Escaped from the communist Czechoslovakia in 1975, the Czech writer will find a second home in France ready to welcome him
Watching from a observatory window, from the thirtieth floor of the tallest tower in the city. Towards the east, towards Prague. In 1975 Milan Kundera crossed Europe by car, having fled from his native Czechoslovakia to Rennes, France. Here, he settled, with his wife Věra, on the top floor of the Tour des Horizons, in this “ugly, really ugly city”, the Brno writer stated smiling, several years later, with the Libération journalist Daniel Rondeau. The arrival in France, his country of adoption, and now of belonging for Kundera, manifested into a short, sharp excerpt in The book of laughter and forgetting. This life entered the novel; the author has his eyes planted towards the horizon from the top of his viewpoint, from the top of his tower, which leads him into the sky, isolating him. With a tear in his eye, “like a telescope lens”, which “makes the faces closer”, of his poet friends, who were remaining in the Czechoslovakian capital which the author had escaped. A country that “had slept for eight years in the sweet and vigorous embrace of the Russian Empire”.
He was a 46-year-old foreigner, an artist who looked elsewhere, by now almost nothing is left of the Kundera who moved to Rennes. These were the years in which the Czech novelist rediscovered French, a language crucial to his literary education, from Apollinaire to Rabelais, and in which he would produce most of his works in the following years. In the Breton city, a position was offered to him to teach comparative literature at the University of Rennes 2. He would remain there until 1979, when he left Brittany for a place at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Having arrived in the capital, Kundera was already a well-established writer and an intellectual. In the early 70s, Claude Gallimard, the most famous French publisher, had met him in Prague and returned in France with a manuscript of Life is elsewhere, which was smuggled back in his luggage. It was indeed this book, which earned Kundera the prestigious French award the Prix Médicis étranger in 1973.
After having settled in for a few years in Paris, and feeling “unrepentant” toward a system where his works are banned, Kundera had his Czechoslovak nationality revoked in ‘79. The author had become even more excluded, and distanced, even officially, from a country in which he was no longer even a citizen. Two years later, it would be the French president François Mitterrand – the same President of the historic 1988 meeting in Prague with Václav Havel and another eight dissidents of the communist regime – who granted French citizenship to him, along with the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. In France, the work of Kundera in the language was tireless. In the early years of his stay in :the “Hexagon” he finished The book of laughter and forgetting, and his greatest literary success, The unbearable lightness of being, completed in 1982, and published in 1984, both of which were still written in Czech. At the same time, he had already begun a meticulous revision of the translations of his novels in French. Kundera discovered, to his surprise, that the translation of The Joke was actually a heavier, baroque rewrite. Consequently, the work of literary research was carried out by the novelist alongside the retranslation of his books, a work on which the Czech writer admits: “I spend almost as much time as on writing”.
In his early French years, Kundera gave interviews and made numerous television appearances. The man was in short a writer, and renowned public figure. Subsequently, over the years, the man became a novelist. Only then, as Flaubert said, the writer disappears behind his work, and thus since 1985 the Czechoslovakian born novelist no longer granted interviews, and lived invisibly, ineffably, like his best prose, in his apartment in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, in the Montparnasse district. A house to which only his close friends, and those of his wife Věra, had access.
Slowness was completed in 1993 and published in 1995, his first novel written in French. The pages are dedicated to the writer exploring and criticizing the obsession with speed of the contemporary world. His works have been enthusiastically received by the public and French intellectuals. Kundera, now able to write in the language of Hugo, has become one of them. However, in 2003 the harmony created between Kundera and France cracked. The proof lay in the publication of the novel Ignorance, written in French, but published first in Spain by the publisher Tusquets, then in half of the rest of the world. The version for the Gallimard types came only three years later, in 2003. The rupture, and the strong, bitter choice was made against a section of the French critics who attacked him for his bare prose, as if they intended to reproach him for not belonging to the language, which was by now his own
However, the French intellectual world has also been present, when necessary, to close ranks around the writer. It was in 2008 when the Czech magazine Respekt published a document from 1950 in which Kundera, then a convinced communist, was indicated as the man who reported to the police of the regime Miroslav Dvořácek, the whereabouts of a young 21-year-old Czech, who fled to West Germany before being recruited by Western intelligence services for a mission in Czechoslovakia. The young man was arrested the same evening of the interrogation and sentenced to 22 years in prison. He would undergo 13 years of forced labor. Many have cast doubt on the authenticity of the document, and many writers, both French and foreign, backed Kundera. Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk, Philip Roth are a few of the many. In France, the writer Yasmina Reza, in a papier in the newspaper Le Monde, speaks of “the offense of silence”, saying it is easy to attack and hard to forgive, a great and illustrious man, of a quiet and honest demeanor. Kundera, in this case did not expose himself, or raise his voice. In a bare press release he expressed sadness and strongly denied the news. His name remains great in France and elsewhere. In 2001 his work was republished by Gallimard, for the collection of the Pléiade, one of the most prestigious issues in the country. Kundera is one of the few living writers to be enshrined in the French literary Olympus. He has been in the list for the Nobel Prize several times, often being among the favorites, but the Czech novelist has not yet received the recognition from the Swedish academy. Meanwhile, distancing himself from the controversy, the cultural gossip circles, and the French media circus, Milan Kundera continues to write. His latest book, The feast of insignificance, released in 2013, was hailed by critics as a tribute to good humour. It is in a magic reality, in that apartment closed to the world, that this man of 85 years old, still enchants through the elegance of the prose, the strength of the characters, the strong presence of a consciousness. A novelist stuck between two worlds: a French one on paper, yet universal in his creation.
by Edoardo Malvenuti