Following yesterday’s republishing of an article on Kundera by Howard Jacobson, in which he posited (among other things) that history had left Kundera behind, i commented that perhaps – as can happen with writers/artists – history would swing back. This article seems to suggest something similar.

What this further indicates is that Kundera, if he didn’t have that status before, can now (and it often happens posthumously) be seen as having a universality in his work: by that, i mean an insight into the human condition that stands in any age, amongst any company.

Kundera’s ‘genius’ was to investigate living just beyond the boundaries of the political and belief systems that are pushed at us in order to categorise and to control. The result is often to be misunderstood, perhaps wilfully, since the challenge of living one’s life without being ‘captured’ provides an uncomfortable challenge to others who’ve sought the security of such systems.

He joins Graham Greene in my opinion one of greatest novelists of the 20th century in not winning the Nobel prize for literature.

“In choosing to write his later books in French, Kundera pulled off the near-miraculous feat of being expressive in a second or third language at a world-class level, putting him in the company of Vladimir Nabokov.”
As someone who writes mostly in a second (and sometimes third) language, I find this especially impressive. And it also puts him in the company of the great Joseph Conrad.

Dear David, Thank you for this excellent tribute to Milan Kundera who left us yesterday. As a French young adult, I read The unbearable lightness of Being in the eighties. I just cannot remember what I made of it and I do not have the book in my library. Your mention about Bernard Henry Levy’s attempt to suck the great writer’s literature is probably the reason why I did not pursue reading Kundera. I have to admit that at that very time, I was secretly willing to throw a tart with a lot of cream to the pretentious philosopher, who was simply kidnapping intellectual thinking and writing for his own pretension, vanity and political objectives.
Your words make me willing to read Milan Kundera literature and carry on writing away from politics. Thank you for your contribution
“A conviction is not novelistic” Milan Kundera, a phrase to meditate and not to debate!

“Luckily, we have Kundera’s masterworks as guides to the new-old world in which the people of the West increasingly find themselves embracing the unfreedoms of the East, in what is surely one of history’s greatest jokes — a joke that Kundera the novelist would have greeted with liberating irony.”

Of course, the tyranny of enforced speech and thought in Czechoslovakia was ultimately enforced by tanks and rifles as demonstrated by the snuffing out of the Prague spring. In our case it is perhaps that too many of us have adopted the unpolitical detachment of Kundera that has enabled the triumph of the apparatchiks of the unfreedom ideologies.

An excellent article. Thank you.

Thank you for this wonderful essay David. I read many of Kundera’s novels in the 90s and found this tribute to his literary talent insightful. The trifecta of individuality, privacy and eros nails it. The comparison with Nabokov and latter day censoriousness is also apt. Thank you and vale Milan Kundera.

IDK but he had a view into his world in CZ land that I found unique at the time. Maybe he saw the light at the end of the Comintern tunnel in the 60s. He was not an ideologue and got out to Paris early. Did he lose something in leaving? A lot I think.

No serious person would compare Kundera to Vladimir Nabokov. Where do you find these people?