Milan Kundera, the great writer, just passed away at 94.
I remember my discovery of his work. I am 18 years old. I had been offered The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I immediately jumped into it, and was dazzled. It was a philosophical novel, taking the form of an investigation into existence, and more particularly, into modern existence.
Modernity
For Kundera, literature was not only used to tell stories, but made it possible to explore the contradictions of the world, its facticity, too. Especially since his characters always, or almost always, found themselves at a distance from themselves, conscious of evolving in a comedy that is called society, attached to their role, but still feeling locked in it. Who immerses himself in this magnificent collection of short stories that is The book of laughter and oblivion will see it.
Kundera was a master of irony, who knew the tragic human condition, but never managed to take it absolutely seriously, even though he experienced communism in Czechoslovakia, his native country. This will not prevent him from thinking about the disruptive function of humor in totalitarian regimes, as we will rediscover by rereading Joke.
Kundera also knew how to integrate real essays into the heart of his books, which presented themselves as a meditative follow-up to the narrative, as seen in Immortalityperhaps his finest book.
Kundera, novelist, was also, in his own way, a political thinker, placing at the heart of his thinking the situation of what he called “small nations”. The latter were not characterized, according to him, by their size, but by their existential situation. A small nation is a nation aware of its possible disappearance, of its precarious identity. One immediately thinks of the Baltic countries and other peoples bordering Russia. One also thinks, of course, of the case of Quebec, where Kundera was widely read.
Kundera, less well known, was also not fooled by the ideology of rights that has ravaged the West for 30 years.
Nation
It is worth quoting him, as early as 1993: “As in the West we no longer live under the threat of concentration camps, as we can say or write anything, as the struggle for human rights gained in popularity it lost all concrete content, to finally become the common attitude of all towards everything, a kind of energy transforming desires into rights. The world has become a human right and everything has turned into rights: the desire for love into the right to love, the desire for rest into the right to rest, the desire for friendship into the right to friendship, the desire to drive too fast in the right to drive too fast, the desire for happiness in the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book in the right to publish a book, the desire to shout at night in the streets in the right to shout the night in the streets.
Kundera had understood the delirium of our time.