Ira Math­ur

This week WE spot­lights the great Czecho­slo­va­kian writer Mi­lan Kun­dera who died on Wednes­day at 94. I didn’t ex­pect the vis­cer­al re­ac­tion I had to his death, as if a piece of me was be­ing cut away. In Kun­dera’s nov­els, the small­est ges­tures have mean­ing. Be­tray­al, pain, loss, the light and heavy emo­tions, the full­ness in our frag­ile hu­man hearts is root­ed in the po­lit­i­cal and per­son­al, cau­terised and made palat­able with hu­mour and satire.

More than any oth­er writer, Kun­dera showed me how to take no­tice of small hu­man move­ments, trans­port­ed me to places and times when noth­ing was ba­nal, bor­ing, cliché, and trite and showed us we can all live like that. Showed us the un­ex­am­ined life, the life lived by rote, is a life squan­dered.

One blis­tery win­ter, when I was a stu­dent in Lon­don, walk­ing mis­er­ably along a crowd­ed street in cen­tral Lon­don un­der an un­end­ing grey sky, caught be­tween con­ti­nents, my then com­pan­ion, in a burst of youth­ful com­pul­sion dashed across the road to a book­shop – it could have been Hatchards, or Wa­ter­stone - emerged and hand­ed me a gift on the pave­ment.

It was a book, “The Un­bear­able Light­ness of Be­ing” by Mi­lan Kun­dera.

Read­ing it on the plane home, I con­fess I skimmed the parts of the in­va­sion by the So­vi­et Union af­ter the Prague Spring (up­ris­ings) of 1968. I was caught up in the love sto­ry, the lives of a cou­ple, a mis­tress, her lover and a dog.

There’s Tomáš, a Czech sur­geon and in­tel­lec­tu­al who wom­an­is­es and con­sid­ers sex and love dis­tinct. He sleeps with many women but loves on­ly his wife.

There’s Tere­sa, Tomáš’s wife, a young in­tel­lec­tu­al, a fear­less pho­to­jour­nal­ist who finds the hu­man body shame­ful due to her moth­er’s con­di­tion­ing and fears that Tomas will stop lov­ing her one day.

And Sabi­na, Tomáš’s mis­tress, lives light­ly, amoral­ly, rev­el­ling in the act of be­tray­al yet is un­com­pro­mis­ing­ly against ‘kitch’ (tacky, cliched, low­brow taste) and will not bow to ei­ther the com­mu­nist par­ty or a hyp­o­crit­i­cal pu­ri­tan­i­cal so­ci­ety. Yet she is not averse to role-play­ing, al­low­ing her­self to be sex­u­al­ly hu­mil­i­at­ed. (The 1988 film adap­ta­tion with Lena Olin as Sabi­na wear­ing her grand­fa­ther’s bowler hat as an act of re­bel­lion and eroti­cism is un­for­get­table).

Fi­nal­ly, there is the gen­tle ide­al­ist Pro­fes­sor Franz, Sabi­na’s lover who, though not as in­ter­est­ing as the oth­ers, dies at­tend­ing protests against a re­pres­sive regime.

Tomáš and Tere­sa’s dog Karenin (named af­ter Alex­ei Karenin, the hus­band in Tol­stoy’s An­na Karen­i­na) is giv­en hu­man char­ac­ter­is­tics and unites the cou­ple as they imag­ine him smil­ing at them as he dies of can­cer.

The sto­ry echoes the artis­tic and in­tel­lec­tu­al life of Kun­dera, a Czecho­slo­va­kian writer ex­pelled from the Com­mu­nist par­ty for cam­paign­ing for free­dom of speech. His 1967 nov­el, The Joke ( based on Trot­sky), was re­moved from book­shops af­ter Russ­ian tanks rolled in, and Kun­dera was fired from his teach­ing job. Kun­dera moved to France and lost his cit­i­zen­ship which was re­stored 40 years lat­er in 2019 when he was 90.

The point is I saw then, even be­fore I read his oth­er nov­els (Life is Else­where, The Book of Laugh­ter and For­get­ting, Im­mor­tal­i­ty, Iden­ti­ty, Ig­no­rance, The Fes­ti­val of In­signif­i­cance), Kun­dera was a great nov­el­ist as he wove the re­pres­sive po­lit­i­cal regime that ex­pelled him in­to his nar­ra­tive but nev­er for­got the du­ty of lit­er­a­ture, not to hec­tor and preach, but to ex­plore the un­end­ing mys­tery and com­plex­i­ty of hu­mans. Kun­dera showed me writ­ing is art us­ing the hu­man imag­i­na­tion, be­yond man or woman, sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, coun­try, re­li­gion or time.

I vis­it­ed Kun­dera’s Prague, his city of bridges, cathe­drals, church spires, and tow­ers re­flect­ed in the thou­sand-year-old Vi­van­ta riv­er, watched the sun set be­hind its 9th-cen­tu­ry cas­tle, walked through silent memo­ri­als ded­i­cat­ed to Jews sent to con­cen­tra­tion camps when Nazis oc­cu­pied it and, ducked in­to court­yards pul­sat­ing with the throb­bing buzz of the young who par­tied un­aware of the fight for their free­dom, or its bloody his­to­ry. Cen­turies min­gled with hor­ror and beau­ty, loss and hope. Kun­dera’s writ­ing is as nec­es­sary to un­der­stand the past as the syn­a­gogue memo­ri­al­is­ing Czech and Mora­vian Jew­ish Holo­caust vic­tims.

The UK Guardian obit­u­ary calls him “fun­ny, ex­per­i­men­tal, world­ly” and quotes Kun­dera from New York Times in 1980: “All over the world peo­ple nowa­days pre­fer to judge rather than to un­der­stand, to an­swer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the nov­el can hard­ly be heard over the noisy fool­ish­ness of hu­man cer­tain­ties.”

This ad­vice to ask, to un­der­stand, and not to judge is gold for those who know that great lit­er­a­ture lets in a chink of light and cracks the mys­tery of what it means to be hu­man on earth.

In that ex­pert sto­ry­telling weav­ing in the per­son­al with the po­lit­i­cal, we see that jus­tice starts not with a pu­ri­tan­i­cal pun­ish­ment to­wards oth­ers but when a mas­ter artist suc­ceeds in nudg­ing the hearts and minds of peo­ple to­wards a greater hu­man­i­ty.

Ira Math­ur is a Guardian colum­nist and the win­ner of the non-fic­tion OCM Bo­cas Prize for Lit­er­a­ture 2023.