Actually, there is no need to concoct parabolas. Tomáš Ježek, one of Klaus’ former colleagues from the Academy of Sciences and later minister of privatisation, once presented in Czech media an alleged real-life story that’s even more apt:
During the World Championships in football in Mexico in 1986, Klaus, Ježek and a couple of other academicians were watching the match where Diego Maradona scored with his “magic hand”. Everybody agreed that Maradona was a real creep — except Klaus. To him, Maradona had just done everything in his power to win the match, and the only fault was that he got caught. If that story is true, it may seem that the Czech president regards football much in the same way as he regards politics.
Kundera, Milan
If there exists an ultimate and living proof that the biblical words “a prophet has no honour in his own country” correspond to reality, it has to be Milan Kundera. While people all over the globe praise Kundera as a brilliant novelist who more than once has been close to the Nobel prize, in his mother country he seems to arouse more disapproval and downright anger than respect and admiration.
Of course, the fact that he is an emigrant, even an extremely successful one (see: Egalitarianism), doesn’t exactly guarantee him raging popularity among his ex-countrymen. Some would even say that Kundera, in the eyes of the overtly Prague-fixated Czech intellectuals, has a drawback, since he was born in Moravia. But this goes deeper.
Both the intensity with which many Czechs revel in hating the star novelist and the contempt with which Kundera treats his Czech readers bear all the signs of a relationship that has turned irreparably sour. It’s something like an ex-husband and his former wife soon after an ugly divorce.
It’s hard to say when it started. The writer Ladislav Verecký, for instance, believes the first tensions appeared after the Soviet invasion in 1968. In a heated debate in one literary magazine, Kundera, at that time 39 years old and famous for several collections of poetry, theatre plays and not least his latest novel, The Joke, clashed with another prominent intellectual, Václav Havel, in their evaluation of the Prague Spring's legacy.
In short: while Havel claimed that the attempts to reform the communist regime were meaningless because communism was irreformable (history later proved him right), Kundera, who personally engaged himself in the reform movement, felt that such attempts made sense.
According to Verecký, the discord grew stronger after Kundera left Czechoslovakia in 1975 and settled in France. Instead of using his international fame and position as an exiled writer to help promote the Charter 77 dissidents in their non-violent fight against the Husák regime, Kundera preferred to concentrate on his career as a writer. Later literary successes proved this choice, at least from a pragmatic point of view, to be a wise decision.
However, this petty quarrelling was nothing compared to the hullabaloo that broke out when Kundera published the novel that was to become his biggest success ever — The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In his biting travesty of the gloomy daily life in Czechoslovakia under normalization, Kundera managed to enrage both the communists as well as the dissidents. The red establishment reacted as expected, and attacked the novel for being artistic trash that didn’t hesitate to distort “socialist reality” just to achieve commercial success.
Amazingly enough, the dissidents this time fully agreed with their communist oppressors. In the novel, Kundera’s hero Tomáš, a brilliant surgeon, was degraded to a window cleaner because of his support for the Prague Spring reformists. But Tomáš didn’t despair and used the advantages of his new profession (i.e., transparent windows) to conquer a veritable host of willing women. This, the dissidents objected, was definitely not the fate of Czechoslovakia’s persecuted! Actually, many of them were forced to work as window cleaners, so maybe the true reason for their rage was an uneasy feeling of being unsuccessful conquerors?
Anyway, the literary values of The Unbearable Lightness of Being may be arguable, but one thing remains undisputed: internationally, Kundera’s novel — and the screen version which followed some years later — shed more bad light on the Czechoslovak communist regime than any other artistic work in the 1980s.
Unfortunately, the Velvet Revolution didn’t smoothen the conflict. As a gesture of goodwill, Václav Havel, now as president, nominated Kundera for a state order for his literary merits. But instead of accepting his former opponent’s hand, the famous novelist sent his wife to the ceremony in the Prague Castle, while he himself, allegedly, strolled incognito around in the streets, hidden behind dark glasses and a false moustache.
The Ypsilon Theatre in Prague fared even worse when it decided to honour Kundera by staging one of his earliest plays. Only days before the premiere, the theatre’s managing director received a telegram from Paris: the author does not give his consent to the re-staging! In their enthusiasm, the Czech actors had failed to notice that Kundera some years earlier had conducted a strict revision of his earliest works and found some of them to be worthless.
Admittedly, an artist of Kundera’s calibre can allow himself eccentric behaviour, and the misunderstandings could certainly have been sorted out in a lengthy interview. The problem, however, is that Kundera, since the middle of the 1980s, has stubbornly refused to say a word to the press, let alone grant some journalist — Czech or foreign — an interview.
Do these entanglements sound very petty? After all, why should there be anything else between the author and the readers than his or her books? Well, the core of the problem lies elsewhere. In 1986, Kundera declared that he was a French writer, which obviously doesn’t point to what passport he is carrying, but to the language in which he is writing.
Since the author can’t stand the thought of letting somebody translate his French novels into his mother tongue, Czech readers who don’t speak foreign languages can forget about Kundera’s latest novels. And due to the fact that he has started revising all his earlier works, they haven’t got access to some of his most famous, Czech-written works — such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being — either.
In other words: Milan Kundera has, for different reasons, burnt every thinkable bridge to his former home country. For this, his former compatriots have rewarded him with grumpy and ostentatious oblivion.
Lustration
“What’s happened to Franta, why did he leave our office?” a civil servant asks his colleague. “Oh, nothing much, there was only a lustre that fell on his head...”
To a foreigner, this joke might appear a bit cryptic, but to the Czechs, it’s clear enough: František was one of those who were registered in the archives of the communists’ feared secret police, the StB, as an agent, informer or collaborationist. And the chandelier that smashed his head was the Lustration Law, which rules that anybody who holds a senior position in the civil service, the army, the judicial system, the police, public broadcasting, the National Bank and companies controlled by the state, must prove the he or she is “Stb negative”.