ATIn the United States, one of the main reactions to the death of Milan Kundera was to pay him a respectful, but slightly condescending tribute, while taking him a little high as a man of the past. This attitude is explained by the fact that the anticommunism of the Cold War is now a long time ago and that more recent problems have arisen, along with new moral codes, especially in America, which have relegated to an outdated era the representation of women and sexuality found in Kundera. Moreover, his cerebral philosophical style is not unanimous. However, I don’t really understand this response to his disappearance. To me, it should be obvious that Kundera was a man of our times, and even a visionary. Every day, the news from Ukraine bears witness to this – even if it is necessary to recall its vision of the world to notice it.
Its central theme has always been the conflict between life and lies. He treated it with a certain amount of humour, because humor has this strangely tragic quality of resisting lies. By also integrating sex which, by its intensity in certain works, takes on a dimension close to rebellion. Through his characters evolving in Prague in search of erotic adventures, by making their enjoyment credible, he could show that authority was not credible. His view of life versus lies also lent itself to a geopolitical interpretation.
The predominant idea during the Cold War was that, within Europe, the nations of the Eastern bloc shared a “Slavic soul”, which distinguished them from the West and gave this bloc a cultural and some legitimacy. Yet in 1983, at the height of the Cold War, Kundera published in the journal Debate an article titled “A Kidnapped West. Or the tragedy of central Europe”, which caused a sensation in many countries (including the United States of course), where he explained that, on the contrary, the “Slavic soul” was a myth, that is to say a lie. There are Slavic languages, but the ancient and deep division that marked Europe actually came not from linguistic groups, but from theological differences between the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire. And this division pushed the various small nations immediately to the west of Russia towards the civilization of Western Europe, and not towards the East.
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