Farewell to Milan Kundera
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Transcript
00:00 Jacques Rupnik, professor at Sciences Po, is with us.
00:04 Thanks for joining us here on France 24.
00:07 You knew Milan Kundera very well.
00:09 You were with him just a week ago.
00:13 That's right.
00:14 And it's a sad day for not just his friends, but it's a sad day, I think, for those who
00:23 were attached to his literary genius and to his thinking about Europe.
00:30 So I think this is a great legacy of this man, both as a novelist and as a thinker.
00:38 And the two complemented each other.
00:43 He talked about the novel as being the art form where you can't cheat because it's so
00:49 intimate.
00:51 And it was his intimate writing that, again, broke through the iron curtain.
00:59 That's right.
01:00 He made this distinction between poetry, the lyrical art.
01:07 You can write wonderful verses, but they don't have to be true.
01:15 Whereas the novel is the art of truth.
01:20 You cannot produce a novel based on complete nonsense.
01:27 That was his view of the novel, which I think you had mentioned in your introduction, The
01:36 Unbearable Lightness of Being.
01:38 This is probably the book that is best known around the world.
01:42 For me, the best or the one that I feel most attached to is The Joke, the novel he published
01:49 in France in '68, but in Prague the year before.
01:53 And in that novel, he basically makes a portrait of the country in the whole post-war era,
02:01 as seen by the four different characters.
02:06 Each of them has a different version of that story.
02:10 And that's, I think, why he's a great writer.
02:14 He's not the narrator with a message telling you, this is what you have to think about
02:18 it.
02:19 But he shows the complexities, the ironies, of course, of history and their tragic moments
02:27 too.
02:28 So that is Kunderad, the novelist.
02:30 Yeah, and then of course, just a word on The Joke, because it's in 1967.
02:36 So this is before the Prague Spring, and he pulls no punches in that book.
02:43 That's right.
02:44 I mean, the novel starts with a postcard that a young man sends to his girlfriend, who is
02:54 a very enthusiastic communist.
02:56 And he writes, you know, "The optimism is the opium of the people.
03:06 Long live Trotsky."
03:07 And it's supposed to be, it's a kind of joke, and he sends it off.
03:12 Of course, she as a dutiful communist, you know, shows it immediately to her superiors,
03:18 and the whole machinery starts working.
03:21 He gets kicked out from the university, he becomes a non-person, etc.
03:25 And the whole book is about the revenge he wants to take on the person that expelled
03:32 him from the university then.
03:36 And of course, being Kunderad, it's a revenge that falls flat on its face.
03:41 I will not describe any more, but I invite your viewers to read The Joke.
03:47 Great, great novel.
03:49 But I think that what is important about Kunderad is not just his novels, it's his essays, his
03:54 thinking about Europe.
03:56 He's a great European.
03:59 And since he lived both and wrote Czechoslovakia, he wrote in Czech, and then he has his life
04:08 in France, and he did something very daring, he shifted to French.
04:13 And he wrote beautifully in French.
04:20 And he wrote very well in French.
04:22 So he's a bridge between the two Europes.
04:25 And he is really famous for an essay he wrote in 1983, which is called The Tragedy of Central
04:33 Europe or The Kidnapped West.
04:35 What he meant by that, he says in his essay, is Central Europe is culturally Western, politically
04:44 East and geographically in the center.
04:47 This is a tragedy of Central Europe.
04:49 It is sort of torn apart between belonging to the Soviet fold and culturally being Western.
04:57 And you could say that 1989 is a way for Central Europe to reconcile its culture, its politics,
05:08 and its geography.
05:10 So that was an essay which incidentally was republished now and has had 20 translations
05:20 in one year.
05:21 So you have an author who wrote something 40 years ago.
05:26 It was not republished since.
05:28 It's published now, translated in 20 languages.
05:32 And you had to ask yourself why.
05:35 Two reasons.
05:36 One is what he describes about Central Europe, the tragedy of small nations whose existence
05:45 is not guaranteed.
05:47 So they survive through the richness of their culture, through their contribution to European
05:51 culture.
05:52 Why is this interesting today?
05:55 Because this, what he was writing about Czechoslovakia, Hungary, to Hungary, to others, it applies
06:04 to Ukraine today.
06:06 Because the question of a small nation is not a question of size, the number of its
06:11 inhabitants, but the idea that it is a nation whose existence is not self-evident, is not
06:17 guaranteed.
06:19 That is the shared predicament of Ukraine today and the nations of Central Europe before.
06:26 So this is, I think, a very interesting insight.
06:29 And the second insight concerns Russia, because for him, Russia is the constitutive other
06:37 for Central Europe.
06:39 He says it's a different civilization.
06:42 So he doesn't say it's superior, inferior.
06:47 It's another civilization, but which happens to be threatening for the nations of Central
06:52 Europe.
06:53 Well, again, I think what he has to say about Russia is very relevant for today.
06:59 And it explains why the essay is retranslated, republished all over Europe today and beyond.
07:06 I mean, the latest news is it's translated in Thailand, in Korea, in Brazil, et cetera,
07:13 et cetera.
07:14 So this is an author who can write about Europe, change the mental geography of Europeans through
07:21 his writings, through his essays and become read worldwide and appreciated as a great
07:33 European worldwide.
07:34 So a French, Czech, yeah, that's something that speaks to somebody like me.
07:40 But beyond that, a great European.
07:42 Jacques Rupnik, he spoke to you.
07:46 He didn't speak much to journalists.
07:48 So is there one anecdote in particular?
07:50 There's a man who moved to Paris in the 1970s.
07:54 One crucial moment during that arc of history you've just described where you bumped into
07:59 Milan Kundera, where you exchanged with him.
08:02 Well, you know, the exchanges were multiple, but I think what I recall from all of them
08:13 is his ironic detachment.
08:17 You know, he would probe, he would try a subject and let you develop it.
08:24 And once you discover that you've gone perhaps too far in your argument, he would have a
08:29 little smile.
08:30 And yeah, he knew where he wanted to get you in your argument.
08:35 And I think that that's, of course, it's his very playful approach to human relations and
08:44 to ideas, you know.
08:46 So yeah, so that I think is.
08:50 And of course, I think a great moment for him was his the moment he lost his Czechoslovak
09:03 citizenship.
09:04 He was deprived of it by the regime.
09:07 And soon after that, adopted French.
09:10 And you know, for many people, including Kundera, exile is a difficult thing.
09:15 People think exile, oh, you just go and you become successful and you are, you know, you
09:23 escape the harshness of the of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
09:27 Well, exile can be very difficult.
09:30 Yet he would consider exile also as something liberating.
09:36 And in the end, he got that citizenship, that Czech citizenship back after, of course, the
09:43 fall of the Berlin Wall.
09:44 I want to thank you so much for sharing those insights and those moments with us, Jacques
09:49 Rupnik.
09:50 My pleasure.