There’s a memorable 15-page part of The Insufferable Lightness of Being, essentially the most well-known work by the celebrated Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera, who died this week at age 94, through which the world-weary and sexually voracious brain-surgeon protagonist Tomas dithers over whether or not he ought to signal a petition asking Czechoslovakia’s communist president to grant amnesty to all of the nation’s political prisoners. The setting is the early Nineteen Seventies, and the federal government is halfway by means of the societal suffocation course of grotesquely marketed as “normalization.”
Signing the petition could be “presumably noble however actually, and completely, ineffective (as a result of it will not assist the political prisoners),” Tomas muses, as his long-estranged organic son and a dissident editor await a solution, “and unsightly to himself (as a result of it came about underneath situations the 2 of them had imposed on him).” It was irritating to be placed on the spot.
In the long run, citing a late-breaking concern for his spouse, the physician declines. “Tomas couldn’t save political prisoners, however he may make Tereza glad. He may probably not achieve doing even that. But when he signed the petition, he could possibly be pretty sure that she would have extra frequent visits from undercover brokers, and that her palms would tremble increasingly.”
What the novel’s a whole lot of 1000’s of American admirers couldn’t have presumably recognized was that Tomas’ conflicted refusal mirrored a hauntingly related alternative Kundera himself had made at mainly the identical geopolitical place and time. Dissident playwright Václav Havel within the dreary normalization yr of 1972 circulated a petition asking Communist Occasion Normal Secretary Gustáv Husák to free all political prisoners throughout the conventional Christmas amnesty. Thirty-four courageous intellectuals signed, Kundera conspicuously didn’t.
That call, and the underlying dilemma of how a person ought to greatest oppose a totalitarian state, shaped the idea of probably the most consequential, long-lasting, and finally tragic political/literary feuds of the previous six a long time.
Kundera and Havel, the Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig of Czech letters, did greater than some other two individuals to popularize the plight of Czechs and Slovaks subjugated by Soviet communism after the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The 2 had been among the many main figures of the “Prague Spring” cultural and political liberalization throughout the 5 years earlier than the tanks. However the mentor and his pupil (Kundera, seven years senior, had been a key sponsor of Havel’s mental ambitions as early because the late Nineteen Fifties) clashed vituperatively for a quarter-century over the optimum techniques for confronting commies, an expertise that cemented the late novelist’s alienation not simply from his residence nation, however ultimately from his personal mom tongue.
It is not onerous to depict the divide between the 2 males in methods extra flattering to the playwright/president. Kundera was the Stalinist-poet-turned-reform-socialist; Havel was a lifelong anti-communist. Kundera was the émigré who discovered fame describing the Czech situation from afar after decamping to Paris in 1975; Havel was the man who determined to remain and struggle, discovering each fame and prolonged jail time after describing the Czech situation in minute and revelatory element that very same yr in a exceptional open letter to Husák.
Most importantly, the 2 disagreed over the that means and import of particular person Davids aiming their slingshots on the all-encompassing Goliath. Kundera dismissed such quixotic gestures as “pure ethical exhibitionism”; Havel countered that loudly “dwelling in reality” may unleash the “energy of the powerless.” The collapse of communism in 1989 appeared to show Havel proper.
However historical past (which Kundera mordantly maligned as “silly”) nearly by no means produces fairy tales as healthful because the Velvet Revolution, and the everlasting debate over activist motivation and technique is aware of no geographical or temporal bounds. The Kundera/Havel fault line is definitely mappable onto our current day—ought to political exercise be geared towards believable change or long-shot miracles? When does realism turn out to be pessimism and even fatalism? And is there any actual future for the small nation-states between Germany and Russia?
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Kundera’s refusal to signal the petition was an occasion vital sufficient that it appeared in fiction six years previous to The Insufferable Lightness of Being, in Havel’s withering 1978 play Protest. In it, Havel’s dramatic alter-ego Vanek, a dissident author recent out of jail, is invited to the house of his squishier pal Stanek, a TV author who has constructed a very good dwelling out of coloring safely between the regime-approved traces. The play’s complete dramatic rigidity, and laborious mental sparring, rests on whether or not Stanek will signal Vanek’s petition to free a singer from jail.
“What follows is a prolonged monologue by Stanek that’s painful to learn, so bare are his emotions of disgrace, and so blatant are his makes an attempt to suppress that disgrace with ostensibly goal, tactical issues,” wrote Benjamin Herman at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, in an examination of the testy Kundera/Havel relationship a couple of weeks after the latter’s 2011 dying. “In the long run, Stanek rationalizes himself into the perverse place that including his title to the petition would truly be egocentric, as a result of it will glorify himself however do nothing for the singer. Sound acquainted?”
The familiarity was not merely with Kundera’s (in)motion in 1972, or Tomas’ rationalization in 1984, however with a scorching public polemic between the 2 males after the Soviet invasion, in these waning months earlier than impartial expression in Czechoslovakia was snuffed out by the state. This well-known Kundera-Havel-Kundera alternate, the final time both could be revealed of their residence nation for 20 years, began off as a seemingly innocuous try by the elder statesman to salve the recent wounds of occupation.
“I refuse to name it a nationwide disaster, as our considerably tearful public tends to do immediately,” Kundera wrote in a December 1968 essay titled “Czech Future.” On the contrary, those that had pushed for “socialism with a human face,” who had insisted on a uniquely Western-facing and impartial tradition regardless of the ever-present menace of shackles imposed from the East, ought to really feel delight at having “positioned Czechs and Slovaks within the heart of world historical past.” It’s the Czech lot to be hemmed in by imperial neighbors; in that context, impartial survival is heroic.
“Havel’s reply a month later,” his biographer and pal (and former Czech ambassador to the USA) Michael Žantovský wrote, “shocked many individuals by the overtly adversarial, nearly hostile tone with which he attacked Kundera’s argument.” The venom certainly leaps off the web page:
All of us—the whole Czech nation, that’s—should little question be happy after we discover out that we now have gained recognition for our stand in August, even from Milan Kundera, that blithely skeptical, mental man of the world who at all times was apt to see our fairly unfavourable angles.
Havel dinged his erstwhile pal (fairly precisely, it will prove) for Pollyannaishly declaring “monumental hope” for Prague Spring–fashion liberalism enduring, and attacked the “Czech Future” framing as “pseudo-critical illusionism” that rationalizes defeat as one of the best one can hope for.
“I don’t consider on this destiny, and I believe that initially we ourselves are the masters of our destiny,” Havel wrote. “We won’t be free of this by…hiding behind our geographic place, nor by reference to our centuries-old lot of balancing between sovereignty and subjugation. Once more, that is nothing however an abstraction cloaking our concrete accountability for our concrete actions.”
The gloves have been off. Kundera responded with a March 1969 essay titled “Radicalism and Exhibitionism” attacking Havel’s grimmer evaluation of the post-invasion state of affairs as a sort of mental brush clearing for vainglorious acts of futility:
The individual anticipating self-display gravitates in the direction of an understanding of the state of affairs as hopeless, for under a hopeless state of affairs can free him from the responsibility of tactical consideration and totally clears some area for his self-expression, for his exhibition. And he not solely understands it as a no-win state of affairs, however he (attracted by the irresistible seduction of theatrical battle) is even, along with his habits, his “dangerous acts,” able to making it so. In contrast to cheap (which in his lexicon means cowardly) individuals, he doesn’t concern defeat. Nonetheless, he isn’t so wretched as to lengthy for victory. To be extra actual, he doesn’t lengthy for the victory of the simply factor he’s working for; he himself is most victorious exactly within the defeat of the factor he champions, as a result of it’s the defeat of the simply factor that illuminates, with the sunshine of an explosion, all of the distress of the world and all of the glory of his character.
With this backdrop, Kundera’s refusal to signal Havel’s petition in 1972 seems to be nearly pre-ordained; the ask itself like a theatrical act of fraternal cleavage. No marvel the 2 gifted writers simply could not let it go.
What occurred subsequent is the sort of paradox Central European intellectuals love: The 2 males switched sides. That’s to say, having fled the nation in 1975, and discovering a brand new worldwide viewers for his novels and essays, Kundera turned probably the most pitiless assessors of the tried “strangulation” of Czech tradition, declaring his departed nation on a number of events at being on the verge of dying. Havel, having plunged headlong into open opposition in 1975, now bristled at such pessimism, celebrating the inexperienced shoots of tradition he and his fellow dissidents have been serving to seed, even within the face of persecution.
“I’m irritated by his repeated pronouncements in regards to the cultural graveyard right here; no matter we’re we don’t consider ourselves as corpses,” Havel complained in a 1984 letter.
Their respective reputations now grew, exponentially. Havel’s Constitution 77—an open petition to a totalitarian authorities!—not solely galvanized Czechoslovakia’s dissidents and civil society, it turned the only most influential anti-communist motion underneath Soviet misrule, with reverberations felt to today in locations like Cuba and China. The Insufferable Lightness of Being, in the meantime, turned a world sensation, introducing a brand new era to the horrors of the 1968 invasion. Kundera’s essays, too—notably “The Czech Wager” and “The Tragedy of Central Europe” in The New York Evaluation of Books—had a profound impression on the best way individuals thought in regards to the captive nations between Berlin and Moscow.
And nonetheless they weren’t accomplished speaking about 1972. In his 1986 book-length interview Disturbing the Peace, Havel, whereas in any other case downplaying the supposed rift with Kundera, nonetheless pointed to the lasting significance of that preliminary petition as “the primary vital act of solidarity within the Husák period”:
All those that didn’t signal or who withdrew their signatures in methods much like Tomas in Kundera’s novel. They stated they could not assist anybody this manner, that it will solely annoy the federal government, that those that had already been banned have been being exhibitionistic, and, worse, that by means of this petition, they have been making an attempt to pull those that nonetheless had their heads above water down into their very own abyss by misusing their charity. Naturally, the president didn’t grant an amnesty, and so some signatories went on languishing in jail, whereas the great thing about our characters was thus presumably illuminated. It could appear, subsequently, that historical past proved our critics to be right.
However was that basically the case? I might say not. When the prisoners started to return again after their years in jail, all of them stated that the petition had given them quite a lot of satisfaction. Due to it, they felt that their keep in jail had a that means: It helped renew the damaged solidarity.…
However the petition had a far deeper significance as nicely: It marked the start of a course of through which individuals’s civic backbones started to strengthen once more. This was a forerunner of Constitution 77 and of every little thing the Constitution now does, and the method has had plain outcomes.
Three years later, that course of led to outcomes nearly nobody had foreseen.
Czechoslovakia’s liberation from captivity and transition to liberal democracy ought to have been the tip of the Kundera-Havel feud. Actually, Havel tried magnanimously to bury the hatchet and reunite the Czech writer along with his residence viewers; eating with the novelist in Paris (“I haven’t got the impression he is making an attempt to stay in isolation from his native nation—solely from the media,” he stated hopefully), and laboriously negotiating a public rapprochement at a 1993 manufacturing of a Kundera play in Brno.
However Kundera, who had solely traveled again residence a few instances in disguise, backed out on the final minute. The person whose primary literary themes (in addition to intercourse) have been betrayal and exile, simply couldn’t steer out of the lengthy curve that communists had imposed on his life trajectory. He dragged his toes on having his novels revealed within the Czech Republic, blocked makes an attempt at republishing or translating his nonfiction, refused all media interviews, turned down all movie diversifications after his disappointment with Insufferable, micromanaged translations, and appeared to stay life as extra of a paranoid recluse than a cosmopolitan bon vivant. Most tragically of all, for a person who did a lot to propagate the notion of a singular Czech literary and nationwide identification, he started in 1993 to write down all his novels in French.
In a 2019 interview with the Czech Information Company, Kundera’s spouse and literary agent Vera Kunderova made the absurd allegation that dissidents again residence had at all times criticized the world’s hottest Czech writer as a result of they feared his potential political energy. “They selected as a pacesetter of the anti-Communist opposition Havel, fearing that Milan, who was way more recognized overseas, may wish to head the political opposition himself,” Kunderova stated.
The cost might have been nonsensical, however the paranoia was not. As lots of the estimated 200,000 post-1968 émigrés needed to discover out the onerous manner, the individuals they left behind could possibly be extraordinarily small-minded and merciless towards the individuals who discovered a greater life within the West. There was a lot to criticize in Kundera’s analyses and decisions at varied instances, however the stage of rancor from his homeland through the years recommended a sure jealousy, or no less than a scarcity of proportionality towards an individual who had accomplished a lot to champion their trigger. It wasn’t Milan Kundera who despatched within the tanks and jailed the opposition and stifled society; it was the Soviet-dominated communists who compelled a unending sequence of horrible decisions onto everyone of their path.
The coda to Kundera’s Czech-facing profession was thus appropriately bitter: In 2008, he was accused, I believe credibly if unverifiably, of getting knowledgeable on a returned defector to the key police at midnight outdated days of 1950, when he was nonetheless an enthusiastic younger communist. The defector would go on to serve 14 years in a labor camp. Kundera fiercely denied the fees, calling it a “smear marketing campaign.” One of many many literary lions who leaped to the outdated former commie’s protection? Havel.
Individuals who stay underneath totalitarian rule deserve our grace. Individuals who struggle in opposition to it, even imperfectly, with skeletons of their closet, deserve our thanks. Could the remainder of us by no means need to face such horrible decisions.
