Death of a master writer

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