The French novelist Milan Kundera, born on April 1, 1929 in Brno (Moravia, then in the Czechoslovak Republic), died in Paris on July 11, learned Le Monde from its publisher. He was 94 years old. “Novelist” – and not “writer” – in all the meaning he gave to the art of the novel, considered as a means of total, aesthetic and non-theoretical knowledge, a true “call of thought”. This demanding program, carried by a poetics and a meditation on existence, he described it himself, in his essay Les Testaments betrayed (Gallimard, his French publisher, 1993), as “an attitude, a wisdom, a position excluding any identification with a politics, with a religion, with an ideology, with a morality, with a collectivity”.
Based on a whole tradition of “world literature” to which Kundera has never ceased to express his attachment, from Cervantes to Carlos Fuentes, from Goethe to Diderot, from Kafka to Musil, the art of the Kundera novel questions with acuity the territories, the stakes and the temporality of a genre historically under tension, sometimes threatened with internal exhaustion, sometimes with external aggression.
The prompt commitment of Kundera in favor of Salman Rushdie, in 1988, at the time of the Satanic Verses (Plon) affair, was then an exemplary reminder of the ever-strong urgency to defend the imprescriptible rights of fiction. “French” novelist nevertheless, by personal decree, by elective affinity towards a country of emigration which had naturalized him in 1981, after his forfeiture of Czech nationality (1979), and, above all, towards this conquered “second mother tongue” of high struggle against the determinism of history. A tragically confusing story of the 20th century, that of the “kidnapped West”, as he put it, a story with which his personal life and his work have continually come into conflict, over multiple twists and turns often against a backdrop of polemical and slanderous violence. .
A joke genius
“I was born on the 1st of April. It has metaphysical significance,” Kundera confided to his friend and compatriot Antonin Liehm. As a sign no doubt of a joking genius to which he was to devote his most famous title in 1967 (The Joke, 1968), as a nod also to the burlesque of Brave soldier Chvéïk (1921), popular hero of his compatriot Hasek, promoted to national emblem.
Contemporary of a young nation reshaped by the interwar period after and before other tectonic movements, Milan Kundera was born into a family of the cultivated elite of the independent republic, embodied by the figure of Mazaryk. His father, a pupil of the composer Janacek, piano teacher at the Brno Conservatory, gave his son a very high-level musical education, the scope of which is found both in the principle of composition and in the central leitmotifs that irrigate the work of Kundera: the reflection on rhythm and acceleration, the combination of tempos, polyphony, legato and staccato style, fugue and coda, the perfectly assimilated lesson of musical modernity, Schoenberg above all.
The teenager, an excellent musician (he tries his hand at composition), will however follow another path for his university studies, which lead the provincial of Moravia to the capital, Prague. As a literature assistant, he studied screenplay and directing at the Film Academy at the same time, a practice to which later work would also be indebted by its theme, but also its editing effects, in a dialogue between the arts that was both fruitful and tumultuous.
Short cinematic idyll
If, in his youth, Kundera assiduously associated with Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel, Juraj Herz, representatives of the brilliant Czech New Wave, if he collaborated in the film adaptation of The Joke (1968) and approved that which Hynek Bocan proposed for n a short story from his collection Risibles amours (1970), the cineromane idyll is cut short. Radicalized by exile in France (1975) and literary recognition, Kundera’s positions against what he calls “rewriting” are indeed sharpening.
In 1988, he rejected Philippe Kaufman’s adaptation of his bestseller The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). As for the criticism of the degradation of visual art into “imagology”, of the script into “storytelling”, it is unleashed in the essays and in his story La Lenteur (1995), with devastating humor and sarcasm. To understand the sometimes grating sound, the yellow laughter that accompanies the little music of the long-term work, in two languages ??and two spaces, we must therefore take up da capo the meanders of a tortuous personal and intellectual journey, braving a few forbidden by the author himself, starting with the most intimidating of all in the immediate posthumous period: virulent antibiography. “The novelist demolishes the house of his life in order, with the stones, to build the house of his novel. A novelist’s biographers undo what the novelist made, redo what he undid,” reads the entry “The Novelist (and His Life)” in The Art of the Novel (1986).
This so Kunderian aphorism, cult for some, source of irritation for others, well deserves transgression, a pious infidelity, in order to put precisely the enemy’s history in its rightful place, only its own, but all of its own. Because if the historical individual allows himself to be mystified in Kundera, it is because he sometimes has an interest in being duped, in order to better manipulate in turn, when the time comes.
The Czech period of Milan Kundera, brutally interrupted by his exile in France, first in Rennes, then in Paris, where he was welcomed with his wife Vera thanks to the help of Aragon and Claude Roy, is inseparable from the vicissitudes of the post-Yalta story, of the relative latitude then offered by the communist regime to a gifted young intellectual full of promise.
young opportunist
In February 1948, a coup brought Communist Klement Gottwald to power in Czechoslovakia; the date of joining the young Kundera to the party is slightly earlier than him, from which he was excluded for the first time in 1950. Fundamental ideological dissidence or simple youthful passion, like Ludvik, the hero of The Joke? The facts are still debated. And how did the young man experience the disgrace of moderate minister Vladimir Clementis in 1952, if he knew about it? Mystery. The episode will reappear later in an ironic apologue of the Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), by partially erasing the undesirable from the official photo, of which only the fur hat remains. Sic transit…
Be that as it may, Kundera rejoined the Communist Party in the mid-1950s, which enabled him to publish two collections of lyric poetry (L’Homme ce vast jardin, in 1953, and Monologues, in 1957, untranslated) as well a great epic poem dedicated to a communist executed by the Nazis, the Czech resistance fighter Julius Fucik (Last May, 1955, untranslated), to which are added a book of essays and the play The Owners of the Keys ( 1962). The young opportunist will still commit a few forgivable propaganda texts, prefaces and afterwords, which indicates at least an author known and recognized by the public. He receives official prizes, benefits like others from the secondary advantages of a protected status, in return for an ideologically undisturbing and fairly conformist production.
Monologues, perhaps thanks to a relaxation of the regime, nevertheless marks an aesthetic turning point in this period of poetic production constrained by circumstances: the claim of an intimate life is expressed there, the personal lyricism offers a breath, opens a breach in the vein of pure revolutionary pathos. This age of immaturity, Kundera will later give him ruthless penknife through the character of Jaromil, his “experimental ego” of paper, the grotesque poet of Life is elsewhere (1973), which earned him the Medici prize .
Nascent talent
It is undoubtedly in the play The Owners of the Keys, which was a great success when it was released, and was even translated into several languages ??including French (1969), that the budding talent of Milan Kundera best shines through, skilful in combining the superficial respect of the Jdanov realist canon (alliance of workers and intellectuals, anti-Nazi resistance…) and scenic situations exploited in a register close to the theater of the absurd.
A time close to Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), with whom he fell out on the question of “Czech destiny”, founding some hope in the effervescence of the “Prague Spring”, in 1968, Kundera published short stories in his country of Risible amours and his novel La Joke without censorship problems. The crushing of said “spring” does not prevent him from continuing to teach at the cost of a continual struggle, bullying and humiliation accumulating.
The opportunity offered to emigrate, heartbreaking as it is, opens a new era, a quasi-literary renaissance, which reached its peak in the late 1980s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the resurgence of interest in France for the literature of Central Europe, around reviews such as Le Messager européen and L’Atelier du roman. Kundera first taught cinema in Brittany, then in Paris, was introduced into the Parisian intellectual milieu, translated and published by Gallimard.
A hypercontrolled conception of the work
His literary work, steeped in the phenomenology of the sensitive, achieves the feat of bringing together a vast international readership of enthusiasts and intellectual and academic circles, particularly in Canada under the leadership of François Ricard, in France, Italy and Germany, around themes now associated with his poetics of the novel: eroticism and licentiousness (L’Insoutenable Légèreté…), derision (La Valse aux adieux, 1976; Risibles amours), the rejection of kitsch (everywhere) and illusion deadly lyric (Life is elsewhere), memory and amnesia (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), but also nostalgia (L’Ignorance, Le Rideau, 2003 and 2005), all in the name of a hyper-controlled conception of the work which receives a restricted perimeter administered by the sole author.
“There are two conceptions of what is ‘work’. Either one considers as a work whatever the author has written; it is from this point of view, for example, that the writers in the famous “La Pléiade” collection are often edited. Namely, with everything: with every letter, every diary note. Either the work is only what the author considers valid at the time of the balance sheet. I have always been a vehement supporter of this second conception. »
This “note from the author” Milan Kundera, attached to the Czech reissue of The Joke, in the aftermath of the “velvet revolution” (1989), which suspended censorship of his works in his country of origin after twenty years of prohibition, sign ethics and bias that are tirelessly stated in French in his four published essays. It also serves as a scrupulous protocol for the “definitive edition” in “La Pléiade” (two volumes) of the Work, established by François Ricard, in 2011, without critical apparatus or biography of the author, accompanied by a single “biography of the work” under the auspices of the Latin adage: Habent sua fata libelli, “books have their own destiny”.
A work translated into more than eighty languages
Kundera, who renounced his youthful poetic texts and other productions deemed unworthy of passing on to posterity, left a “recognized” work of sixteen works, translated into more than eighty languages, characterized, from 1985, by the chosen transition from a first literary language (Czech) to a “second first” language (French, which has since become the reference language for any translation) and by alternating between the novel and the essay.
If the thematic unity strongly dominates in this creation from one language to another, from one genre to another, certain critics wanted to see, sometimes maliciously, a drying up of inspiration and a reduction of the format linked to the transition to direct expression in French, even to the concern to write in order to seduce this international readership. A less partisan reading almost makes it possible to affirm, on the contrary, that the Kunderian signature adapts with pleasure to drypoint and the rhythmic impulse specific to French. This trial no doubt conceals other, more underhanded, settlings of accounts of an extraliterary type, such as the one to which Kundera was exposed in 2008 following allegations of denunciation brought by the Czech newspaper Respekt.
On the grounds that betrayal plays a central role in his imagination, why wouldn’t the Kundera man have “swung” Miroslav Dvoracek in 1950? A typical case of “lustration”, this belated and dubious accusation, despite the friendly mobilization of many international intellectuals, left wounds in the old man. It dealt a definitive blow to Kundera’s desire to resettle in his country of origin and hampered the meritorious efforts of Czech intellectuals and scholars for the translation and local rehabilitation of a work with a paradoxical reception, as showed a very beautiful international symposium in Brno, in 2009, in his hometown.
The impossible return of the exile
The Ignorance, his penultimate novel (2003), had almost predicted it, bringing the emotional powers of “pensive fiction” to their climax: to the staccato rhythm of its fifty-three chapters, the novel weaves the fable of impossible return of the exile. Contrary to the myth of Ulysses, whose text offers a melancholic variation against a background of philological reverie, the Czech protagonists of the novel, Josef and Irina, experimented in 1990 with the underhand work of the “great broom of history”, which makes that Prague is no longer in Prague, and definitively convert to this “liberating exile” celebrated by the novelist Vera Linhartova, quoted by Kundera at the beginning of An Encounter. This last essay, published in 2009, undoubtedly the most autobiographical, even manages to circumvent the much hated “biographical immodesty” by a subtle weaving of new and rhapsodic themes thus defined: “Meeting of my reflections and my memories; of my old themes (existential and aesthetic) and my old loves (Rabelais, Janacek, Fellini, Malaparte). The father figure, already present in Le Rideau (2005), passes through it with emotion and warmth.
Milan Kundera, who had no biological descendants, today has many heirs in literature, “young shoots” whom he has dubbed or helped and who, after having been his friends in the last circles, salute his memory. with gratitude: Marek Bienczyk the Pole, Patrick Chamoiseau the French, Adam Thirlwell the Briton, Lakis Proguidis the Greek and Massimo Rizzante the Italian, among others.
It was also in Italy that what remains of Kundera’s last novel, La Fête de l’insignifiance, was first published in France in 2014. A fantasy in seven movements, under the sign of the non-serious and the the joke, of this lightness reviewed by Arthur Schopenhauer of which the discreet novelist held the secret.
