When Milan Kundera died last year, I was in Prague, visiting my parents. After nearly thirty years as missionaries in the city, they were planning to move back to South Carolina, and I wanted to say goodbye. I spent a lot of my time out, reading. I was trying to read Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. I drifted between two cafes, one that doubles as a bookstore for a small leftist press, and another that largely caters to film-school students. The staff at the latter establishment were all beautiful men a decade younger than me with identical DIY bowl cuts. One sometimes wore a t-shirt with the words FUCK PUTIN printed on the front. A portrait of Václav Havel hung over the bar.
I was not actually in Prague the day Kundera died, July 11, 2023. I was on a brief trip to Naples. On the day of his death, one of the bookstores on the Via Port’Alba posted a simple handmade sign on its door: “Milan Kundera, 1 aprile 1929 – 11 iuglio 2023.” There’s a joke here, maybe; Kundera wasn’t in Prague either, when he died, of course, but Paris (and maybe the real joke is that we should both have been in Brno, Kundera’s decidedly second-city hometown).
I flew back to Prague two days later. Back at my parents’ house in a green suburb, I looked through books I left behind sixteen years before. I grew up in a house that sits two streets over, but this house felt nearly identical. The same photos of my siblings hung next to an inlaid wood portrait of Jesus. On the first Wednesday of each month, the city still tests its air-raid siren system, and the sound floated, eerily, through the same lace curtains. I first read Kundera in the house two streets over. I know the date, and the book, and the passages and fragments of passages that moved me, because I used to mark down these details. My notes reveal that I sometimes read books in a single day, and that I have always loved sentimentality. In Life Is Elsewhere, which I apparently read when I was fifteen, in English translation, I underlined “Why do you want to transform love, comrades? Love will be the same until the end of time.”
For much of my childhood, I did almost nothing but read. I used to search for language to describe my education: nontraditional, informal, maybe. Sometimes I deploy this language defensively, to explain why I don’t really understand the process of photosynthesis, or why I can’t do basic math. After the success of Tara Westover’s unschooling memoir Educated—a book that would make me cry, later, when I had to teach it to bored student athletes—I grew tired of people asking me, have you read this book? My parents graduated from college, I want to respond, they entertained former dissidents and astronauts. I struggle with other words, too: Should I call my parents evangelical missionaries or fundamentalist missionaries, and to Eastern Europe or to Central Europe? My selections depend on my audience. What is certain is that between the ages of six and eighteen I did very little school. Instead, I read through the weirdly varied collection of what my parents had on hand: three sets of encyclopedias, Bill Gothard’s Character Sketches, The Waste Land, Moby-Dick, back issues of the Economist, my dad’s Westerns. Once I finished those, I moved on to what was available in bookstores in Prague in the early 2000s, in both English and Czech: Havel, Bohumil Hrabal, Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Hynek Mácha, Miroslav Holub, Kafka. This is how I started reading Kundera.
●
The news of Kundera’s death surprised me with grief, though maybe it shouldn’t. I was home, for the first time in years, back in the place where reading Kundera for the first time felt so aspirational, so dangerous. Aspirational because—in hindsight—I suspect the thinness of my education made me anxious to present as well-read and well-spoken. I imagined I could articulate my way out of my background. I still fall back on this thinking. After I completed my Ph.D., I felt an intense relief. I had attained a pass to allow me into certain rooms, or at least out of the room where I had felt trapped for much of my life. Kundera, an internationally famous writer, had been one of the first keys to my escape. I wanted to be the kind of person who reads Kundera.
That he felt dangerous is more obvious, I imagine. Oddly enough, given my religious upbringing, I don’t remember feeling all that shocked. I do remember feeling afraid of discovery. My parents were unaware of the content of Kundera’s novels, but this didn’t stop me from worrying they’d realize that I read novels awash with sex. When I left Prague to attend bible college, back in South Carolina—a place I essentially understood as a series of sensations: eating boiled peanuts in gas-station parking lots, the intensity of the air conditioning in the many churches where my parents spoke—I brought The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being alongside Havel’s Disturbing the Peace and Hrabal’s I Served the King of England, but I did not put all of these books out for display. Only Disturbing the Peace made it onto my dorm-room bookshelf. Like many parts of my life during this time, Kundera became a secret. I listened to forbidden music, quietly. I watched forbidden movies under a blanket. I let my sister buy me a single forbidden beer on my 21st birthday, anxious the whole time.
At some mortifying point, a hallmate found my copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and read aloud a passage at random. In it, Tereza photographs Sabina, nude, until Sabina turns the camera on Tereza. The women, united by a single word—strip!—each think of Tomáš. Kundera describes the moment as one of “frightening enchantment” broken only by Sabina’s laughter. Tereza, disarmed. Her own submission intoxicates her. As the passage progressed, my hallmate’s voice dropped from embarrassment, and she reprimanded me, half-joking, half-serious. It was deeply shameful, and even as it occurred, deeply funny. The incident joined a litany of other minor offenses, both real and imagined, that disqualified me from invitations to optional hall prayer and made me seem like “a girl who had kissed someone,” as another friend hilariously—and derisively—described me. I hadn’t even yet held hands with someone.
●
Even far away from my family and bible college, reading Kundera never stopped feeling a little dangerous, or at least uncomfortable. In the years after college, the wider culture I entered had its own set of discomforts with his work. Many of the tributes I read in the weeks after his death homed in on his supposed misogyny. The New Statesman declared that “the misunderstood author cared more about skirt-chasing than power politics.” The New York Times described Kundera’s “use of his female characters” as “pitiless,” citing Joan Smith’s proclamation that “hostility is the common factor in all Kundera’s writing about women.” These eulogies were the culmination of years of criticism that tied his apparent misogyny to questions of his significance as a writer; a piece published in the Atlantic after the publication of his poorly received final book, for example, suggested that the “perverse thrill” of reading Kundera in the Eighties was the permission it gave one to feel “politically enlightened while watching a beautiful woman in a bowler hat and little else open the door for her lover, a neurosurgeon who spends his spare time wandering around Prague telling random women to take off their clothes.”
It would be dishonest to say these representations of women and sex never left me uncomfortable. Once, when asked to name a writer whose work I admired but also felt occasionally troubled by, I recalled, almost instantly, the moment in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting when Jan describes rape as erotic, and the word no as particularly erotically beautiful—as a word with its own “red glow.” It would take me years to untangle my response. The discomfort I felt experiencing transgressive art wasn’t solely related to its content, I slowly realized, but also to a fear of external judgment for finding that art valuable or beautiful anyway.
At that point, I lacked the confidence to explain the strange emotion—relief, I think, is the closest word—that I felt when I first encountered Kundera’s more troubled characters. Even at the young age I started reading his novels, I had already experienced sexual violence; much of the pre-approved art that my community encouraged me to embrace (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien) felt toothless. Kundera, meanwhile, engaged directly—not via fantasy—with “the fullness of the human condition,” to use a bible college-approved phrase I might have employed to justify my questionable taste.
At the beginning of Simple Passion—a book I turned to as a break from 2666—Annie Ernaux suggests that writing ought to replicate the experience of watching pornography, “the feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.” What she wants isn’t obscenity, but the shock of recognition, of familiarity that leads to a suspension of judgment. I experience the shock of recognition in Kundera’s morally ambiguous, adrift characters. I suspend judgment. This is partially theological; I occasionally joke that, of the Five Points of Calvinism, I am at least a one-point Calvinist, and my one point is total depravity—we can’t outrun our fallenness, and Kundera writes “bad” characters because any honest exploration of human nature necessarily involves “bad” characters. But I have secular defenses of Kundera, too. The characters he writes often live undignified lives, largely powerless in the face of power. This logic remains consistent in his treatment of women, whose perhaps particularly undignified state in his work reflects their condition as actors juggling the cruelty of more than one type of power.
If my attachment to Kundera feels slightly questionable abroad, it’s also messy at “home.” After July 11th, his books weren’t among the ones I brought to the two cafes I frequented in Prague. Some part of me didn’t want the tinge of cliché—an American, reading Kundera in Prague—but mostly I did not read Kundera in Prague because Kundera’s relationship to his birth country was a complicated one. Documents released in 2008 suggesting that Kundera may have acted as a police informant—leading to the arrest and fourteen-year imprisonment of a fellow student, Miroslav Dvořáček—marred an already uncertain legacy. His flight to France in the Seventies when many artists and intellectuals chose to remain, including Havel, who served prison time for this choice, painted Kundera as cowardly to some. More than once I have heard the accusation that Kundera’s writings on the tragedy of Central Europe express only his desire to escape Eastern Europe, and in the end, he seemed to want to escape even Central Europe, embracing the indisputably western France. The café where I drank espressos did not have a sign in memory of the most internationally renowned Czech writer, nor did the nearby student establishment where I decamped in the afternoons to drink one beer, or four, while I read 2666. The fact that it is Havel—who engaged Kundera in an extended debate vis-à-vis the Czech condition—who hung over the bar, there, feels representative of the general mood.
●
Before I left for Europe, my publisher asked me to compile a list of influences ahead of the publication of my first book, and I added and removed and added Kundera several times. In the end, he stayed. I had approached the list as a curated record of my reading life, maybe to avoid the weight of the word influence. What does it mean to call Kundera—or anyone—an “influence”? Certainly it’s more than a mere attachment to my memories of reading him many years ago. To admit that I have an emotional connection to Kundera’s work feels acceptable, particularly when contextualized and narrativized. What makes me anxious is admitting that I love Kundera’s work, or that it influences my own. Despite having read nearly every book he wrote (a claim I can make about very few writers), I have often emphasized easier influences, influences that don’t need caveats, or defenses.
I hadn’t read Kundera in years. Maybe I’d avoided him. But in Prague, in the wake of his death, he was difficult to avoid. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, but he remains forever linked in my mind to the city that I was in the process of losing not long after his death, a simultaneity that I couldn’t shake during my month at home. I brought apricots and bread to Stromovka and recalled how I once got day-drunk with friends there and read Farewell Waltz. Walking up Petřín, the same hill that Tereza climbs in a dreamscape in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and looking down on Prague, I remembered an argument I had there that nearly ended the most significant relationship of my life. I photographed the empty space that during my childhood contained a statue of Soviet General Ivan Konev, and I thought about the passage in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting where Max Brod and Kafka describe a city “haunted by the ghosts of statues torn down.” At the beginning of the book, Kundera describes two versions of a famous photograph of Vladimír Clementis and Klement Gottwald, on a balcony in 1948. In the original, the men stand next to each other as Gottwald addresses an assembled crowd. Gottwald wears Clementis’s fur hat, handed to him by Clementis because it was snowing, heavily. Years later, Clementis is purged, and executed. The censors scrub Clementis from the photograph, from history, but they forget his fur hat. It remains on Gottwald’s head, the only remnant of Clementis. I felt momentarily guilty for imagining my small losses against the stakes of such significant forgetting, but then I thought, it’s perfect. In Kundera, the distance between major and minor tragedy, historical and personal, often appears barely perceptible, a razor-thin white line.
While out trying to read 2666 and write, I took notes in a small blue book like the kind that schoolchildren might use. I was working on a long poem, but in the margins, notes about Kundera persistently emerged, about his attention to the senses, and the nakedness of his characters, and his writing. I wrote about a friend of mine who thinks that Sofia Coppola makes movies that the audience can smell (to me, like expired makeup, candy and wet grass). I wrote that the reader can smell Kundera’s novels (to me they smell deeply human, and interior, like sweat, and marble). Even at its most overwrought, his work still feels beautifully, delicately constructed as he veers wildly between Beethoven, Nietzsche, history and the mundane and funny eros of everyday life: someone is always unbuttoning a blouse or drinking a glass of wine while somewhere, there are tanks. Paul Éluard dances away from the executed body of Záviš Kalandra. A literally feverish young poet masturbates during a coup d’état (the same coup d’état that cements Klement Gottwald’s power). On his way to visit a woman, a man takes his car to a mechanic, and Kundera intersperses their exchange with a meditation on genocide.
Formally, Kundera appears everywhere in my writing once I start to look for him. I see him in my love of pastiche and reference, in my juxtaposition of history and minor erotic details. I see his presence in the long poem I was writing in Prague, a love poem, in a haunted city that is, of course, the haunted city, a city I both know and don’t know. I see him in the odd cast assembled almost as guides through the text. Éluard, Kalandra, Kafka and Brod float through Kundera just as Bolaño, Éric Rohmer, Jiří Kolář and Walerian Borowczyk appear and disappear through my poem as the lovers consider their small lives, their obsessions both significant and insignificant.
That a writer I read during my formative years has left a mark on my aesthetics doesn’t surprise me, but his influence lurks in places I wouldn’t have expected, too, but can’t ignore: my bad-Calvinist fascination with the uncertainty of human agency and my investment in the question, always, over the answer in art. My theologically inflected embrace of human limitation looks a lot like Kundera’s geopolitically inflected embrace of human limitation. There is an overwhelming, oppressive feeling of inevitability in his work; minor action seems to matter very little, if at all, especially against the crushing force of history, but this is written as a tragedy, not a victory, leaving much room for nuance in terms of individual response. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomáš (at least for most of the novel) and Sabina embrace and represent the simultaneously terrifying and freeing truth of human smallness, even futility, but Tereza’s almost irrational love and loyalty for her country and Tomáš offers a profound counterweight. Tomáš and Sabina seem correct in Kundera’s final accounting, but also somehow wrong, and Tereza, incorrect, in ways, but right.
If he writes heroes, they are difficult to identify: Tomáš and Sabina may be the rational actors, but they’ve surrendered to the tragedy of the human condition, while Tereza resists that tragedy, despite the harm this resistance arguably causes her. This tension creates a novel that never answers its own question, which is not about the uncertain state of agency and action, but what to do with that uncertainty, how to respond, how to live. My own writing engages in a similar refusal. I am never sure who is right, least of all myself, and who should get the last word, if anyone, or if there should be a last word at all. In an interview included at the end of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—probably my favorite of his novels besides Immortality—Kundera describes the novelist as teaching the reader to “comprehend the world as a question.” The text asks a question it can’t answer because if the text could answer its own question, it wouldn’t be worth writing, much less reading.
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We don’t choose our influences. Increasingly, I think that I would have had to be an entirely different person—who lived an entirely different life—to truly avoid Kundera. I am Czech American, and I spent my childhood in Prague, yes, but it goes beyond that. I read many Czech writers as a teenager, and I admire some of them—Hrabal, Holub—more. Yet I recognize Kundera in my writing with far greater intensity—in my commitment to comprehending the world as a question, and my thematic fascination with sex, and history, and agency (and ideally, the collisions of all of these at once, at any given moment).
You also don’t choose the life that gives you your formative influences, a very Kundera-approved thought equally on my mind as I prepare to lose Prague. It is not lost on me that I narrowly missed a more straightforward life. My parents reminisce often about the reasons they came to Prague: my mother’s roots in the region, their desire to serve God, happy summers as (then-illegal) missionaries in Hungary and (then) Czechoslovakia, but always they acknowledge that they nearly decided against moving abroad, that if Communism hadn’t ended, they wouldn’t have come. I wonder sometimes about this life that I might have lived, and the influences that life would have given me, and the writing they might have inspired. But I have this life. I have Kundera.
My parents give me a date for their final month in the city: July 2024. Before leaving Prague, I sorted through the Kundera novels I didn’t bring to college in South Carolina, all those years ago, still in two boxes in my parent’s house and decided to keep them all. I resolved to read Kundera again. I made plans to start from the beginning, to read The Joke.
Image credit: Alisha Dietzman
When Milan Kundera died last year, I was in Prague, visiting my parents. After nearly thirty years as missionaries in the city, they were planning to move back to South Carolina, and I wanted to say goodbye. I spent a lot of my time out, reading. I was trying to read Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. I drifted between two cafes, one that doubles as a bookstore for a small leftist press, and another that largely caters to film-school students. The staff at the latter establishment were all beautiful men a decade younger than me with identical DIY bowl cuts. One sometimes wore a t-shirt with the words FUCK PUTIN printed on the front. A portrait of Václav Havel hung over the bar.
I was not actually in Prague the day Kundera died, July 11, 2023. I was on a brief trip to Naples. On the day of his death, one of the bookstores on the Via Port’Alba posted a simple handmade sign on its door: “Milan Kundera, 1 aprile 1929 – 11 iuglio 2023.” There’s a joke here, maybe; Kundera wasn’t in Prague either, when he died, of course, but Paris (and maybe the real joke is that we should both have been in Brno, Kundera’s decidedly second-city hometown).
I flew back to Prague two days later. Back at my parents’ house in a green suburb, I looked through books I left behind sixteen years before. I grew up in a house that sits two streets over, but this house felt nearly identical. The same photos of my siblings hung next to an inlaid wood portrait of Jesus. On the first Wednesday of each month, the city still tests its air-raid siren system, and the sound floated, eerily, through the same lace curtains. I first read Kundera in the house two streets over. I know the date, and the book, and the passages and fragments of passages that moved me, because I used to mark down these details. My notes reveal that I sometimes read books in a single day, and that I have always loved sentimentality. In Life Is Elsewhere, which I apparently read when I was fifteen, in English translation, I underlined “Why do you want to transform love, comrades? Love will be the same until the end of time.”
For much of my childhood, I did almost nothing but read. I used to search for language to describe my education: nontraditional, informal, maybe. Sometimes I deploy this language defensively, to explain why I don’t really understand the process of photosynthesis, or why I can’t do basic math. After the success of Tara Westover’s unschooling memoir Educated—a book that would make me cry, later, when I had to teach it to bored student athletes—I grew tired of people asking me, have you read this book? My parents graduated from college, I want to respond, they entertained former dissidents and astronauts. I struggle with other words, too: Should I call my parents evangelical missionaries or fundamentalist missionaries, and to Eastern Europe or to Central Europe? My selections depend on my audience. What is certain is that between the ages of six and eighteen I did very little school. Instead, I read through the weirdly varied collection of what my parents had on hand: three sets of encyclopedias, Bill Gothard’s Character Sketches, The Waste Land, Moby-Dick, back issues of the Economist, my dad’s Westerns. Once I finished those, I moved on to what was available in bookstores in Prague in the early 2000s, in both English and Czech: Havel, Bohumil Hrabal, Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Hynek Mácha, Miroslav Holub, Kafka. This is how I started reading Kundera.
●
The news of Kundera’s death surprised me with grief, though maybe it shouldn’t. I was home, for the first time in years, back in the place where reading Kundera for the first time felt so aspirational, so dangerous. Aspirational because—in hindsight—I suspect the thinness of my education made me anxious to present as well-read and well-spoken. I imagined I could articulate my way out of my background. I still fall back on this thinking. After I completed my Ph.D., I felt an intense relief. I had attained a pass to allow me into certain rooms, or at least out of the room where I had felt trapped for much of my life. Kundera, an internationally famous writer, had been one of the first keys to my escape. I wanted to be the kind of person who reads Kundera.
That he felt dangerous is more obvious, I imagine. Oddly enough, given my religious upbringing, I don’t remember feeling all that shocked. I do remember feeling afraid of discovery. My parents were unaware of the content of Kundera’s novels, but this didn’t stop me from worrying they’d realize that I read novels awash with sex. When I left Prague to attend bible college, back in South Carolina—a place I essentially understood as a series of sensations: eating boiled peanuts in gas-station parking lots, the intensity of the air conditioning in the many churches where my parents spoke—I brought The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being alongside Havel’s Disturbing the Peace and Hrabal’s I Served the King of England, but I did not put all of these books out for display. Only Disturbing the Peace made it onto my dorm-room bookshelf. Like many parts of my life during this time, Kundera became a secret. I listened to forbidden music, quietly. I watched forbidden movies under a blanket. I let my sister buy me a single forbidden beer on my 21st birthday, anxious the whole time.
At some mortifying point, a hallmate found my copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and read aloud a passage at random. In it, Tereza photographs Sabina, nude, until Sabina turns the camera on Tereza. The women, united by a single word—strip!—each think of Tomáš. Kundera describes the moment as one of “frightening enchantment” broken only by Sabina’s laughter. Tereza, disarmed. Her own submission intoxicates her. As the passage progressed, my hallmate’s voice dropped from embarrassment, and she reprimanded me, half-joking, half-serious. It was deeply shameful, and even as it occurred, deeply funny. The incident joined a litany of other minor offenses, both real and imagined, that disqualified me from invitations to optional hall prayer and made me seem like “a girl who had kissed someone,” as another friend hilariously—and derisively—described me. I hadn’t even yet held hands with someone.
●
Even far away from my family and bible college, reading Kundera never stopped feeling a little dangerous, or at least uncomfortable. In the years after college, the wider culture I entered had its own set of discomforts with his work. Many of the tributes I read in the weeks after his death homed in on his supposed misogyny. The New Statesman declared that “the misunderstood author cared more about skirt-chasing than power politics.” The New York Times described Kundera’s “use of his female characters” as “pitiless,” citing Joan Smith’s proclamation that “hostility is the common factor in all Kundera’s writing about women.” These eulogies were the culmination of years of criticism that tied his apparent misogyny to questions of his significance as a writer; a piece published in the Atlantic after the publication of his poorly received final book, for example, suggested that the “perverse thrill” of reading Kundera in the Eighties was the permission it gave one to feel “politically enlightened while watching a beautiful woman in a bowler hat and little else open the door for her lover, a neurosurgeon who spends his spare time wandering around Prague telling random women to take off their clothes.”
It would be dishonest to say these representations of women and sex never left me uncomfortable. Once, when asked to name a writer whose work I admired but also felt occasionally troubled by, I recalled, almost instantly, the moment in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting when Jan describes rape as erotic, and the word no as particularly erotically beautiful—as a word with its own “red glow.” It would take me years to untangle my response. The discomfort I felt experiencing transgressive art wasn’t solely related to its content, I slowly realized, but also to a fear of external judgment for finding that art valuable or beautiful anyway.
At that point, I lacked the confidence to explain the strange emotion—relief, I think, is the closest word—that I felt when I first encountered Kundera’s more troubled characters. Even at the young age I started reading his novels, I had already experienced sexual violence; much of the pre-approved art that my community encouraged me to embrace (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien) felt toothless. Kundera, meanwhile, engaged directly—not via fantasy—with “the fullness of the human condition,” to use a bible college-approved phrase I might have employed to justify my questionable taste.
At the beginning of Simple Passion—a book I turned to as a break from 2666—Annie Ernaux suggests that writing ought to replicate the experience of watching pornography, “the feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.” What she wants isn’t obscenity, but the shock of recognition, of familiarity that leads to a suspension of judgment. I experience the shock of recognition in Kundera’s morally ambiguous, adrift characters. I suspend judgment. This is partially theological; I occasionally joke that, of the Five Points of Calvinism, I am at least a one-point Calvinist, and my one point is total depravity—we can’t outrun our fallenness, and Kundera writes “bad” characters because any honest exploration of human nature necessarily involves “bad” characters. But I have secular defenses of Kundera, too. The characters he writes often live undignified lives, largely powerless in the face of power. This logic remains consistent in his treatment of women, whose perhaps particularly undignified state in his work reflects their condition as actors juggling the cruelty of more than one type of power.
If my attachment to Kundera feels slightly questionable abroad, it’s also messy at “home.” After July 11th, his books weren’t among the ones I brought to the two cafes I frequented in Prague. Some part of me didn’t want the tinge of cliché—an American, reading Kundera in Prague—but mostly I did not read Kundera in Prague because Kundera’s relationship to his birth country was a complicated one. Documents released in 2008 suggesting that Kundera may have acted as a police informant—leading to the arrest and fourteen-year imprisonment of a fellow student, Miroslav Dvořáček—marred an already uncertain legacy. His flight to France in the Seventies when many artists and intellectuals chose to remain, including Havel, who served prison time for this choice, painted Kundera as cowardly to some. More than once I have heard the accusation that Kundera’s writings on the tragedy of Central Europe express only his desire to escape Eastern Europe, and in the end, he seemed to want to escape even Central Europe, embracing the indisputably western France. The café where I drank espressos did not have a sign in memory of the most internationally renowned Czech writer, nor did the nearby student establishment where I decamped in the afternoons to drink one beer, or four, while I read 2666. The fact that it is Havel—who engaged Kundera in an extended debate vis-à-vis the Czech condition—who hung over the bar, there, feels representative of the general mood.
●
Before I left for Europe, my publisher asked me to compile a list of influences ahead of the publication of my first book, and I added and removed and added Kundera several times. In the end, he stayed. I had approached the list as a curated record of my reading life, maybe to avoid the weight of the word influence. What does it mean to call Kundera—or anyone—an “influence”? Certainly it’s more than a mere attachment to my memories of reading him many years ago. To admit that I have an emotional connection to Kundera’s work feels acceptable, particularly when contextualized and narrativized. What makes me anxious is admitting that I love Kundera’s work, or that it influences my own. Despite having read nearly every book he wrote (a claim I can make about very few writers), I have often emphasized easier influences, influences that don’t need caveats, or defenses.
I hadn’t read Kundera in years. Maybe I’d avoided him. But in Prague, in the wake of his death, he was difficult to avoid. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, but he remains forever linked in my mind to the city that I was in the process of losing not long after his death, a simultaneity that I couldn’t shake during my month at home. I brought apricots and bread to Stromovka and recalled how I once got day-drunk with friends there and read Farewell Waltz. Walking up Petřín, the same hill that Tereza climbs in a dreamscape in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and looking down on Prague, I remembered an argument I had there that nearly ended the most significant relationship of my life. I photographed the empty space that during my childhood contained a statue of Soviet General Ivan Konev, and I thought about the passage in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting where Max Brod and Kafka describe a city “haunted by the ghosts of statues torn down.” At the beginning of the book, Kundera describes two versions of a famous photograph of Vladimír Clementis and Klement Gottwald, on a balcony in 1948. In the original, the men stand next to each other as Gottwald addresses an assembled crowd. Gottwald wears Clementis’s fur hat, handed to him by Clementis because it was snowing, heavily. Years later, Clementis is purged, and executed. The censors scrub Clementis from the photograph, from history, but they forget his fur hat. It remains on Gottwald’s head, the only remnant of Clementis. I felt momentarily guilty for imagining my small losses against the stakes of such significant forgetting, but then I thought, it’s perfect. In Kundera, the distance between major and minor tragedy, historical and personal, often appears barely perceptible, a razor-thin white line.
While out trying to read 2666 and write, I took notes in a small blue book like the kind that schoolchildren might use. I was working on a long poem, but in the margins, notes about Kundera persistently emerged, about his attention to the senses, and the nakedness of his characters, and his writing. I wrote about a friend of mine who thinks that Sofia Coppola makes movies that the audience can smell (to me, like expired makeup, candy and wet grass). I wrote that the reader can smell Kundera’s novels (to me they smell deeply human, and interior, like sweat, and marble). Even at its most overwrought, his work still feels beautifully, delicately constructed as he veers wildly between Beethoven, Nietzsche, history and the mundane and funny eros of everyday life: someone is always unbuttoning a blouse or drinking a glass of wine while somewhere, there are tanks. Paul Éluard dances away from the executed body of Záviš Kalandra. A literally feverish young poet masturbates during a coup d’état (the same coup d’état that cements Klement Gottwald’s power). On his way to visit a woman, a man takes his car to a mechanic, and Kundera intersperses their exchange with a meditation on genocide.
Formally, Kundera appears everywhere in my writing once I start to look for him. I see him in my love of pastiche and reference, in my juxtaposition of history and minor erotic details. I see his presence in the long poem I was writing in Prague, a love poem, in a haunted city that is, of course, the haunted city, a city I both know and don’t know. I see him in the odd cast assembled almost as guides through the text. Éluard, Kalandra, Kafka and Brod float through Kundera just as Bolaño, Éric Rohmer, Jiří Kolář and Walerian Borowczyk appear and disappear through my poem as the lovers consider their small lives, their obsessions both significant and insignificant.
That a writer I read during my formative years has left a mark on my aesthetics doesn’t surprise me, but his influence lurks in places I wouldn’t have expected, too, but can’t ignore: my bad-Calvinist fascination with the uncertainty of human agency and my investment in the question, always, over the answer in art. My theologically inflected embrace of human limitation looks a lot like Kundera’s geopolitically inflected embrace of human limitation. There is an overwhelming, oppressive feeling of inevitability in his work; minor action seems to matter very little, if at all, especially against the crushing force of history, but this is written as a tragedy, not a victory, leaving much room for nuance in terms of individual response. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomáš (at least for most of the novel) and Sabina embrace and represent the simultaneously terrifying and freeing truth of human smallness, even futility, but Tereza’s almost irrational love and loyalty for her country and Tomáš offers a profound counterweight. Tomáš and Sabina seem correct in Kundera’s final accounting, but also somehow wrong, and Tereza, incorrect, in ways, but right.
If he writes heroes, they are difficult to identify: Tomáš and Sabina may be the rational actors, but they’ve surrendered to the tragedy of the human condition, while Tereza resists that tragedy, despite the harm this resistance arguably causes her. This tension creates a novel that never answers its own question, which is not about the uncertain state of agency and action, but what to do with that uncertainty, how to respond, how to live. My own writing engages in a similar refusal. I am never sure who is right, least of all myself, and who should get the last word, if anyone, or if there should be a last word at all. In an interview included at the end of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—probably my favorite of his novels besides Immortality—Kundera describes the novelist as teaching the reader to “comprehend the world as a question.” The text asks a question it can’t answer because if the text could answer its own question, it wouldn’t be worth writing, much less reading.
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We don’t choose our influences. Increasingly, I think that I would have had to be an entirely different person—who lived an entirely different life—to truly avoid Kundera. I am Czech American, and I spent my childhood in Prague, yes, but it goes beyond that. I read many Czech writers as a teenager, and I admire some of them—Hrabal, Holub—more. Yet I recognize Kundera in my writing with far greater intensity—in my commitment to comprehending the world as a question, and my thematic fascination with sex, and history, and agency (and ideally, the collisions of all of these at once, at any given moment).
You also don’t choose the life that gives you your formative influences, a very Kundera-approved thought equally on my mind as I prepare to lose Prague. It is not lost on me that I narrowly missed a more straightforward life. My parents reminisce often about the reasons they came to Prague: my mother’s roots in the region, their desire to serve God, happy summers as (then-illegal) missionaries in Hungary and (then) Czechoslovakia, but always they acknowledge that they nearly decided against moving abroad, that if Communism hadn’t ended, they wouldn’t have come. I wonder sometimes about this life that I might have lived, and the influences that life would have given me, and the writing they might have inspired. But I have this life. I have Kundera.
My parents give me a date for their final month in the city: July 2024. Before leaving Prague, I sorted through the Kundera novels I didn’t bring to college in South Carolina, all those years ago, still in two boxes in my parent’s house and decided to keep them all. I resolved to read Kundera again. I made plans to start from the beginning, to read The Joke.
Image credit: Alisha Dietzman
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.