In his novels, the exiled author dissected and derided the follies and cruelties of the Soviet satellite regime that ruled his homeland until 1989
most famous novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, a dissident Czech artist feted in Germany finds herself lauded as a “saint or martyr”. Sabina protests, however, that her “enemy is kitsch, not Communism!” Mr Kundera, who died on July 11th aged 94, moved from a fervent youthful socialism to global renown as an exiled author who dissected and derided the follies and cruelties of the Soviet satellite regime that ruled his homeland until 1989.
Yet his scorn for “totalitarian” idealists had its roots in his experience as one of them. Born in Brno in 1929 as a musician’s son, he studied literature in Prague; as communists took power in 1948, he produced poetry to glorify their revolution. “I too once danced in a ring,” he writes in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”. He too felt “the magic qualities of the circle”.
Playful, elusive, experimental, Mr Kundera eschewed not just the “Grand March” but the grand statement. “My lifetime ambition,” he told the, “has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.” Music, his first love, gave him a model. His novels consist of sets of variations composed in the vein he admired in the greatest central European writers: “the privileged sphere of analysis, lucidity, irony”.
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