If the death of Cormac McCarthy and Martin Amis over the past two months didn’t make one feel as if a certain literary era has come to an end, Milan Kundera’s death in Paris this week at the age of 94 surely must. Kundera, like McCarthy and Amis — and like Kundera’s great American champion Philip Roth, whose death five years ago marked the beginning of the end of this era — was part of a generation of writers who believed wholeheartedly in the art and power of the novel. Working in the artistic tradition of Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Gustave Flaubert, Kundera wrote about big themes and important ideas with elegance. He broached the kinds of momentous topics that his Anglophone counterparts did not, because they could not: the challenges of creating genuinely honest, uninhibited art while living under one of the most censorious regimes in modern history; the struggle of maintaining one’s intellectual freedom under communism; and the imperative of preserving one’s emotional and psychological freedom (and especially one’s ability to love and to laugh) while living under the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain.
Born in the Czech city of Brno, Kundera was raised in a household full of music. His father was a well-regarded concert pianist as well as the director of the Janacek Academy of Music and Performing Arts. Like many Eastern and Central Europeans of his era, Kundera was a communist, at least at first, because it was Soviet communism that had liberated his country from German Nazism. But when the communists themselves began to exert the kind of totalitarian control that the Nazis had exhibited, Kundera began to change his tune. After the Soviet Union tightened its grip over Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Prague Spring in 1968, Kundera joined other Czech activists in protesting the communist clampdown on their freedoms. Kundera was particularly incensed over the communists’ incursions on his and other writers’ freedom of speech.
I’M A BOOK MAN, NOT A BEACH READER
The communists’ response, at least in hindsight, was eminently predictable — they curtailed Kundera’s and other writers’ freedom of expression even further. Kundera was censored, forced out of his university job, and rendered persona non grata. His 1967 novel The Joke was banned, and all of his books were removed from public library shelves. Unable to get any other teaching jobs, Kundera supported himself through piano-playing gigs and by writing anonymous horoscopes for Czech magazines. When he finally decided that his situation in his native land was untenable, in 1975, Kundera emigrated to France. Kundera’s Czech citizenship was revoked, but he acquired citizenship in another domain — the realm of exiled writer, a distinguished literary tradition in its own right that stretches from Dante to Nabokov.
Although The Joke was esteemed in certain literary circles, it was his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being that would make Kundera an international literary superstar. The erotic philosophical novel about a doctor and his two lovers who flee from Prague to Geneva following the Prague Spring, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was an immediate success. It was translated soon thereafter into over 20 languages and was made into a major Hollywood film in 1988. The movie, directed by The Right Stuff director Philip Kaufman and starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche in their first major lead roles, was an artistic success in its own right, receiving multiple Oscar nominations and heaps of praise.
From 1995 on, Kundera wrote almost exclusively in French. His last published novel was The Festival of Insignificance (2015), which has received mixed reviews. In 2019 the Czech Republic at last restored Kundera’s citizenship, an important and deserved gesture, though it was clear that Kundera would never return to live in the land of his birth.
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Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and an incoming postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, is being published this month by the University of Alabama Press.
