The Grace Of Dying On Time

Milan Kundera: The Grace Of Dying On Time

by Andrei Codrescu

I once tried to give Kundera $ 60,000 to give a lecture in Oklahoma. He was the top candidate for a 1986 literary prize that required only a trip to the state and a lecture. Among the other candidates were Nadine Gordimer, Rene Char and Gherasim Luca. Kundera said that he would take the money but he wouldn’t come to lecture. He lived in Paris, and Zoom hadn’t been invented. Gordimer won the Nobel Prize soon after, Rene Char died, and Luca drowned himself in the Seine. The money went to Raja Rao, an Indian writer of family epics who lived in Texas and had no trouble lecturing in Oklahoma.

The weather was horrible. Snow and freezing winds shook the quonset hut where Susan Sontag and I emptied a wine bottle talking about Kundera. Susan’s candidate Nadine Gordimer would have braved the stormy seas and prairie winds to come and get her check. My candidate, Gherasim Luca, who lived in a freezing Paris attic on the charity of dying Surrealists (about 5,000 francs/annum) was philosophically against literary prizes.

As folk wisdom has it, there is a long, possibly infinite line of better-than Shakespeare Shakespeares waiting in the afterworld for their rewards.

So that left us with the problematic Milan Kundera. His refusal of the prize and money was not a surprise. He was becoming notoriously adverse to public appearances. He rejected the adaptation of his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Philip Kaufman. To him, literature was an art difficult to translate for film, not to speak of censors and biographers. A year earlier he had declared that, “In July 1985, I made a firm decision: no more interviews. Except for dialogues co-edited by me, accompanied by my copyright, all my reported remarks since then are to be considered forgeries.” Following this decision, he proceeded to destroy his personal archive of correspondence, notes, and unpublished manuscripts. This grand gesture was intended to keep the readers’ attention on his books instead of the writer who had become famous enough to become the subject of paparazzi. It was also an historically validated upgrading of his self-regard. Of the writers in his pantheon, his Czech predecessor, Franz Kafka, instructed his friend Max Brod to destroy his work, most of it unpublished at the time of his death. Happily, Max Brod did nothing of the sort. He not only disobeyed his friend’s wishes, he did everything he could to advertise his genius. By the time Kundera published his early poetry in the communist journals of the 1950s, Kafka’s star was already shining brightly in the firmament of 20th century literature. Gogol, another of Kundera’s predecessors in the mastery of the satirical-political style, burned the sequels to his immortal novel, “Dead Souls.” Criticized by the Church for its setting in hell, Gogol set his next book in Heaven, but he found it good only for the fireplace. A writer’s wishes as to the posthumous disposition of their oeuvre, whether unsuccessful like Kafka’s or successful like Gogol’s, are out of their control. There are even better ways to succeed in erasing one’s work by leaving no trace of it, for example being thrown into the fire by the church, nazis, or commies, or best of all, not writing at all. As folk wisdom has it, there is a long, possibly infinite line of better-than Shakespeare Shakespeares waiting in the afterworld for their rewards.

In 1985 Milan Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem prize, and in 1987 he won the Austria Literature prize. One year before these awards, in 1984, Kundera published his seminal essay, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” which could have been a keynote to either one of those honors. These awards had a deep and obvious connection both for Kundera personally, for European literature, and geopolitics globally. Susan Sontag and I were discussing his rejection of our invitation in 1986. It was Kundera’s moment. Not coming to Oklahoma was not a rejection. The eyes of Europe were on him and he doubtlessly had little time for entertaining Americans. Sixty grand is nothing to sneeze at, but his books were best sellers so he didn’t need it.

Austria is the center of German language literature for various reasons: it is not Germany (Anschluss is in parentheses here, in order to let in Jews, Sigmund Freud* for instance.) Austria is the birthplace of great writers, among them Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig*, Ingeborg Bachman, Joseph Roth*, Thomas Bernhard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gustav Meyrink, Herman Broch*, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The asterisks are yellow stars. I started this list with the fairy-tale writer Hugo von Hofmannstahl because he gave the Jews of Austria-Hungary poetic German names, Sugarmountain (Zuckerberg), Mother of Pearl (Perlmutter), and so on, leaving no nature postcard unturned. He did this on orders from Empress Maria-Theresa who intended to integrate Jews in the empire. Her mitzvah turned out to also be a gift to antisemites who now had a nice Judenbuch to consult. This is a digression, but it is not insignificant in regard to Kundera’s gesture of deleting his own past. Nor is the last name on this list insignificant: it belongs to the writer who gave his name to “masochism,” a psychological condition easily translated geopolitically in a longer essay.

The Austro-Hungarian empire was Central Europe, par excellence, a circle of greatness that embraced Czech, Polish, Slovak, Romanian, Hungarian writers, among them the great Bohumil Hrabal, Jaroslav Hasek, Franz Kafka*, Max Brod*, Karel Capek, Czeslaw Milosz, Witold Gombrowitz… all of whom Kundera considered Central Europeans. “What does Europe mean to a Hungarian, a Czech, a Pole? For a thousand years their nations have belonged to the part of Europe rooted in Roman Christianity… Isn’t Europe, though divided into east and west, still a single entity anchored in ancient Greece and Judeo- Christian thought?”

This impeccable Cold War logic will sound suspect for various reasons today, but at the time of my conversation with Susan Sontag in 1986 I had another problem. I saw the fine traces of an ex-Communist mea culpa in the dialectic of West and East as thought by Kundera. Susan saw it too, more so because earlier that day we had been given a tour of the Science Library at the University of Oklahoma, by a librarian who insisted that science began in Greece from a remark by Heraklitus, and that Europe was the only place where Science, capital S, had developed. This irritated Susan Sontag to no end and there issued fiery disagreement, and a marvelous polemic. What about China? Egypt? Sumeria? Persia? The Mayan and Aztec civilizations? Where is the taperecorder when one needs it?

I highly recommend intellectual poker with Susan Sontag. I can’t wait to play her in the bardo. There, we will invite Kundera to the table.

It did not escape her that our candidate Kundera and the librarian thought the same way. By the same token, we thought Kundera a great writer. American literature in English, with the exception of the two writers discussing it, had become unbearably boring. For me, personally, I preferred suicide to reading another novel by John Updike. I was happy that Saul Bellow and Philp Roth were still alive, but I didn’t have their books on pre-order. And then, just like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, saved us in 1970 from the suburban solitudes of John Cheever, another foreigner, Milan Kundera, stormed the mainstream parapets with Life Is Elsewhere, and relieved us of the heavy-handed rule of the Johns. This was followed by Farewell Waltz (1971), The Book of Laugher and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) The lightning success of this last undeniable masterpiece was unanimous. The critical establishment was compelled to admire it, and even the frowning literary underground responded by naming some its radical practitioners, “The Unbearables.”

The timing had much to do with it. Writers banned in Russia and its satellites, were anxiously read and promoted, but not fully enjoyed. Solzhenitsyn’ “Gulag Archipelago,” a New York Times best-seller, languished on millions of “must read” piles on the bedside tables of their owners. Even I, an exile from a barbed-wire Soviet fiefdom, read it mostly out of duty to history and my condition. After the first million Russians killed by Stalin in the Gulag, my attention flagged. The next twenty million remained unread. I often regretted that our books in English did not require cutting the pages as they were being read, like French books. Cut pages were a good measure of how far in a book one had traveled. I once browsed through the library shelves of a famous French philosopher while he was busy making us drinks in the kitchen, and found that many classics of philosophy, including Schopenhauer, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, had mostly uncut pages. Maybe he read them at the library in the original, I thought. I was 23 years-old, fresh out of Eastern Europe. I found it unthinkable that such an eminence, known for his essays on the very uncut classics I had seen, had not read them. It took another Frenchman, Pierre Bayard, to write How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read (2007), to blow the cover off the “well-read,” including famous intellectuals who did not read the books that lent them authority in the salons and the quarterlies. Ah, a Kundera moment.

Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the world changed. The Berlin Wall and its metaphorical shadow, “the Iron Curtain” lasted from sheer inertia for another two decades. No one in Russia or the countries in its “sphere of influence” (another metaphor for military occupation) believed in communism or the ruling apparatchiks. The obligatory rhetoric was still mouthed at May Day parades, but all demonstrations of loyalty had become a joke, as Kundera’s novel The Joke seriously called it. The Joke was all about faking it. Folk music became “folk music.” One could apply quote marks to every act of official support for the ideology. What made the joke sinister while still being laughable, was the immense cadres of snitches and policemen charged with guarding the simulacra. The cadres did no more believe in the official religion of communism than anyone else, but a job is a job, eh? Among the dispirited masses, only a few dissenters were still laboring in the opposition and were routinely arrested. Kundera was no exception, but unlike his contemporary Vaclav Havel, he did not go to prison. There is a nearly tragic undercurrent in Kundera’s novel about the lost utopia of communism he had once believed in. The seriousness of The Joke and that of my favorite novel, Life Is Elsewhere, comes from precisely the sadness of his betrayed faith.

In 1981 Kundera was still living in Prague and writing in Czech. His French publisher, Claude Gallimard, persuaded him to move to France where he had a large and enthusiastic readership. He was mentioned for the Nobel.

Susan thought that his novels were truly novels, with living characters who gave the writer permission to think on their behalf in a world that was inimical to them. She thought his female characters credible, witty, intelligent and unable to escape their attachment to the narrator. If they did, it was through a radical act that had a logic inaccessible to the men who loved or hated them. She thought of these interaction as “moral calibration.” Susan delighted in their thinking, which was often the writer reporting it from his male incomprehension. This made interpretation unnecessary.

I thought that his novels were essays with puppet-like characters who enacted Kundera’s life in a futile attempt to escape his evolving nausea with the police state. In other words, it was all commentary sprinkled with sex performed on stage for an army of interpreters.

Susan Sontag had written in Against Interpretation (1966) that “The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters.” She loved that Kundera had prevented these armies from breaching the moat of his own textual interpretation. His humor and sense of absurdity protected his characters from would-be interpreters. She had directed Kundera’s play, Jacques and His Master at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, and knew his characters well.

Since she had brought up Kafka, I raised her a Hrabal. In the books of Bohumil Hrabal, a wicked humor unfolded inside the tragedy that was life in an absurd society. This particular humor may be essentially Czech, but in Hrabal it never required commentary or even “thinking” in its relentless unfolding of magnified trivia. For Hrabal the existential tragedy is always a metaphor of itself: the funny thing is that no matter how hard it tries to transcend its thingness, it can only be itself. The laundry never dries.

Susan raised me Herman Broch. I saw that and raised her a Gombrowicz. She saw that and raised me a Hasek. I threw in Havel. The pile on the table rose as the wine in the bottle went down. I highly recommend intellectual poker with Susan Sontag. I can’t wait to play her in the bardo. There, we will invite Kundera to the table.

artnovel “It’s enough to read the greatest Central European novels: in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, History appears as a process of gradual degradation of values; Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities paints a euphoric society which doesn’t realize that tomorrow it will disappear; in Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, pretending to be an idiot becomes the last possible method for preserving one’s freedom; the novelistic visions of Kafka speak to us of a world without memory, of a world that comes after historic time. All of this century’s great Central European works of art, even up to our own day, can be understood as long meditations on the possible end of European humanity.”

Until 1985, even in exile, Kundera still wrote in the language of the country where he was born. His books were banned in the communist East, but his rise to fame in the West was phenomenal. His English translators, great wordsmiths like Henry Michael Heim, lifted his prose to the center of our literary concerns. The reviews of what some critics called the “minor literature” of small nations, shriveled and vanished in the wake of these novels.

Kundera asked “But what is a small nation? I offer you my definition: the small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and it knows it. A French, a Russian, or an Englishman is not used to asking questions about the very survival of his nation. His anthems speak only of grandeur and eternity. The Polish anthem, however, starts with the verse: “Poland has not yet perished. . . . Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a vision based on a deep distrust of history. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx, that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate—that is the history of conquerors. The people of Central Europe are not conquerors. They cannot be separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the wrong side of this history; they are its victims and outsiders. It’s this disabused view of history that is the source of their culture, of their wisdom, of the ‘nonserious spirit’ that mocks grandeur and glory. Never forget that only in opposing History as such can we resist the history of our own day… Actually, in our modern world where power has a tendency to become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few big countries, all European nations run the risk of becoming small nations and of sharing their fate. In this sense the destiny of Central Europe anticipates the destiny of Europe in general, and its culture assumes an enormous relevance.”

If that passage from “The Tragedy of Central Europe” may have been the perfect acceptance speech to the Austrian State Prize for literature, the following dealt with its inevitable companion, the Jerusalem Prize Award:

“Sigmund Freud’s parents came from Poland, but young Sigmund spent his childhood in Moravia, in present-day Czechoslovakia. Edmund Husserl and Gustav Mahler also spent their childhoods there. The Viennese novelist Joseph Roth had his roots in Poland. The great Czech poet Julius Zeyer was born in Prague to a German-speaking family; it was his own choice to become Czech. The mother tongue of Hermann Kafka, on the other hand, was Czech, while his son Franz took up German. The key figure in the Hungarian revolt of 1956, the writer Tibor Déry, came from a German-Hungarian family, and my dear friend Danilo Kis, the excellent novelist, is Hungario-Yugoslav. What a tangle of national destinies among even the most representative figures of each country! And all of the names I’ve just mentioned are those of Jews. Indeed, no other part of the world has been so deeply marked by the influence of Jewish genius. Aliens everywhere and everywhere at home, lifted above national quarrels, the Jews in the Twentieth Century were the principal cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central Europe: they were its intellectual cement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators of its spiritual unity. That’s why I love the Jewish heritage and cling to it with as much passion and nostalgia as though it were my own. Another thing makes the Jewish people so precious to me: in their destiny the fate of Central Europe seems to be concentrated, reflected, and to have found its symbolic image. What is Central Europe? An uncertain zone of small nations between Russia and Germany. I underscore the words: small nation. Indeed, what are the Jews if not a small nation, the small nation par excellence? The only one of all the small nations of all time which has survived empires and the devastating march of History.”

After the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in the second decade of the 21st century, Kundera’s remarks at the end of the 20th, acquire added relevance. The much ballyhooed “end of history” when the USSR and the Berlin Wall collapsed, caused premature euphoria. The countries that had been forced to forsake their national identities for a utopian rhetoric of universal harmony, continued to be ruled by the apparatchiks. What’s more, the commissars turned capitalists became incredibly rich. Without the burden of the rhetoric they were free to feed on the corpses of their countries.

“Today,” Kundera wrote in 1984, “all of Central Europe has been subjugated by Russia with the exception of little Austria, which, more by chance than necessity, has retained its independence, but ripped out of its Central European setting, it has lost most of its individual character and all of its importance. The disappearance of the cultural home of Central Europe was certainly one of the greatest events of the century for all of Western civilization… The Central European revolts were not nourished by the newspapers, radio, or television—that is, by the “media.” They were prepared, shaped, realized by novels, poetry, theater, cinema, historiography, literary reviews, popular comedy and cabaret, philosophical discussions—that is, by culture. The mass media—which, for the French and Americans, are indistinguishable from whatever the West today is meant to be—played no part in these revolts (since the press and television were completely under state control).”

“The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas … and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.”

This eulogy is no longer for the “small nations,” it is for the disappearing culture of Europe. In what seemed dated for the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, can now be read again as a critique of all totalitarianism: “Totalitarian Russian civilization is the radical negation of the modern West, the West created four centuries ago at the dawn of the modern era: the era founded on the authority of the thinking, doubting individual, and on an artistic creation that expressed his uniqueness. After the destruction of the Austrian empire, Central Europe lost its ramparts. Didn’t it lose its soul after Auschwitz, which swept the Jewish nation off its map? And after having been torn away from Europe in 1945, does Central Europe still exist?”

Life Is Elsewhere (1969)], my favorite Kundera novel, is an investigation in the making of a poet, a kind of anatomy lesson good enough to be a universal blueprint. Jaromil, the poet, gestates inside the dome of his mother’s womb until he dies. He is, in fact, a human who is never born. What does Jaromil do in his mother’s womb? He writes poems to please his landlord, his mother. She loves his poems, Mother loves Jaromil’s poems because all the worlds he dreams are safely in her womb. Jaromil can only dream of escape while in her womb.

A poet is for Kundera an unborn human who dreams in words because words are the quickest and cheapest way to share his dreams of escape. Sharing his dreams in images requires equipment. It is still the 20th century, the unborn have no cameras. Had he been digitally born in the 21st century Jaromil would have shared his dreams on screens. Since 2020 all fetuses are furnished with a visual recorder (it develops when the eyes first appear.) Kundera did briefly attend the Prague film school, was in the circle of Milos Forman, and helped make “Closely Watched Trains,” the film based on a book by the greatest writer of his generation, Bohumil Hrabal.

Kundera became the writing master of every kind of escape: oedipal, physical, political, literary, amorous, national, ideological, academic, fan worship, and as we saw in Oklahoma, financial.

These escapes from the boredom of a life full of duties to an imaginary world where neither body nor mind are imprisoned or made to do anything, transcend the small country under the shadow of Empire. Like Baudelaire, the bard of laziness, Kundera was at first a poet and a utopian. He made beautiful worlds from which he subtracted himself, until he was no longer allowed to, either by the state or by his own mixed up feelings about communism. He then wrestled with reason. He did not become a reflexive traitor, a true existentialist like Blaise Cendrars, applauded by Henry Miller for being a “traitor to the human race.” His genius was that of the escape artist, a Houdini who becomes inadvertently a prophet. Humor, satire and wit are a master escapist’s tools, and a Czech specialty. When Communism pretended to reason, Kundera responded with irony. Kundera’s title, Life Is Elsewhere, is from Athur Rimbaud’s A Season In Hell: “True life is elsewhere.” Not in the hellish womb of captive Czechoslovakia.

“My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form,” Milan Kundera told Christian Salmon in 1984 in The Paris Review. “The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas … and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.”

For a time before his recent death at the age of 94, Kundera seemed to have fallen out of fashion with critics. Jonathan Coe, a nouveau censor for the current neo-puritanism, wrote of his “problematic sexual politics” with their “ripples of disquiet. . . androginism. I avoid the word ‘misogyny’ because I don’t think that he hates women, or is consistently hostile to them, but he does seem to see the world from an exclusively male viewpoint, and this does limit what might otherwise have been his limitless achievements as a novelist and essayist.”

Nor are we “consistently hostile” to fashion.

Another critic complained about the “adolescent and posturing” flavour of the books which had thrilled him in his youth, adding of Kundera’s later novels that reading them was an “increasingly laboured process of digging out the occasional gems from the abstraction and tub-thumping philosophising… a series of retreats into mere cleverness.” Diane Johnson wrote in the New York Times “what he has to tell us seems to have less relevance… the world has run beyond some of the concerns that still preoccupy him.”

Sure, he wasn’t a beatnik.

These critics’ withdrawal of support is modish schadenfreude. Kundera wrote about sex because it was one of the few ways individuals could assert their liberty in a repressive state, it was an escape from ideology. And there is no doubt he loved women, they are never one-dimensional. It wasn’t as if a saint had fallen off Charles Bridge.

Did Kundera become a teller of truths inconvenient to the modern age? In his early work he foresaw our own times of image oversaturation, and the loss of time to the vampires of marketing. He did not like the atmosphere of growing intolerance and rhinoceros-like groupthink that increasingly resembles the Soviet world he thought he left behind. His disdain was not reactionary, it was a defense of the imagination. “The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity,” he wrote. “Every novel says to the reader: ‘Things are not as simple as you think.’” Each book was a “paradise of individuals,” a world in which all the characters had their reasons. No one could be right or wrong, and all could expect to be understood—anathema to any movement wanting heroes, villains, or easy answers. Interviewers pressing Kundera on his loyalties found him just as difficult to pin down. Was he on the Left? “I’m a novelist.” On the Right then? “I’m a novelist.” At times his dedication to the form reached an obsessiveness that was either impressive or just plain cranky. He sacked an editor for changing his colons to full stops.

Susan Sontag was a great partisan of Eastern European writers and Eastern Europe. She supported Czeslaw Milosz and Danilo Kis, and György Konrád. Mayor Muhidin Hamamdzic of Sarajevo announced the city named a street after her, and the city’s Youth Theater mounted a plaque for her on its wall. Kundera was not the only card in her deck, but it was royal.

—Andrei Codrescu
July 22, 2023

Codrescucrop Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, andcommentator for National Public Radio. He is the author of over fifty books of poetry, fiction, critical essays, and commentary on art, life, and literature, averaging a book a year since his first publication, and including So Recently Rent A World—New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012, Blood Countess, The Posthuman Dada Guide, The Poetry Lesson, and In America’s Shoes. Codrescu’s latest poetry collection, Too Late for Nightmares, will be published in the Fall of 2022; a fantasy fiction novel, Meat from the Goldrush, is also slated for Fall of 2022. He is a recipient of the Ovid Prize for poetry, the Heritage Award from the American Immigration Council, a National Book Award Finalist, and two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. His poetry, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, and The Paris Review.