Milan Kundera’s Stubborn Struggle for the Survival of Literature |

 

!The great theme that runs through his writing is the way in which the individual is drawn, unwillingly, into macro-historical affairs. The pair of essays that make up his most recent collection, A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, locate Kundera at two important moments in his life, when his standing as an author would change: “The Literature of Small Nations” finds him in 1967, on the eve of the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia; “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” in 1983, shortly before he would make the decision to disappear from public life. In both, the author is a besieged intellect: menaced by ideology, philistinism, commercialism, censorship, cultural and linguistic imperialism—finally, forced into exile.

Yet two developments threaten a pristine legacy. One is that, despite Kundera’s disdain for publicity, two biographies of him—both unsanctioned—have appeared in the last four years. The first, Milan Kundera: A Writer’s Life, by Jean-Dominique Brierre, mentions little of Kundera’s private life (and even earned Brierre a thank-you note from his subject). The second, Milan Kundera: His Czech Life and Times, by Jan Novák, is far less courteous, portraying Kundera as a scoundrel, a “moral relativist,” and at times, a collaborator, desperate to cover up the scandals of his past. But perhaps an even larger problem is the one that Kundera himself identifies in A Kidnapped West: the marginalization of literature in the culture and the precariousness of its future."

 read more

Milan Kundera’s Stubborn Struggle for the Survival of Literature | The New Republic