I Loved Milan Kundera in Part Because His Pain was Familiar
In my youth, I fell for the 'bad boy' of the literary world but as I got older I saw firsthand that being a revolutionary comes with a lot of heartache
By Leah Eichler,
Milan Kundera died this week at age 94 and the free flow of obituaries reminded me of how enamoured I was with dissident writers when I was young. Other girls had Judd Nelson, I had Solzhenitsyn. There was something about the bad boy writer that really appealed to me. Dark, brooding, artistic, using his pen to take on the world. Swoon.
I can’t recall exactly how old I was when I moved from Russian dissidents to Kundera. I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and like just about everyone else, the book stayed with me for years. I couldn’t look at the famous image of the disembodied bowler hat without feeling something. Even when the plot receded in my memory, the image always made me sad, as if I had forgotten an important message.
Kundera, unlike other Soviet dissidents, was familiar. I’d visited the former Czechoslovakia right after the end of the Cold War, as soon as it was safe for my father to return. Along with many others, my dad escaped during the 1968 Prague Spring. He was in the military at the time, and said he was going on a weekend trip to Vienna but never turned back. From what I understand, there was a warrant out for his arrest in that country until the early 90s, when he had it cleared.
My father never spoke much about that time but I did draw from him an aura of youthful idealism that he shared among the cohort that left with him. He and other ‘68 refugees continue to meet every year in the Tatra mountains in Slovakia. Many of them, he tells me, arrived this year with walkers. (Not me, he says with bravado, I’m still strong.)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being was also first published in Czech close to my home in Toronto by 68 Publishers. It was a publishing house formed in 1971 by Canadian author Josef Škvorecký and his wife, Zdena Salivarová with a mandate to publish books by Czech and Slovak writers who were banned in communists Czechoslovakia.
In my youth, I longed to be part of the revolution (which one, I wasn’t quite sure!) but 68 Publishers certainly moved me as I imagined their books finding their way, samizdat-style, to the streets of the former Czechoslovakia. (I tried to support them in my own way, by writing about them. Click here to read a review of I wrote of Škvorecký’s An Inexplicable Story 20 years ago for the Globe and Mail.)
Kundera also felt familiar because of the dissidents around me, most notably my grandfather, Dr. Benjamin Eichler, who after World War II and into the Communist era, served as president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Slovakia. His accomplishments were not explicitly described to me growing up but I would pick up on pieces of the conversation. I know he spoke out in favour of religious freedoms at great personal risk. He was often intimidated by the authorities, detained, imprisoned and finally, in 1972 expelled from the country. He settled in Toronto, joining my father who had made a home here after escaping in 1968.
I didn’t know him well but he was what I considered to be a great man with not such a great life. For all of his fight, he died in relative obscurity in Toronto, never fully celebrated or embraced by the Jewish community he stood up to communism for.
Meanwhile, Kundera also suffered slights from his landsmen, as we say in Yiddish. His most famous book was only published in the Czech Republic in 2006, 17 years after the fall of communism. “Kundera had the attention of the entire world, except for the people he represented,” according to a Lit Hub analysis. I’m not sure if Kundera ever publicly spoke about his reception back home, but I imagine it hurt to be slighted by the very people you wanted to illuminate to the world.
Still, I’d like to think that Kundera (and my grandfather) wouldn’t have done things any other way. There is value in the fight, even if it doesn’t end exactly the way we would like.
Salman Rushdie, in an interview with The Guardian, said one of the messages from Kundera’s famous book that left a lifelong impression on him was this ethereal concept, of the "lightness of being.’ “(It) warned us that life allows us no revisions or second drafts, and this could be ‘unbearable’, but it could also be liberating.”
In other words, we only get one shot at this life. Choose your words and allegiances wisely. You might never receive a hero’s welcome but you may leave our world just slightly less unbearable.
Yours in reading and writing,
Leah Eichler
What am I reading?
Russia Has a new Gulag - The Atlantic. What’s old is new again.
And Just Like That addresses its Che Diaz Problem - I can’t resist the show and the vitriol against Che keeps piquing my interest.
Inside the Secretive World of Penis Enlargement - ProPublica. Wow, so well-reported and emotionally devastating. Laugh if you like, but this is why we need investigative journalism.
‘Shark Girl’ Madison Stewart Uses Tourism to Compete with Shark Trade - The Globe and Mail. Somehow, this story gives me hope for humanity.
I so agree with what you're saying here, Leah, especially the way he supported the Jewish people, a brave thing to do. Yours is a site I come back to again and again. And folks here should subscribe. So may be this repeat that follows will get more folks to you. So I'll post on NOTES too
I've even thought of sending something I recently wrote to you--and maybe will. I dunno.
Anyway If you don't mind a repeat, here's a comment I wrote to Sam Kahn about Kundera: I have read everything he wrote, except perhaps the last book--was obsessed with his writing style, with his play with form and his use of what I like to call "modules" in his novels: _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_, a superb example that never left me. I suppose some might call this “fragmentary design.” I could see the importance of form and meaning, how inseparable the two are in all narratives. I don’t dare compare myself to him, but I know his style inspired my short story “Sine Die”—probably the best I ever wrote. My point is that his experimentation and use of tying form and meaning were breakthroughs for me and gave me courage to experiment with form.
On another note, I hold this quote dear from _Testaments Betrayed_: “Of course, every novelist, intentionally or not, draws on his own life; there are entirely invented characters, created out of pure reverie; there are those inspired by a model, sometimes directly, more often indirectly; there are those created from a single detail observed in some person; and all of them owe much to the author’s introspection, to his self-knowledge. The work of the imagination transforms these inspirations and observations so thoroughly that the novelist forgets about them.” ~Mary
Puzzled how. But still happy to be placed on your subscribers' list! :) 'The Forward' is the only site I've seen thus far to point to Kundera's empathy with the int'l Jewish community. Meanwhile, I'll close with an aphorism often quoted by my husband: "If a man is not a Communist at 20, he has no heart. If he's still one at 40, he has no head'. All the very best from Israel.