Milan Kundera is both widely praised and somehow overlooked in talks of influential postmodern authors and poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and came of age during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia that started with the Munich agreement. From his early teenage years, Kundera was a devotee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In 1950, he and his close friend Jan Trefulka were blacklisted from the party for “Anti-Communist activities,” since the party’s take-over in 1948. Kundera and Trefulka both criticized the movement’s deviation from Marxist principles and leniency toward totalitarianism. In response to his expulsion, Kundera wrote The Joke, a novel in which he pointed out the hypocrisy of the party, which was banned as soon as it reached bookshelves. This novel was published in 1968 and was Kundera’s foothold for his involvement with the Prague Spring. To understand Kundera, you first have to understand this history. The Prague Spring was a reformist movement led by groups of philosophers, writers, and artists who introduced enlightenment ideals like freedom of speech and religion, as well as a decentralized economy and democracy to what was then Czechoslovakia. You can probably see where this is going if you know your history. The Soviet Union didn’t take kindly to these “Western” ideals being implemented so close to home and used other nations of the Warsaw Pact to invade and take control of the country in a rapid display of violence that lasted only 2 days. Kundera, though certainly on a hit list for his influence in the reformist movement, remained hopeful throughout the occupation, but was eventually pressured to flee from Prague to France in 1975, where he now, at the age of 93, lives a quiet, isolated life.
This brief background brings us to his most popular novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Taking place during the Prague Spring and the Soviet occupation, many have seen this novel as a lament by Kundera in wishing he’d left for France at the beginning of the occupation, and who, since publishing this work, has renounced his Czech citizenship. The novel centers on characters coming to terms with the ever-changing landscape and violence of the area while still trying to live out their otherwise ordinary lives. The novel’s main focus is on Tomas and Tereza, characters and eventual lovers who meet in Czechoslovakia and jump around between Prague and Zurich during and after the occupation. The novel has a way of trying to ignore the conflict altogether by focusing narration on a cast of incredibly crafted characters but fails to do so when the weight of the occupation is too much for many of the characters to bear. The characters eventually have their lives uprooted several times before the end of the novel, and (spoiler) some meet their end while protesting the occupation. This background of violence works perfectly with the inquisitive nature of the novel. Kundera nods to Nietzsche at the start of the novel and focuses the novel on Nietzsche’s principle of eternal return. Basically, and this is a simple rundown, the idea of eternal return questions how we would think if we knew that every decision we make would be repeated infinitely. In a state where everything that exists has been recurring in infinite spaces across time, how are we to deal with this burden? Milan Kundera speculates this throughout the novel:
“…Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens. If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the more real and truthful they become.”
“Then what shall we choose? Weight or Lightness?” is the question Kundera poses to the reader and his characters throughout the novel. In the beginning, it’s clear to see that Tomas and Tereza correlate to these ideas. Tomas is a successful doctor who lives deliberately in a state of lightness, whereas Tereza is more romantic, and pursues heavier decisions on her path to being loved. Just from these descriptions of the characters and their initial thought processes, Kundera shows us that Weight and Lightness are not very far removed from each other. How light can Tomas truly be if he constantly stresses the focus of trying to will his life to be easygoing? How dedicated can Tereza be to the pursuit of heaviness if she doesn’t expect much from life? Why do both characters equate concepts like love, philosophy, politics, and religion with weight and concepts like sex, disdain, work, and sleep with lightness? From the beginning of the novel, Kundera points out that these questions apply to all of us. Why do we place so much emphasis on ideology, companionship, and personality instead of the “simpler” concepts that make up our day-to-day routines? Kundera’s ironic, satirical, and absurdist approach is realized in the fact that he makes us and the characters mull over philosophy during a violent Soviet occupation. So, one could say Kundera’s biggest point in this novel is: why the hell are we reading it? Kundera has a wonderful, friendly, bitter way of asking his readers, “isn’t there something more important you could be doing?”
In this absurdist tradition, one can easily find Kundera’s influences to be his predecessors Kafka and Nietzsche, and even his contemporaries, Sartre and Beauvoir. While modernists may have influenced him, Kundera seems to be actively responding to postmodern literature and philosophy as well. He had a similar approach to Vonnegut in asking why we’re so willing to give up our free will during wartime and accept war as a fact of life. He even makes fun of modernist writers in doing so. Like Hemmingway, Kundera uses war as a backdrop of his novel, and does so to point out a selfish absurdity present in all wartime literature, why would anyone write during times like these? Kundera doesn’t pose such questions to doubt the validity of art as much as he does to relate his own struggles of being a poet and a novelist during times of unrest. He makes his answer from Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 16” in which Beethoven wrote in his manuscript “Muss es sein?” “Es muss sein!” This question and answer roughly translate to “Must it be?” “It must be!” By implementing this phrase into Tomas’s thought process, Kundera clues readers into his struggle of creating art. Kundera’s point of view seems to be that if we didn’t make art during times of unrest, there would be nothing left after war besides death. Yes, it is absurd to write comedies, tragedies, romances, etc. while people are needlessly suffering and dying, but if humans approached this absurdity in an air of self-doubt and resignation, we simply would never improve upon literature, music, philosophy, or anything else revolving around the humanities. Why do we do this? Because we must! If the only thing we focus on during war is the war itself, we are left with nothing but the ghosts of brutality, and Kundera argues in this novel that human nature simply does not allow for this. Humans have in them an innate capacity for moral sentimentality- this argument was made by Adam Smith, and Kundera builds upon this in his literature.
So, please read Kundera’s work. I recommend starting with The Unbearable Lightness of Being as it remains among my top 5 novels. The novel not only offers incredible insight into human nature, war, and love, but some of the best characters and stories ever constructed. Even if you view this novel outside the realm of politics and philosophy, there’s a lot to enjoy about it strictly as a fiction novel. Every character lives their own life and intertwines with all the other characters in the novel. One could argue that Kundera set the stage for movie narratives (forgive the pun) in his use of interconnected stories, an idea that Won Kar Wai and Tarantino implemented in their films that revolutionized the way stories are told across all mediums. Kundera’s life and writings are at times confusing, and Kundera seemed to mimic some of Mark Twain’s satirical messages by saying there are absolutely no messages present in his writings and that those attempting to find themes or plots to his novels are idiots. Of course, this isn’t the case, but Kundera uses this satire to set the narrative of his novels and, I think, to save his own skin. Also like Twain, Kundera followed the tradition of being banned for blurred reasons. Many of his novels and poems were banned for their depictions of life under Nazi and Soviet occupation and have since been rediscovered and re-appreciated.
-Samuel McFerron, Blog Editor.
Samuel McFerron – Blog Editor, Prose Editor & Poetry Editor: Samuel is a Junior at Lewis University. They are double majoring in English and Philosophy with a concentration in Literature. They aspire to become a professor of Ethics and spend most of their free time reading and writing. They hope to improve upon their writing skills as well as their literary analysis skills during their time here at Lewis and are seeking publication within this time frame. Some authors they recommend are David Foster Wallace, Milan Kundera, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Emma Goldman.