Κατηγορίες για συνεργασία του Μ.Κούντερα με την αστυνομία της Τσεχοσλοβακίας

Associated Press

Ο διάσημος συγγραφέας Μίλαν Κούντερα, δημιουργός του περίφημου έργου «Η Αβάσταχτη Ελαφρότητα του Είναι», φέρεται να κατέδωσε το 1959 έναν φοιτητή στην αστυνομία της Τσεχοσλοβακίας και με βάση την κατάθεσή του ένα τρίτο άτομο καταδικάστηκε σε κάθειρξη 22 χρόνων, σύμφωνα με δημοσίευμα του περιοδικού «Respekt». «Σήμερα, στις 16:00, ο φοιτητής Μίλαν Κούντερα, γεννηθείς την 1η Απριλίου του 1929 στο Μπρνο, παρουσιάστηκε ενώπιον της υπηρεσίας για να αναφέρει (ότι κάποιος φοιτητής θα συναντηθεί το απόγευμα με τον Μίροσλαβ Ντβόρατσεκ)... Ο τελευταίος είναι λιποτάκτης από τον στρατό και την άνοιξη του προηγούμενου έτους είχε μεταβεί στη Γερμανία, όπου είχε εισέλθει παρανόμως», αναφέρει η έκθεση της αστυνομίας με την κωδική ονομασία 624/1950.

Μετά την καταγγελία, ο Ντβόρατσεκ συνελήφθη και οδηγήθηκε ενώπιον της Δικαιοσύνης, που τον καταδίκασε σε κάθειρξη 22 χρόνων. Κατά τη διάρκεια της φυλάκισής του ο Ντβόρατσεκ είχε οδηγηθεί σε στρατόπεδο καταναγκαστικών έργων σε ορυχείο ουρανίου, όπως πολλοί άλλοι πολιτικοί κρατούμενοι εκείνη την εποχή. Αποφυλακίστηκε το 1963, όταν ο Μίλαν Κούντερα μόλις είχε εκδώσει τη συλλογή διηγημάτων «Γελοίοι Έρωτες», με την οποία έκανε τα πρώτα του βήματα, σύμφωνα με το δημοσίευμα του περιοδικού «Respekt».

Την εποχή εκείνη ο Κούντερα ήταν 21 χρόνων και σύμφωνα με το δημοσίευμα, δεν γνώριζε προσωπικώς τον φοιτητή που κατήγγειλε, αλλά μετέφερε στην αστυνομία πληροφορίες που είχε ακούσει από τρίτο άτομο. Ο Ντβόρατσεκ, Τσέχος πιλότος, είχε φύγει από την Τσεχοσλοβακία το 1948, όταν η χώρα πέρασε στον έλεγχο του Κομμουνιστικού Κόμματος. Σε στρατόπεδο προσφύγων στο Μόναχο είχε στρατολογηθεί από μία τσεχοσλοβακική μυστική υπηρεσία που χρηματοδοτείτο από τους Αμερικανούς και στη συνέχεια επέστρεψε στη χώρα του για να εργαστεί ως ταχυδρόμος. Ο Μίροσλαβ Ντβόρατσεκ είναι σήμερα 80 χρόνων και ζει στη Σουηδία. Ο συγγραφέας αρνήθηκε να απαντήσει στις ερωτήσεις του περιοδικού «Respekt» για την υπόθεση Ντβόρατσεκ.

Mε πληροφορίες από ΑΠΕ/Γαλλικό

Milan Kundera was born on April 1^st, 1929 in Brno, Bohemia, now Czechoslovakia. His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891-1971), was a musicologist and rector at Brno University. Milan Kundera wrote his first poems during high school. After World War II, he worked as a tradesman and a jazz musician before beginning his studies at Prague’s Charles University where he studied musicology, film and literature and aesthetics. After graduating in 1952, Kundera became assistant and later professor with the film faculty at Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts, lecturing in world literature. During this time, he published poems, essays and stage plays and joined the editorial staff at the literary magazines “Literarni Noviny” and “Listy.” Kundera joined the communist party in 1948 full of enthusiasm, as did so many intellectuals. In 1950, he got expelled from the party due to individualistic tendencies but rejoined from 1956 to 1970. Throughout the 50s, Kundera worked as a translator, essayist and author of stage plays and, in 1953, he published his first book. Although Kundera had published several poetry collections, he gained notoriety with the publication of a collection of short stories entitled “Laughable Loves“, written between 1958 and 1968. His first novel, “The Joke,“ written in 1967, deals with Stalinism. After the Soviet invasion on the 21^st of August, 1968, Kundera, as one of the leading figures of the failed radical movement the “Prague Spring,” lost his teaching position and his books were banned from libraries the country over. In 1970, his books were banned from publication. His second novel, “Life Is Elsewhere”, was published in Paris in 1973. In 1975, Kundera became guest professor at the University in Rennes in Bretagne, France. He was deprived of Czechoslovakian citizenship in 1979 in reaction to his “Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” The novels that followed were banned from publication in the CSSR. He gained his French citizenship in 1981. Since 1985, Kundera has given only written interviews, feeling himself often misquoted. In 1986, Kundera published his first work written in French, the essay “L'Art du Roman“ (The Art of the Novel). In 1988, he published his first novel written in French, “Immortality.” Having been a lecture in comparative language sciences at the University of Rennes for several years, in 1978 Kundera became an author with the noted publishing house Gallimard. In his in 1994 essay “Testaments Trahis” (Testaments Betrayed), Kundera addressed adulterators, interpreters and translators by whom he felt his work was often mistreated. He allowed the translation of his works again in Germany while, in France, he personally oversaw the Czech transcription of all his works. Kunderas most recent novels include “Slowness,” published in 1994, and “Identity,” published in 1998. In 2000, Kundera published “La Ignorancia,” up until now only published in Spanish. Publication in other languages is forthcoming. As he often makes clear, Kundera derives inspirations from the Renaissance and such writers as Boccacio, Rabelais, Sterne, Diderot, but also from the works of Musil, Gombrowitz, Broch, Kafka and Heidegger. Not only are Kunderas books classics of the 20th century, Kundera is among it’s greatest novelists. Unlike many more public authors, Kundera prefers to disappear behind his books, anonymous in his own way. Kundera currently lives with his wife, Vera Hrabankova, in Paris.

The Milan Kundera Bibliography

Poetry:

• Man: A Broad Garden, 1953
• The Last May, 1954-1955-1961
• Monologues, 1957-1964-1965

Plays:

• The Owner of the Keys, 1962.
• Two Ears,Two Weddings (Slowness), 1968
• The Blunder, 1969
• Jaques and His Master, 1971 (Hommage to Diderot in 3 acts)

Fiction:

• The Joke, 1965
• Laughable Loves, 3 parts: 1963-1965-1968, complete 1969
• Life is Elsewhere, 1969/70
• The Farewell Waltz (earlier translation: Party), 1970/71
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1978
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1982
• Immortality, 1988
• Slowness, 1994.
• Identity, 1996
• Ignorance, 2000

Essays:

• About the Disputes of Inheritance, 1955 (an essay on the problem of creative trends in the Czech literature)
• The Art of the Novel, 1960 (essay on Vladislav Vanèura)
• The Czech Deal, 1968 (essay on the problem of the position of the Czech culture in the actual politic situation)
• Radicalism and Exhibitionism, 1969 (essay as answer to Vaclav Havels polemic reaction to “The Czech Deal”
• The Stolen West or the Tragedy of Central Europe, 1983
• The Art of the Novel, essay in 7 parts, 1985 (essay about literature and the tradition of the novel in European culture)
• Testaments Betrayed, essay in 9 parts, 1992

The Most Original Book of the Season

Philip Roth interviews Milan Kundera (30/11/1980)

This interview is condensed from two conversations Philip Roth had with Milan Kundera after reading a translated manuscript of his "Book of Laughter and Forgetting"--one conversation while he was visiting london for the first time, the other when he was on his first visit to the United States. He took these trips from France; since 1975 he and his wife have been living as Èmigrès, in Reenes, where he taught at the University, and now in Paris. During the conversations, Kundera spoke sporadically in French, but mostly in Czech, and his wife Vera served as his translator. A final Czech text was translated into English by Peter Kussi.

• PR: Do you think the destruction of the world is coming soon?

MK: That depends on what you mean by the word "soon."

• PR: Tomorrow or the day after.

MK: The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one.

• PR: So then we have nothing to worry about.

MK: On the contrary. If a fear has been present in the human mind for ages, there must be something to it.

• PR: In any event, it seems to me that this concern is the background against which all the stories in your latest book take place, even those that are of a decidedly humorous nature.

MK: If someone had told me as a boy: One day you will see your nation vanish from the world, I would have considered it nonsense, something I couldn't possibly imagine. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life. But after the Russian invasion of 1968, every Czech was confronted with the thought that his nation could be quietly erased from Europe, just as over the past five decades 40 million Ukrainians have been quietly vanishing from the world without the world paying any heed. Or Lithuanians. Do you know that in the 17th century, Lithuania was a powerful European nation? Today the Russians keep Lithuanians on their reservation like a half-extinct tribe; they are sealed off from the visitors to prevent knowledge about their existence from reaching the outside. I don't know what the future holds for my nation. It is certain that the Russians will do everything they can to dissolve it gradually into their own civilization. Nobody knows whether they will succeed. But the possibility is here. And the sudden realization that such a possibility exists is enough to change one's whole sense of life. Nowadays I even see Europe as fragile, mortal.

• PR: And yet, are not the fates of Eastern Europe and Western Europe radically different matters?

MK: As a concept of cultural history, Eastern Europe is Russia, with its quite specific history anchored in the Byzantine world. Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, just like Austria have never been part of Eastern Europe. From the very beginning they have taken part in the great adventure of Western civilization, with its Gothic, its Renaissance, its Reformation--a movement which has its cradle precisely in this region. It was here, in Central Europe, that modern culture found its greatest impulses; psychoanalysis, structuralism, dodecaphony, BartÛk's music, Kafka's and Musil's new esthetics of the novel. The postwar annexation of Central Europe (or at least its major part) by Russian civilization caused Western culture to lose its vital center of gravity. It is the most significant event in the history of the West in our century, and we cannot dismiss the possibility that the end of Central Europe marked the beginning of the end for Europe as a whole.

• PR: During the Prague Spring, your novel "The Joke" and your stories "Laughable Loves" were published in editions of 150,000. After the Russian invasion you were dismissed from your teaching post at the film academy and all your books were removed from the shelves of public libraries. Seven years later you and your wife tossed a few books and some clothes in the back of your car and drove off to France, where you've become one of the most widely read foreign authors. How do you feel as an ÈmigrÈ?

MK: For a writer, the experience of living in a number of countries is an enormous boon. You can only understand the world if you see it from several sides. My latest book, which came into being in France, unfolds in a special geographic space: Those events which take place in Prague are seen through West European eyes, while what happens in France is seen through the eyes of Prague. It is an encounter of two worlds. On one side, my native country: In the course of a mere half- century, it experienced democracy, fascism, revolution, Stalinist terror as well as the disintegration of Stalinism, German and Russian occupation, mass deportations, the death of the West in its own land. It is thus sinking under the weight of history, and looks at the world with immense skepticism. On the other side, France: For centuries it was the center of the world and nowadays it is suffering from the lack of great historic events. This is why it revels in radical ideologic postures. It is the lyrical, neurotic expectation of some great deed of its own which however is not coming, and will never come.

• PR: Are you living in France as a strange or do you feel culturally at home?

MK: I am enormously fond of French culture and I am greatly indebted to it. Especially to the older literature. Rebelais is dearest to me of all writers. And Diderot. I love his "Jacques le fataliste" as much as I do Laurence Sterne. Those were the greatest experimenters of all time in the form of the novel. And their experiments were, so to say, amusing, full of happiness and joy, which have by now vanished from French literature and without which everything in art loses its significance. Sterne and Diderot understand the novel as a great game . They discovered the humor of the novelistic form. When I hear learned arguments that the novel has exhausted its possibilities, I have precisely the opposite feeling: In the course of its history the novel missed many of its possibilities. For example, impulses for the development of the novel hidden in Sterne and Diderot have not been picked up by any successors.

• PR: Your latest book is not called a novel, and yet in the text you declare: This book is a novel in the form of variations. So then--is it a novel or not?

MK: As far as my own quite personal esthetic judgment goes, it really is a novel, but I have no wish to force this opinion on anyone. There is enormous freedom latent within the novelistic form. It is a mistake to regard a certain stereotyped structure as the inviolable essence of the novel.

• PR: Yet surely there is something which makes a novel a novel, and which limits this freedom.

MK: A novel is a long piece of synthetic prose based on play with invented characters. These are the only limits. By the term synthetic I have in mind the novelist's desire to grasp his subject from all sides and in the fullest possible completeness. Ironic essay, novelistic narrative, autobiographical fragment, historic fact, flight of fantasy: The synthetic power of the novel is capable of combining everything into a unified whole like the voices of polyphonic music. The unity of a book need not stem from the plot, but can be provided by the theme. In my latest book, there are two such themes: laughter and forgetting.

• PR: Laughter has always been close to you. Your books provoke laughter through humor or irony. When your characters come to grief it is because they bump against a world that has lost its sense of humor.

MK: I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror. I was 20 then. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn't fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humor.

• PR: In your last book, though, something else is involved. In a little parable you compare the laughter of angels with the laughter of the devil. The devil laughs because God's world seems senseless to him; the angels laugh with joy because everything in God's world has its meaning.

MK: Yes, man uses the same physiologic manifestations--laughter--to express two different metaphysical attitudes. Someone's hat drops on a coffin in a freshly dug grave, the funeral loses its meaning and laughter is born. Two lovers race through the meadow, holding hands, laughing. Their laughter has nothing to do with jokes or humor, it is the serious laughter of angels expressing their joy of being. Both kinds of laughter belong among life's pleasures, but when it also denotes a dual apocalypse: the enthusiastic laughter of angel-fanatics, who are so convinced of their world's significance that they are ready to hang anyone not sharing their joy. And the other laughter, sounding from the opposite side, which proclaims that everything has become meaningless, that even funerals are ridiculous and group sex a mere comical pantomime. Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.

• PR: What you now call the laughter of angels is a new term for the "lyrical attitude to life" of your previous novels. In one of your books you characterize the era of Stalinist terror as the reign of the hangman and the poet.

MK: Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise--the age old drama of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andrè Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.

• PR: In your book, the great French poet Eluard soars over paradise and gulag, singing. Is this bit of history which you mention in the book authentic?

MK: After the war, Paul Eluard abandoned surrealism and became the greatest exponent of what I might call the "poesy of totalitarianism." He sang for brotherhood, peace, justice, better tomorrows, he sang for comradeship and against isolation, for joy and against gloom, for innocence and against cynicism. When in 1950 the rulers of paradise sentenced Eluard's Prague friend, the surrealist Zalvis Kalandra, to death by hanging, Eluard suppressed his personal feelings of friendship for the sake of supra-personal ideals, and publicly declared his approval of his comrade's execution. The hangman killed while the poet sang.

And not just the poet. The whole period of Stalinist terror was a period of collective lyrical delirium. This has by now been completely forgotten but it is the crux of the matter. People like to say: Revolution is beautiful, it is only the terror arising from it which is evil. But this is not true. The evil is already present in the beautiful, hell is already contained in the dream of paradise and if we wish to understand the essence of hell we must examine the essence of the paradise from which it originated. It is extremely easy to condemn gulags, but to reject the totalitarianism poesy which leads to the gulag, by way of paradise is as difficult as ever. Nowadays, people all over the world unequivocally reject the idea of gulags, yet they are still willing to let themselves be hypnotized by totalitarian poesy and to march to new gulags to the tune of the same lyrical song piped by Eluard when he soared over Prague like the great archangel of the lyre, while the smoke of Kalandra's body rose to the sky from the crematory chimney.

• PR: What is so characteristic of your prose is the constant confrontation of the private and the public. But not in the sense that private stories take place against a political backdrop, nor that political events encroach on private lives. Rather, you continually show that political events are governed by the same laws as private happenings, so that your prose is a kind of psychoanalysis of politics.

MK: The metaphysics of man is the same in the private sphere as in the public one. Take the other theme of the book, forgetting. This is the great private problem of man: death as the loss of the self. But what is this self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life. This is the problem of my heroine, in desperately trying to preserve the vanishing memories of her beloved dead husband. But forgetting is also the great problem of politics. When a big power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness it uses the method of organized forgetting . This is what is currently happening in Bohemia. Contemporary Czech literature, insofar as it has any value at all, has not been printed for 12 years; 200 Czech writers have been proscribed, including the dead Franz Kafka; 145 Czech historians have been dismissed from their posts, history has been rewritten, monuments demolished. A nation which loses awareness of its past gradually loses its self. And so the political situation has brutally illuminated the ordinary metaphysical problem of forgetting that we face all the time, every day, without paying any attention. Politics unmasks the metaphysics of private life, private life unmasks the metaphysics of politics.

• PR: In the sixth part of your book of variations the main heroine, Tamina, reaches an island where there are only children. In the end they hound her to death. Is this a dream, a fairy tale, an allegory?

MK: Nothing is more foreign to me than allegory, a story invented by the author in order to illustrate some thesis. Events, whether realistic or imaginary, must be significant in themselves, and the reader is meant to be naively seduced by their power and poetry. I have always been haunted by this image, and during one period of my life it kept recurring in my dreams: A person finds himself in a world of children, from which he cannot escape. And suddenly childhood, which we all lyricize and adore, reveals itself as pure horror. As a trap. This story is not allegory. But my book is a polyphony in which various stories mutually explain, illumine, complement each other. The basic event of the book is the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children. All totalitarianisms do this. And perhaps our entire technical age does this, with its cult of the future, its indifference to the past and mistrust of thought. In the midst of a relentlessly juvenile society, an adult equipped with memory and irony feels like Tamina on the isle of children.

• PR: Almost all your novels, in fact all the individual parts of your latest book, find their denouement in great scenes of coitus. Even that part which goes by the innocent name of "Mother" is but one long scene of three-way sex, with a prologue and epilogue. What does sex mean to you as a novelist?

MK: These days, when sexuality is no longer taboo, mere description, mere sexual confession, has become noticeably boring. How dated Lawrence seems, or even Henry Miller, with his lyricism of obscenity! And yet certain erotic passages of George Bataille have made a lasting impression on me. Perhaps it is because they are not lyrical but philosophic. You are right that, with me everything ends in great erotic scenes. I have the feeling that a scene of physical love generates an extremely sharp light which suddenly reveals the essence of characters and sums up their life situation. Hugo makes love to Tamina while she is desperately trying to think about lost vacations with her dead husband. The erotic scene is the focus where all the themes of the story converge and where its deepest secrets are located.

• PR: The last part, the seventh, actually deals with nothing but sexuality. Why does this part close the book rather than another, such as the much more dramatic sixth party in which the heroine dies?

MK: Tamina dies, metaphorically speaking, amid the laughter of angels. Through the last section of the book, on the other hand, resounds the contrary kind of laugh, the kind heard when things lose their meaning. There is a certain imaginary dividing line beyond which things appear senseless and ridiculous. A person asks himself: Isn't it nonsensical for me to get up in the morning? to go to work? to strive for anything? to belong to a nation just because I was born that way? Man lives in close proximity to this boundary, and can easily find himself on the other side. That boundary exists everywhere, in all areas of human life and even in the deepest, most biological of all: sexuality. And precisely because it is the deepest region of life the question posed to sexuality is the deepest question. This is why my book of variations can end with no variation but this.

• PR: Is this, then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?

MK: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out in the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.