He will not have won the Nobel Prize and that is a shame. But he probably wasn’t expecting it, he who, like his friend Philip Roth, was ironic about this world sinking into kitsch and insignificance. Too misogynistic? Too European? Too white? Too discreet? Too romantic through and through? Go find out why.
It is necessary to imagine what meant, in the middle of the 1970s, the irruption of this Czech novelist in the literary world and especially in France, of which he made his country of adoption. At a time when the novel was crumbling and seemed to have had its last words, when it was reduced to its simplest expression when it was more than mere entertainment, a literary giant arrived from Eastern Europe. A man inscribed in the great tradition of Rabelais, Kafka and Flaubert, for whom literature was a means of investigating the world. The only one capable of rendering it in all its complexity, far from simplism and ideologies. And above all, to laugh about it.
The general public will have discovered the writer who died last week in Paris thanks to the worldwide success of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Rare are the novels that have so symbolized their time, a true musical score on the fragility of life and the heartbreak of man, between attachment and frivolity, love and licentiousness, commitment and recklessness, tradition and modernity.
At a time when artists are constantly ripping their shirts off for the hottest causes, Milan Kundera only wanted to be judged on what he had written. A bit like Réjean Ducharme, he had no other law than his art, even taking the trouble to delete without qualms, in his edition of the Pléiade, certain remarkable texts but considered too political.
The former communist poet, watched day and night by the secret services, who had to take refuge in France to continue his work, even refused the fine name of dissident. “Are you a communist, Mr. Kundera?” “No, I’m a novelist,” he wrote. “Are you a dissident? “No, I’m a novelist. “Are you left or right?” – Neither. I am a novelist. »
It is in the very flesh of his characters, and not in the speeches, that Kundera distills this ironic, anti-totalitarian and critical thought of modernity, as it was conceived in the West. A thought that Europe discovered with astonishment in the 1970s, in these regions that, in order not to name them, we preferred to designate under the vague expression of “Eastern Europe”. While in the West, youth dreamed of revolution, a clean slate and “new novels”, Kundera and his companions had long since returned from these clichés. Above all, they dreamed of preserving their national identity and adding their brick to the great romantic tradition that goes from Cervantes to Flaubert, from Kafka to Hermann Broch. The very one that Europe, back from everything, no longer seemed to want.
Far from the exacerbated lyricism of autofiction, Kundera claimed to be part of a romantic tradition that lies at the crossroads of humor, dreams, time and history. ” I am in overdose of myself”, he confided to the writer Christian Salmon, when he became an international star. An exclamation that defines an artist struggling to explore the world rather than shutting himself up in himself.
His friend and exegete François Ricard said that at the end of the 1970s, Quebec friends had tried in vain to find him a post in a university. Would Kundera the European have liked Quebec? We’ll never know. There is no doubt, however, that he would have found there the perfect example of what, in A west kidnapped, he calls the “small nations”. A historical reality of which he will have given the most perfect definition.
“Small nations don’t know the happy feeling of being there forever and ever; they have all passed, at such or such a moment in their history, through the antechamber of death; always confronted with the arrogant ignorance of the great, they see their existence perpetually threatened or called into question. »
He knew what he was talking about. Czechoslovakia, he said, had not only been conquered and occupied by Russia. She had been subjected to the yoke of “another civilization”, another vision of the world, of space and time. Prophetic, Kundera will go so far as to predict that “in our modern world, […] all European nations are in danger of soon becoming small nations and suffering their fate”.
This is perhaps why, in a France where part of the elite seems to have abdicated in the face of the standardization of the world, he will be Francophile to the point of revising each of his translations word for word and writing his last books in French – a choice that some will reproach him for. As if a Czech was needed to remind the French of their duties.
In an era that was no longer really his, Kundera will have pushed the delicacy to the point of fading away without making a sound. We will remember from the man who loved to smile so much at the disorder of the world this sentence imbued with concern: “With a heavy heart, I think of the day when Panurge will no longer make people laugh. »