Ninety Years of Milan Kundera; The Only Novel That Remains

"I was born on an 'April Fool's Day.' This is not without metaphysical influence!" This is a sarcastic remark made by Milan Kundera in one of his rare interviews about his birth. Today, Monday, April 1, 2019, he turns ninety. Despite not having won the Nobel Prize in Literature and not being a member of the Académie Française, Milan Kundera is undoubtedly one of the great contemporary writers, especially of the second half of the twentieth century. He is a writer who has not engaged in media discussions for decades and knows the art of silence well. However, if someone lives in Paris, they might accidentally see him walking daily with Vera, his wife, around Le Cherche-Midi in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. It is likely that there is no birthday celebration for Milan Kundera today, as in his last novel titled "The Festival of Meaninglessness," published five years ago, one of his characters expresses distrust in numbers that refer to the "shame of aging." Why the silence? Essentially, this writer believes that it is better to talk about his works than about himself. This is why he has not participated in any television interviews since 1984, and his last interview with the press dates back to 1986. Perhaps this silence is not a "literary act" but rather a "defensive method" in an era dominated by noise. Kundera's works have had a great chance of being read; for instance, he is among the few great writers whose works have been published in the prestigious Pléiade series during his lifetime. This series, dedicated to the undeniable works of world literature, usually selects works from writers who have long passed away, with time being the judge of their worth. Despite the reception of Kundera's literary works and the heavy media silence, it is unlikely that he has fully achieved his goal, which is to prioritize the lines of his works over the details of his life. Speaking and writing about Kundera's life remains appealing even for his enemies. Perhaps this is why sometimes lies about him, such as announcing his death on social media, circulate. More importantly, the controversial accusation made against this writer in 2008 arose when a Czech magazine published a "document" from the Prague secret police in the 1950s, claiming that Kundera, when he was 21, collaborated with the Communist police and exposed one of his compatriots as a "spy." This accusation came despite the fact that Milan Kundera joined the Communist Party in 1948, when he was under 20, and was expelled two years later. Kundera had to succinctly tell the media that this claim was false: "I was completely surprised by this, which I neither expected at all, nor had heard of until yesterday, nor did it happen." Yasmina Reza, a famous French writer and playwright, emphasized in a note she wrote in defense of Kundera in Le Monde that the "something" Kundera said in his brief statement to the media includes both the essence of the alleged incident that supposedly occurred in 1950 and the act of accusation itself. Yasmina Reza harshly criticized the media's handling of this matter, stating that the "absolute powerlessness of a human being in the face of such an assault" was her reason for writing her note in defense of Kundera, adding that in such circumstances, any statement becomes fuel for the fire of accusations: "In thirty seconds, one can destroy the life of a person who has performed their duty and work with a clear conscience... Words, whether spoken or written, become part of reality and take unpredictable paths..." Besides Yasmina Reza, other writers like Philip Roth and Gabriel García Márquez, who knew Milan Kundera closely and visited him during his time in Czechoslovakia, supported him. "Life is Elsewhere" Milan Kundera, born in 1929 in Brno, now in the Czech Republic, into a musical family, learned to play the piano from his father at a young age, and music soon gained an important place in his life. He is referred to as a "music-loving novelist," and the structure of some of his works is compared to a sonata. However, the significance of Kundera's literary works goes beyond their musical aspect; he intertwines philosophy, history, and art in his literature. After writing poetry in his youth, the years 1958 to 1969 can be seen as the formative years of his writing world. During those years, when he still held Czech nationality, he wrote in his mother tongue and was in his homeland, producing the short story collection "Laughable Loves" and the novel "The Joke"; works in which he attempted to present the "bitter record of the political illusions of the Prague coup generation of 1948" that led to the rise of the Communists. "Laughable Loves," which is Kundera's only short story collection, was banned after the occupation of Prague by Russian forces and, like his other works, remained banned until 1990. "The Joke" is also Kundera's first novel, written in 1965 but was held up in the censorship office for a while and was eventually published in 1967, winning the Czech Writers' Union Prize. A film based on this novel, directed by Jaromil Jireš and written by Milan Kundera himself, was supposed to be released but was banned after the occupation of Czechoslovakia and never screened. The restrictions against Kundera in his homeland coincided with the opening of spaces and finding more audiences abroad. In that fateful year of 1968, which saw both the Prague Spring and May '68 in Paris, the translation of "The Joke" with a preface by Louis Aragon was published in French in Paris. This marked the beginning of a decade in which Kundera not only emerged as a global writer but also saw changes in his homeland and nationality due to events throughout the 1970s. The publication of the novel "Life is Elsewhere" in France in 1973 earned him the prestigious Médicis Foreign Prize. In 1971, he wrote the three-act play "Jacques and His Master," which is a variation of the novel "Jacques the Fatalist" by the French philosopher Diderot. This play was performed from 1975, coinciding with Kundera's migration with his wife to France, until fifteen years later, at the end of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, as a play written by "Ewald Schorm," a Czech director and screenwriter, in that country and even in Prague, without anyone realizing who the actual author of the play was. At a time when Kundera's works were victims of censorship, this was considered a significant success for him. In 1972, Kundera completed writing "The Farewell Waltz," which created the impression that this was Kundera's "farewell" to the world of writing. This novel was able to be published only after Milan Kundera had left his country and settled in France, in 1976. Two years later, this novel won the Mondello Prize in Italy. Milan Kundera and His Master "To whom am I attached: to God? To the homeland? To the individual? My answer is: I am attached to nothing but the legacy of Cervantes." Kundera had not said farewell to writing. In 1978, he published "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," which won an important award in America (Commonwealth Awards) two years later. In 1979, the Czechoslovak government stripped Kundera of his Czech citizenship, but two years later, then-President François Mitterrand granted him and Julio Cortázar, another great exiled writer in Paris, French nationality. The Czech government offered this writer last year to regain his Czech nationality, but Kundera has yet to respond to this offer. In 1982, he completed writing "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," which was published in Paris two years later. In 1988, a film based on this novel was released. To fully demonstrate that he had severed ties with his homeland, he began writing directly in French from then on. The first book he wrote in French was "The Art of the Novel," which includes seven essays previously published between 1979 and 1985.