Milan Kundera—author, dissident, philosopher, lover

Rendered jobless when the Party expelled him in the 1970s, Milan Kundera briefly made a living by playing the piano in jazz bars, working as a day labourer and writing an astrology column. (Photo by Jacub Gomez via Pexels)

“What then shall we choose?” Milan Kundera posed an eternal question in his groundbreaking novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “Weight or lightness?” This was the central inquiry that consumed the Czech-origin writer through most of his work right up until his death. Kundera passed away this week (on July 11, 2023) in Paris after suffering from a long illness. His own life and work are testimony that he had found the answer, although what comfort that answer brought goes to bed with him.

Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, displaying a prodigious inclination for the intellectual arts from a young age. Coming of age during World War II, the German occupation and the subsequent rise of Communism in his homeland left indelible marks on his worldview. He’d studied literature, music and aesthetics at Prague, a city whose vibrant cultural atmosphere also shaped him. Learning the piano early in life, he could have had a thriving career as a musician but he chose literature instead.

From an early age, Milan Kundera read European literary luminaries such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Breton, Cocteau, Bataille, Ionesco, and admired French surrealism, as he told a literary journal in 1987. Soon, he developed a taste for Kafkaesque existentialism and satire—embedding both flavours into his work from an early age, as he began to explore themes of individual freedom and the absurdity of totalitarian regimes.

Novels like The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Immortality and, of course, The Unbearable Lightness of Being are considered canon. Beyond their historical value, they demonstrated the distinct voice of an author who blended the metaphysical with the scataological; one who was bent on exploring—through war, the hunger for power, the human psyche, difficult relationships—the absurdity and complexity of human existence in the modern world.

The personal and professional was always political with Kundera, who had joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia while still in his teens in 1948. His own politics leaned towards reformism, and even though he was expelled from the party several times over the course of several years due to “anti-party activities” which were really nothing more than a comment or two, he remained loyal to its core tenets.

Kundera’s problem was with totalitarianism, even though he always disclaimed being a political writer. This is evident in this passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, after which politics appeared less and less in his works: “Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.”

Milan Kundera’s most famous novels are also evidently a personal reckoning with the consequences of his own political thoughts and actions, a result of his cheeky, fearless sense of humour. In The Joke (1967), the lead character Ludvik is sentenced to work as a coal miner in a military penal unit after a casual remark that “insults” the Party. In The Unbearable Lightness, Tomas, an accomplished surgeon, is condemned to washing windows when he refuses to apologize for or take back his remarks about the Party.

Kundera's expulsion from the party in 1970—the second or third such incident—left him without employment. He was a non-person before he became persona non grata. For some years, he survived by playing the piano in jazz bars and working as a day labourer. As the New York Times notes, his “friends sometimes arranged for him to write things under their names or pseudonyms. Which was how he became an astrology columnist.”

In 1975, Kundera moved to Paris after being loosely involved in the 1968 Prague Spring, crushed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and realizing that his undercover reading of the stars was endangering his friends. It was in Paris that Kundera wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an instant commercial success.

It was the novel that also more fully revealed Kundera’s central themes and ideas on the shape of a novel: A fluid thing of metaphysical meditation and storytelling, where the God-like narrator expounded on big ideas and considered their application (or lack thereof) through the lives of a handful of humans going about their entirely ordinary yet extraordinary lives.

In Kundera’s novels, the setting was 20th-century Europe, a time of hope and tumult. The purpose may have been to look at how mankind went about finding meaning and connection in a post-War world. But on his characters, memorable as they were, Milan Kundera was exacting and borderline cruel.

In The Unbearable Lightness, Tomas’ girlfriend and later wife Tereza suffers all her life the indignities of her paramour’s continued infidelity. Sabina, the third main character, shows herself when she tells a boyfriend what she thought of betrayal: A step into the glorious confusion. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Tamina and Hugo are strangers who seem to be attracted to each other, until their ulterior motives come to light.

Many others are shown suspended in states of vulnerability, caught in acts of indignity and paused in moments of unconscionable thoughts. Kundera’s approach to his characters has often been spoken of in the same light as the British figurative painter Francis Bacon. What unites them is “the brutal gesture”, or the "hand movement that roughs up another person's face in hopes of finding, in it and behind it, something that is hidden there," as Bacon described it.

But at the core of Kundera’s circuses was that one question: lightness or weight? In that iconic introductory section of The Unbearable Lightness, he contraposes Nietzsche and Parmenides on the matter. Somewhere in the middle of expounding on “the eternal return”, the heaviest of human burdens, and the bipolarity of weight and lightness, Kundera observes: “For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

Reading the late author’s works in his absence, we must be cautious about confusing this yearning for lightness with levity. Indeed, as the world warps around us, as new regimes take root and old heroes—the intelligentsia, the artists, the freethinkers—are forgotten, banished, exiled, erased, it may be time to revisit books like The Unbearable Lightness: Possibly introduced into our lives in our own idealistic (hormonal) youth to savour its many stark sex scenes, and now to let Kundera’s big key to life reveal itself to us.

As Milan Kundera wrote in The Festival of Insignificance (2014), his last novel dispatched from Paris, at a time when he’d become increasingly irritated and grouchy about the ways of modern life, but never forgetting that hard-won wisdom: “We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush.”

“There’s been only one possible resistance,” Milan Kundera wrote, prophetically: “to not take it seriously.”