In 1975, Milan Kundera had to leave communist Czechoslovakia to go into exile in France. Since then, he has often been asked if he considers himself a dissident. No, he invariably replied, “I am a novelist.” ” And that’s all.
It is this self-definition that opens the documentary by Jarmila Buzkova devoted to the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Gallimard, 1984). “What am I attached to?, asks the writer from the first images. To God, country, people, individual? My answer is as ridiculous as it is heartfelt: I am attached to nothing except the maligned legacy of Cervantes. »
What will Kundera, who died Tuesday, July 11, at the age of 94, bring to literature? How did he evolve this art of the novel to which he devoted not just a famous essay, but his entire life? “It’s the work that counts, not the man,” the writer used to say.
Filled with archives, photos and period documents, the film takes us to Brno, capital of Moravia (Czech Republic) where Kundera was born in 1929, into a cultured and artistic family – his mother worked at the music conservatory, his father is a pianist. Political scientist Jacques Rupnik describes very well the enthusiasm with which the young Milan adhered very early to the communist ideal, how he dreamed of reforming it, in the 1960s, during the creative ferment of the “Prague Spring”.
Visionary retreat
In 1967, when he signed The Joke, Kundera was an adored author in his country. He took risks, denounced censorship. But the arrival of Russian tanks in 1968, the first great disappointment, marked the beginning of his disgrace. Ban on publishing, dismissal from the Prague Film Academy, surveillance by the regime, he was forced into exile.
This is followed by what Jarmila Buzkova calls an “odyssey of betrayed illusions” – which she made the title of her documentary. Until the campaign of slander (the Respekt affair) of which the writer was the victim in 2008 and which the director of Czech origin living in France analyzes with the sense of nuance of those who have experienced the complexity of daily life up close a totalitarian regime.
We follow with great interest this journey strewn with editorial triumphs and personal renunciations. Disillusions which, until La Fête de l’insignifiance (Gallimard, 2014), his latest book, will never affect either Kundera’s visionary perspective on his time or his sense of humor and playfulness.
Erudite witnesses, such as the academic Martine Boyer-Weinmann, or admiring writers, such as Laurent Binet or Elif Shafak, shed light on this singular crossing of the century. And pay homage to a writer who was undoubtedly one of the last giants of world literature.
