Milan Kundera, died at the age of 94 on Tuesday July 12, had left Czechoslovakia for France in 1975. In this portrait entitled “Milan, the fatalist”, Guillaume Malaurie describes this forced departure which looked “less like an escape than a journey”. The writer was one of the rare authors to have entered during his lifetime in the prestigious editions of La Pléiade in 2011.
Never tell Milan Kundera that he is a dissident writer from the Eastern countries: his blue gaze would turn gray and, on the changing face, bitterness would erase even the wrinkles of the smile. Double odd, indeed. This 53-year-old Czech novelist has had a French passport since August 1981. And, above all, unlike the Soviet rebels confronted with the Asian demons of their own history, Kundera moves, in Europe, among his own. From the Atlantic to Warsaw, but not much further. He therefore feels no discomfort and his point of balance remains intact. Also his forced departure from Czechoslovakia for France, in July 1975, looks less like an escape than a trip finally made.
Very little luggage, in the trunk of his small Renault 5, when he crosses the border. A few records – he loves Béla Bartok and jazz – photos – those of his father – and an invitation from the faculty of Rennes. On his arrival, he is questioned about the Stalinist universe. He answers on Diderot, to whom he will dedicate his play, Jacques and his master. Translated today into twenty languages (including Albanian), “nobelizable”, some still whisper, Milan the fatalist is, here, at home.
But that he writes his articles directly in French, is enthusiastic about the cinema for The Valseuses, by Bertrand Blier, or takes Normandy in affection, he always stands equidistant from Prague and Vienna. Central Europe, his mental space, also inspires the seminar entrusted to him by the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. For Kundera, it’s an acknowledgment of intellectual debt, in a way. “Reform, structuralism, linguistics, did they not take root in Prague, hothouse and magic capital of the West? Whereas the best authors of the 20th century examined man under all its psychological seams, Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek were already anticipating its totalitarian future. Don’t forget that!” And he recalls that the very term “robot” originates from a Czech neologism.
“In France, you are still too serious”
In his classroom at the Hautes Etudes, in a basement of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, crowd elbow to elbow, Poles, Swiss and Greeks in search of this lost literary mosaic: that of the former Austrian Empire. -Hungary. At the same time attentive, indulgent and happy to joke, Professor Kundera does not know how to pontificate, he exercises a maieutic. Its very presence takes the place of knowledge, encourages everyone to think without slipping into a nostalgia for the ghetto. In this respect, the tender or fierce humor that runs through his work counts for a lot. “In France, you are still too serious,” he said. “Remember that Kafka could not read to his friends the first chapter of Trial so much he laughed to tears.”
At the age of 30, he made this simultaneous discovery of an “ironic self” and of Czech modernism, by writing the very caustic Laughable Loves. From now on, it is over for a poetic-lyrical period during which he celebrated the Prague coup of 1948, his own spring of 68. Excluded from the Communist Party two years later, the Khrushchevite political thaw opened the doors of the famous Czech Film Institute to him, where he taught. This parenthesis closes quickly, with the Soviet intervention of August 1968 and the ousting of Alexandre Dubcek. With one hundred and twenty thousand of his compatriots, he will soon find only exile to escape the “Biafra of the mind” – a formula signed Aragon and taken from his preface to Joke. Kundera’s fourth novel: “One of the greatest novels of this century.” Tasty praise for a bad socialist subject made famous in Paris. Through him, here is the Czech power sprinkled, and the sprinkler – burlesque reversal – emerged from the communist literary elite.
In France too, this “sneer for adults”, looking like a Boris Vian, surprises. Shy in public, Kundera avoids atmospheres that are too serious, or the undermining of a joke. Do we seriously question him about the ocean mists at the end of a walk at the Pointe du Raz? “Probably the furthest place from Russian tanks,” he replies. If the anecdote makes the rounds of Tout-Paris, it is quite wrong that we would take this pirouette for thinking cynicism. Those who have seen him as a distant loner are still mistaken and pass blindly by the astonishing duet he achieves with his wife Vera. Vera, the clandestine woman of his novels. On the express condition that the couple make room for you at their side, the meeting immediately finds a scenario. Is Kundera darkening the future of his country? Vera heckles her skepticism. Is he reluctant to choose the photo intended to illustrate this portrait? Here she teases him about his narcissism…
Milan Kundera and his wife Vera in Prague, October 14, 1973.
© / afp.com/-
Contradictory, impertinent exchanges… basically, almost Latin. And always accomplices. We feel they are capable of reproducing, there, in front of you, this short story of hitchhiking where spouses pretend to meet for the first time. They unlock the prohibitions, lie to each other brazenly and, on the verge of a catastrophe, finally find each other.
Kundera writes in Czech but rereads in French
This is how Kundera goes, whom no disaster really annihilates, as he knows how to observe it, then divert it to his advantage. “During the worst moments of the Soviet occupation, I disguised my identity, changed apartments and made up for myself the role of a doctor to deceive the police and amorous proprieties.” Similarly, Kundera, who for the past fourteen years has been writing his novels in Czech but can only proofread in French, has no complaints. On the contrary, he plays the difficulty: “It’s an antidote to my laziness, a constraint to renewal, far from my regular readers.” His next book, The Unbearable Lightness of Beingexpected in bookstores in mid-January 1984, will probably devote its efforts.
Until now, the essayist and the novelist lived in separate rooms. Now they embrace. From Geneva to Thailand, from Prague to the United States, his story indeed follows the paths of a European culture that he considers today bloodless. Would the joke have lasted long enough? Maybe. And Kundera, this time, feels the need to say why.
A return to the original conception of the novel, this “polyphony”, says Kundera, where the individual crosses in major the orchestra of History. Imperceptibly, as if to explain himself better, he approaches the shelves of his discotheque. Musician, son of a pianist student of Cortot, he then penetrates, measure after measure, into The House of the Dead, this Dostoyevsky penitentiary orchestrated by Leos Janacek. Astonishing correspondence between this Czech opera and the work of Kundera. Same concern for accuracy, whether it’s a crack of the whip or a groan, a similar desire to question the concrete without ever violating it. Head bent, back slightly arched, he follows the progression of the libretto, murmuring. A unit of place welded to the plot, the penal colony cannot fail to evoke, for him, Prague under high surveillance, “this poem which disappears”. But the prisoners’ aptitude for exceeding hatred, for forming love affairs and confounding their jailers still preserves them from the torments of an unhappy conscience.
Memory haunts Milan Kundera and oblivion relieves him. Equal distance where stand his literary creatures, men without qualities, suddenly endowed with the gift of clairvoyance.