What, other than the value of dissident art, does a writer leave behind for his progeny? Milan Kundera, the Czech exiled author who died on July 11, handed on a literary moot: art is above ideology. An artist’s tryst with ideology triggers a showdown between art and politics. The communist Czechoslovakia revoked Kundera’s citizenship, forcing him to live in exile in Paris. The citizenship was restored in 2019. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 shoved communists from power and Kundera’s nation was reborn as a Czech Republic. However, he decided to stay in France for ‘the love of adventure.’ In between, he wrote novels that questioned the thorny realities of exile, the monstrous masquerade of Stalinism and states controlled by offshore indoctrinators. But his disdain for autocracy was rinsed with trenchant wit, letting his readers develop faith in the democracy of words.

Kundera came to the literary scene in the ’50s when East Europe was reeling under the petrifying aftermath of World War II. The minds behind the war in the West envisioned a quintessentially capitalist world. The fall of the Nazi regime paved the way for political binaries. East Europe became a laboratory for communism. Kundera witnessed the horror of the 1968 Russian invasion of his country, calling off his romance with Stalin’s utopian ideals. Once a member of the Communist Party, he was banned and fled for his life, crossing the border into France in 1975. The feeling of an internally displaced European brought an unprecedented lingual and aesthetic thrust to his fictional diegesis. It would not be wrong to say that post-exile Kundera cast off the weight of ideology. Surprisingly, he stopped writing in Czech and wrote in French instead. That mono-lingualism is a barrier is a theme on which the exponents of theatre of the absurd had already capitalised.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), his magnum opus, begins with Russian troops entering Prague in the Spring of 1968. The spectacle is not much different from the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. To hammer home the significance of the conflicts plaguing the modern civilisation, he adds a definite dose of philosophy. He associates heaviness with Nietzsche and lightness with the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides. Why should one become a Superman carrying the weight of redeeming the world? Hitler, Mussolini and their East European protégés - Nicolae Ceaușescu and Josip Tito - vowed to take the weight off the masses’ shoulders. In the Kunderian imaginary, heaviness denotes the weight of faith, ideology and conventional love. The being is always in need of putting down an unbearable onus. Inevitably, Kundera makes his readers think about the futility of human ambition. For him, exile gravitated to a creative disburdening; leaving behind the cumbersome debris of history, topical emotions and unguided obsessions. Tomáš, the protagonist, a surgeon and a critic of communism, ends up washing windows and having affairs with women. His philandering is conceived as an ardent negation of the order imposed by Communist Czechoslovakia. The republican Paris is a place for amour fou. Therefore, in Kundera, sexuality is a sustained trope. His depiction of women is appallingly nihilistic: Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Tomás’ mistress Sabina personifies Kundera’s rejection of kitch – the curse of sentimentality. Most critics believe it to be an aesthetic node of his oeuvre. Sabina betrays the protagonist and is not smitten with guilt; she feels light. He rejects art’s decadent tendency of beautifying lies. Some acolytes of post-modernism set aside this propensity as simulacra.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) is also an acerbic attack on totalitarianism. Importantly, he suggests that oppressive regimes and modernity have joined hands in altering our perspective of history. The novel patently carries a double-strand of humour – Kundera’s favourite ploy; as well as ‘psychologisation’ of memory, which Beckett, Joyce and Proust have also dealt with finesse. A polysemic novel, both thematically and stylistically, it is interspersed with magic realism capturing the lives of seven different people in seven disparate narrative frames. It shows modernism’s aggressive celebration of fragmentation glossing over its darker side. Mirek, a once-celebrated researcher, now jobless and hounded by undercover surrogates, observes that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Zdena, Mirek’s once love interest, refuses to return their love letters as the former wants to destroy those before they reach the hands of the state. On the other hand, Tamina, the waitress, wants to preserve her letters shared with her late husband. Once again, Kundera explores the origins of the opposites: weight and lightness; body and soul; and private and public. Even the laughter is split across angelic and demonic categories. Tamina, caught in the modernist quagmire, observes that sexuality free of love can result both in lightness and burden.

Art is above ideology. An artist’s tryst with ideology triggers a showdown between art and politics. 

The feeling of self as an estranged counterpart does not leave Kundera’s imagination. The Russian invasion solidified his belief that human societies are a product of collisions and collations. Therefore, leaving his homeland and his native language gives way to a layered literary battle of wills vis-à-vis the Russian intrusion. However, this should not be straitjacketed as a limitation of the author’s vision. Even before he left his country, the ‘elsewhere’ had surfaced in his writing (The Czech-language Life is Elsewhere (1971)). In that novel, a poet in an oppressive society is made to betray his ideals. The poet-protagonist Jaromil believes that “lyric poets generally come from homes run by women.” Her mother, a domineering and heavy-handed woman, injects prodigious ideals into her son’s mind making him believe a man with grandiose imagination. The motherly intrigue exposes Jaromil’s fair to middling talent capitulating to tuberculosis, but he cannot achieve the stature of a Rimbaud or Keats. To put things in perspective, Kundera lashes out at Romanticism churned as a monolithic poetic model. Jaromil, like Byron, rhapsodises the joys of liberty but cannot practice those. Like Shelley and Byron, he cannot put his so-called ideals into poetic metaphor either. Instead, he loses stature, becoming a butt of jokes in a world governed by political howling.

The Joke (1967) is perhaps the most talked about novel from Kundera’s early phase. It sparked a transcultural misunderstanding identified in its translations. On a lighter note, the writer’s nemesis is bilingualism. His novels are translated into 24 languages, but the author expects uncompromising loyalty from the translator. The vicarious feeling of weight as a form of responsibility of taking translation as original behoves Kundera. Therefore, in The Joke, he draws upon the nuanced idea of misunderstanding as a mode of reading and writing. He does not depreciate the beauty of translation but laments at the murder of an original aesthetic. Translations, for him, are not good or bad but right and wrong.

At the age of 46, Kundera managed to switch from writing in his mother tongue to a new language. In an interview in 1987, when asked whether he would like to return to his native country, he replied, “I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to return to Czechoslovakia. It will never be possible.” In a similar vein, “Translation”, he said, “is my nightmare. I’ve lived horrors because of it.” Between 1968 and 1969, the novel was translated into all major Western languages, but the author was haunted by translators’ flimsy permutations and aesthetic tampering.”The shock of The Joke’s translations left a permanent scar on me,” he said.

In the late ’80s and mid ’90s eighties came Slowness, Immortality, Ignorance and Identity, based on a characteristically Kundarian model – a merging of politics, art, and philosophy. In Immortality, the author’s persona explains: “No novelist is dearer to me than Robert Musil. He died one morning while lifting weights.” Robert Musil is an Austrian writer and one of Kundera’s favourites – deep down. He fears that his culture is being erased by Stalinism, an equivalent to the Nazis’ bludgeoning of egalitarian art. He holds Kafka – the soul of Prague – in high esteem and frequently refers to him in his literary criticism.

Immortality, like the rest of his fiction, establishes his lack of interest in a conventional plot. Instead, there are verbal gestures, such as “Music: a pump for inflating the soul. Hypertrophic souls turned into huge balloons rise to the ceiling of the concert hall and jostle each other in unbelievable congestion.” Funny, risqué and wry, it causes tickles in the underbelly. Correspondingly, Kundera gave his version of existentialism in times of the Cold War when Sartre was the mover and shaker. The laughter and jokes thus carry an existential punch in his fictional universe.

In The Art of Novel (1986), he asserts that the “novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity” but “the wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.” Kundera, despite being intrinsically European, is also a global luminary. In search of an alternative form, he discovers the “truth of uncertainty.” A novel, he says, “shouldn’t be like a bicycle race, but a feast of many courses.”

The Festival of Insignificance (2015), another feast with multiple characters, came after a 15-year hiatus. It revisits some of his old concerns, now refurbished. He makes four friends of different ages and different professions meet and one of them discusses the pain of ageing. Even in his last novel, the characters rant about Stalin: for Kundera, 1968 could never be over. He had witnessed the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and the incumbency of Vaclav Havel, the last president – a poet and a playwright. He lived a private and apolitical life in Paris and gave sparse interviews.

The writer is an English-language poet based in Lahore. His first collection of poems, Lahore, I Am Coming, was published in 2017 by Punjab University Press