Why Kundera never went home

My visits to Milan Kundera and his wife, Věra, became regular in 2019, when I was in the third year of my mission as Czech ambassador to France. What started as polite and admiring calls from a diplomat to his country’s greatest author evolved into friendship. But this late November evening was special, and I was as nervous as I had been at my first call to the Kunderas two years before. We sat in their Parisian apartment chatting, as usual, about this and that. When I thought the right moment had come, I stood up and said: “Milan, I know you don’t like ceremonies, but let me say a few words.”

After a brief speech, I handed over a document stating that Milan Kundera had acquired Czech citizenship. With a mild, slightly bashful smile, Kundera nodded, taking the document and signing a copy for the Czech authorities. Symbolically, Kundera returned home that evening, 40 years after having been stripped of his citizenship, and 30 years after the Velvet Revolution put his fellow dissident intellectuals in power, notably his former friend Václav Havel, who served as president from 1989 until 2003.

Why had it taken so long? Hadn’t Kundera wished to return home? Or had the Czechs preferred him in exile? After 1989, the Kunderas considered splitting their time between Paris, Prague, and Brno, where Milan was born. But this never happened. A few incognito trips to Czechia, occasional visits by Czech friends to Paris or his summer residence in Touquet, frequent phone calls—but that was all. No return. Why?

“Friends of Havel were especially active in these attacks against Kundera.”

Kundera’s novels may offer some hints. His critics claimed to detect anti-Czech sentiments in them. He himself considered one of his early plays anti-Czech. More notable, he not only ridiculed Communist officials in his novels, but took critical distance from dissidents. For example, when Tomáš, the physician protagonist of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, declines to sign a petition in support of political prisoners, the reader can’t but side with him. Moreover, Kundera was said to be reluctant to authorize Czech translations of the books he had written in French. But he never spoke publicly about his relationship with his home country. In fact, he never spoke in public at all.

It was Věra who, a few weeks before the restitution of his citizenship, broke this long silence with a frank interview. She revealed her longing for a lost home, but also why they couldn’t return. Many Czech readers were stunned to learn that for decades, Kundera had faced hostility from dissidents in Prague and from other anti-Communist exiles. Friends of Havel were especially active in these attacks against Kundera; Havel’s own involvement was ambiguous.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/UjnqmaO