsch, his demonic delight in outraging our delusions? Will he be remembered at all, other than as a period piece? In a time of competing fundamentalisms—religious and political—it seems unlikely his posthumous reputation will have an easy ride, though as long as political or personal lies exist his work will have things to tell us.”
https://quillette.com/2023/07/11/milan-kundera-the-nobel-prize-for-literature-winner-we-never-had/
I was hoping you’d post about this. What a truly great artist, the kind that almost no longer exists. This was already on instapundit, which many here read, but in case anyone missed it:
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
JJ,
Your fifth paragraph, the one that ends with “Not paradise.” is succinct and brilliant.
I know him mostly from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I’ve never read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but it just got bumped to the top of my reading list. I should be able to start this weekend.
Was the film “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” a good adaptation of the novel? It had a great cast and got good reviews.
I saw it, but remember little.
I thought it was great. Lost a bit of the poetry and the introspection of the novel, but a fantastic movie as far as I’m concerned.
Thanks, Rufus T.
huxley:
It was an okay movie but just a pale shadow of the book. The voice and viewpoint of Kundera was absent, which to me means that about 95% of the point was absent.
thats a hard thing to do without becoming overbearing, it is so much about his thoughts and perceptions,
JJ,
I second RTF’s opinion. Well put.
FWIW, I’m fairly social and I really like people, but I have never wanted to ‘circle dance’. Never.
Molly,
How about square dancing? 🙂
The voice and viewpoint of Kundera was absent, which to me means that about 95% of the point was absent.
I’ve never read Kundera. I suppose he was as brilliant and brave as people say. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, though, was one of the most painfully boring films I’ve ever seen. Carriere and Kaufman (the screenwriter and director) didn’t want to cut things out of the book and reduce it to the standard 90% minutes, but apparently the absence of the authorial voice, Kundera’s comments and digressions, made the film less than the book must have been.
Someone suggested online that the characters (Tomas and Sabina, presumably) were meant to be banal and were only lifted above shallowness by Kundera’s authorial voice. I don’t know if that’s true, but so far as I could see the film didn’t manage to make the characters or the story really compelling.
Critics were looking for something that they could call a European-style political, philosophical, and erotic masterpiece, so they overpraised the film. They were also impressed by Binoche and Day-Lewis. In addition, there was a greater tolerance in those days for stories of compulsive womanizers than there is today. Even at the time, the sequences with Tomas’s promiscuity didn’t work for all of us.
The passage about circle dancing reminds me of Czeslaw Milosz. It’s accurate and damning, but it might be worth remembering that Kundera and Milosz were both attracted to Communism in their youth (to different degrees, perhaps). Perhaps they understood the attraction of “circle dancing” so well because they had shared it in their younger days.