The success of an author is often accompanied by increasing misunderstandings about him. After the worldwide success of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, misunderstandings did not cease to arise. Interview requests came in from all over the world and his words were often misrepresented. The legend of the Prague dissident threatened to overshadow his work, which he had tried to protect from biographers with his constant translation and editing work. His seminar at EHESS, the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, was always full of journalists and intellectuals in need of a master thinker. One of them said to me as I left a seminary, "I could be the new Sartre!"
More informationThe six most representative works of Milan Kundera
A decision had to be made, which consisted of a neologism: "beckettize", an allusion to Samuel Beckett's refusal to appear in public. And that's what he did from 1986 onwards. No more interviews. No more photos. His seminar was reserved for about twenty students, which I was in charge of selecting according to their work. From 1986 onwards, my role as an assistant often consisted of driving away annoying people rather than "helping" Kundera.
Instead of quelling the comments, his voluntary withdrawal from the public stage only served to fuel suspicions. You don't disappear just because, your detractors insinuated. Would he have anything to hide? After much searching, in 2008 they finally found a report from the Prague Communist Police from 1950, accusing him of having been an informer when he was 18 years old. A Kafkaesque judgment in the form of an anachronism. Yasmina Reza, in Le Monde, defended him: "It is difficult to forgive a man for being great and illustrious. But even less, if he meets these qualities, by keeping silent. In the empire of noise, silence is an offense. Anyone who does not lend themselves to revealing themselves, to some form of public contribution apart from the work, is an annoying figure and a priority target."
For Kundera, refusing to talk about himself was not a moral attitude, nor a posture of proud withdrawal, but a novelesque rejection of the despotism of the media, a strategy aimed at foregrounding works, the life of literary forms, and not that of authors. Refusing to talk about himself was the only possible reaction to the tendency of most literary critics and biographers to study the writer, his personality, his political opinions, and his private life, rather than studying his works. "The aversion to having to talk about oneself" was, in his opinion, the fundamental trait of the novelist's talent.
So much has been said and written about Milan Kundera that, on many occasions, the noise around his life has often taken the place of his novels. Journalists, those great informants about alien souls, have not stopped chasing him, following in his footsteps from Brno to Prague and from Rennes to Paris, searching for supposed secrets behind the closed door of intimacy, as if novels were not enough on their own and had to be supported in a biography, hung on a wall of celebrities.
There are two ways to approach the Kundera phenomenon. The first is biographical and consists of pointing out the different stages of his life, which, through a series of tests, took him from the lyrical illusions of his youth to the disenchanted maturity of adulthood. It is the formative novel of a young writer seduced and then disappointed by the communist revolution of 1948, which culminated in the Prague Spring of the sixties and the Soviet occupation of 1968.
In the first perspective, three writers follow one another, three Milan Kundera, one inside the other like Russian dolls: the young poet, traveling companion of communism in 1948; the organic intellectual of the Prague Spring in the sixties; and, after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the opponent of normalization, who is excluded from public life and forced into exile in the seventies (he settled in Rennes in 1975 and in Paris four years later). After the Soviet occupation, Kundera wrote three novels: The Book of Ridiculous Loves, Life Is Elsewhere and The Farewell, which, together with The Joke, form the group of novels written in Prague. Then came exile and Kundera again unfolded into the man of the East and the dissident, the stateless exile, deprived of his citizenship by the communist regime, and the "assimilated" writer to whom President Mitterrand granted nationality and who wrote his first essays and all his subsequent novels in French.
Therefore, if we listen to the biographers, there is not one Milan Kundera but five, five masks showing his effigy. What else are we going to think of this distribution of roles but what Kundera himself said about one of his characters?: "When I looked back, his life lacked coherence: all he found were fragments, isolated elements, an incoherent succession of paintings ... The desire to justify a posteriori a series of scattered events was a falsification that could deceive others, but not him." And I reflect: isn't that precisely the biography? An artificial logic that imposes itself in an "incoherent succession of paintings"?
But there is another possible approach, which is not filled with biographical details and focuses on the fundamental, which begins in medias res, according to the "art of ellipsis" that Kundera considered essential in novelistic composition. It is a "phenomenological" approach, although Kundera, who was bothered by philosophical labels, would have undoubtedly rejected the word and would have preferred an approach that he would have described as problematic, that is, bent on describing and making understandable a set of problems relating to the work and not to the life of the novelist.
It is impossible to understand the role and place of Kundera in the Paris of the eighties without taking into account the literary and intellectual context of the time: the crisis of Marxism, the end of the great stories and the decline of the figure of the committed intellectual, materialized in the death and burial of Sartre. on April 15, 1980. It was a crucial moment that helps us understand his strategy as a writer: "50% of a writer's talent is in his strategy!" he confided to me during my first interview with him in December 1981. That moment coincided with his arrival in Paris, when his work gradually left the Czech or Central European literary sphere (what he called the small context) and thus escaped the problems of dissent, which were to lose their appeal with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The end of history, the end of ideologies and great stories of emancipation.
We could say that this moment was the moment of the narrative impasse, the waiting period between two centuries: the twentieth century, which came to an end in 1989, and the twenty-first century, which, according to the media, did not begin until September 11, 2001. It is at this moment that, paradoxically, Kundera's works, his novels and essays, written mainly in Czech or French, take on the meaning of a return to the novel, a great recapitulation, a great retrospective, retro-European moment: as he wrote in The Art of the Novel, "European is one who feels nostalgia for Europe".
Christian Salmon is a French writer, author of Storytelling, The Cannibal Ceremony and The Age of Confrontation. Between 1982 and 1988 he was assistant to Milan Kundera at the EHESS in Paris.
Translation by María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia.
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