Tribute: Milan Kundera was the greatest 20th century writer who did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature

Milan Kundera's first novel, The Joke, was blacklisted by Moscow. It was a savagely funny tale of how, under the communist regime, a harmless joke can totally upend a person’s life. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons 1.0)

Milan Kundera has died at the ripe old age of 94. So let me put it very simply. He was the greatest writer of the 20th century who did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Of course, many great writers have been overlooked by the mysterious Nobel committee, from Anton Chekhov and Joseph Conrad to Leo Tolstoy and Graham Greene. But the denial of Kundera has mystified very large numbers of readers over the last three decades. Of course, one has no way of knowing whether it mattered to Kundera at all, but does it matter whether it mattered to Kundera?

Kundera died in Paris, where he had spent the last five decades of his life, after driving out of his native Prague early one morning in 1968, as the Soviet tanks were rolling in to brutally quell the Czech demand for freedom from communist Moscow. His first novel, The Joke, had already been published and blacklisted by Moscow. It was a savagely funny tale of how, under the communist regime, a harmless joke can totally upend a person’s life.

Faber & Faber cover

His most famous novel is The Unbearable Lightness of Being, about three people—one man and two women—and a dog. Tomas, a surgeon, sees no dissonance between his steady relationship with his wife Tereza and his constant adultery. Tereza is a “heavy” person who is devoted to and emotionally dependent on Tomas, and convinces herself that Tomas’ promiscuity is because she herself is a “weaker person”.  Sabina is the embodiment of “lightness”—she denies all societal ties and constraints and wants to live as a fully free spirit with no luggage. She revels in sexual betrayal. Tomas, neither heavy nor light, is one of her lovers and gets progressively obsessed with her.

Many doctoral theses have been written on what Kundera meant to say in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The simplest explanation is that it is about the various states of being which we all inhabit at different times—and all of them have consequences that are not necessarily to our liking. The deepest meaning may lie in the book’s title, which suggests that life itself is as inconsequential as a feather in the wind.

Kundera makes all analysis more difficult by periodically stepping back and telling the reader that she is reading only a concocted story that does not claim to be any sort of truth. Kundera was a master of meta-fiction. In many of his novels, he stops the action to speak directly as a writer to his reader, casually junking—for some time—the intermediary device of the story and its characters.

In the mind-bending novel Immortality, right at the beginning, he lays bare his inspiration and intentions. He saw a woman whom he did not know wave at someone he never saw while she was leaving a swimming pool, and that got him musing. Are all life and all people actually a collection of gestures—some thoughtful and others carefree—that live on till eternity? The casual wave compels Kundera, who is a character in the book, to invent a woman called Agnes, because, as he says, he had never known any woman with that name, and write a novel about her.

I know that this may not make any sense to many people, but Kundera goes on to tell a story about this imagined woman—he never meets her, but meets her husband and sister, and periodically discusses how his plot is shaping up with his friend Professor Avenarius, who knows Agnes and her family. At one point in this seven-part novel, the Kundera character says: “A novel shouldn't be like a bicycle race but a feast of many courses. I am really looking to Part 6. A completely new character will enter the novel. And at the end of that part he will disappear without a trace. He causes nothing and leaves no effects. That is precisely what I like about him. Part 6 will be a novel within a novel, as well as the saddest erotic story I have ever written.” He then proceeds to do what he has promised.

The “story” in the book called Immortality—does not seem to have any normative conclusion, yet the last page leaves the reader with a lump in her throat, even though Kundera has been assuring her all along that it’s all make-believe and perhaps just an act of his self-gratification.

This is art at the highest and most extraordinary level. It audaciously questions every assumption that quietly underlies every form of storytelling and breaks every law of whatever land writers’ minds reside in.

All of Kundera’s work is a sophisticated but inconclusive probe into what life is about. And death. None of the books consciously carry any clear message or blinding insight, though a reader may find some later while thinking about them. Today’s wokes may see his books as misogynistic, whereas the key issue is that Kundera is fully non-judgemental. He observes and he cooks up a story. He is both kind and clinical, if one can ever imagine these qualities co-existing happily with each other.

Above all, he spoke for the individual and his free will. The subtext of every novel of his is about freedom from authoritarianism, arcane mores and preachy moral codas. The choices made by his characters may turn out very bad for them, but at least they made them on their own.

Milan Kundera was that rare writer whose passing feels like a personal loss. The only friend I messaged with the news replied: “Oh no!” Yes, that’s how Kundera affected people all over the world. Because he not only helped you see the world more clearly but also told you how the stories that supposedly help you see the world more clearly are constructed. He offered you a mirror while he himself stood winking in the background. May he keep winking forever.