Destiny as Alibi: Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and the 'Czech Question' after 1968

Destiny as Alibi: Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and the 'Czech Question' after 1968Author(s): TIM WESTSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (July 2009), pp. 401-428Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40650406 .

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THE SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN

REVIEW Volume 87, Number 3 -July 2009

Destiny as Alibi: Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel and the 'Czech

Question5 after 1968 TIM WEST

In January 1968, Alexander Dubcek assumed the post of First Secret- ary 01 the Communist rarty 01 Czechoslovakia (KdC) and a hve- year-old era of gradual political and economic liberalization took a dramatic turn. Czechoslovakia had responded to the stimulus of Khrushchev's Twentieth Congress in 1956 with less enthusiasm than any of the other Soviet satellites, but in the first months of 1968 it suddenly witnessed the abolishment of censorship, laid the legislative groundwork for radical political and economic restructuring and, perhaps most significantly, underwent a renewal of civil society in a period of stunning civic optimism known as the Prague Spring. The Warsaw Pact 'intervention5 the following August meant not only an end to these reforms but a complete reassertion of Party control and the presence on Czech and Slovak soil of an occupying army that would remain for two decades.

With certain exceptions, the reimposition of Stalinist-era restrictions on civil liberties and emigration was not immediate and, while there was a distinct chilling of the political climate, for several months Czechs and Slovaks enjoyed a period of open borders and relative political freedom in which public debate remained possible. It was in this atmosphere that the literary journal Listy published in December 1968 an essay entitled 'Õesky údeF ('Czech Destiny') by Milan Kundera,

Tim West is a graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. I wish to thank Caryl Emerson, Craig Cravens, Serguei Oushakine and Annalise Rivas

for their advice as I prepared this article, as well as the very helpful comments of the anonymous reviewers of The Slavonic and East European Review.



402 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION whose successful first novel £ert (The Joke) had been published only a year earlier.1 Noting the first indications of a massive wave of emigration during the months following the invasion, Kundera warned against giving in to despair and advised caution to those who were demanding political guarantees from a government that had yet to undertake the severe crackdown many considered inevitable.

In February 1969, the young absurdist playwright Vaclav Havel responded in the monthly Tvar with his own polemic, which tacked a provocative question mark onto the title of Kundera's essay: cÕesky údel?' ('Czech Destiny?').2 In it Havel accused Kundera of taking existing freedoms for granted and advocated pre-emptively confronting the authorities in order to forestall any further eroding of civil liberties. The following month, the journal Host do domu published Kundera's caustic and highly personal 'Radikalismus a exhibicionismus' ('Radicalism and Exhibitionism'), which in turn accused Havel of grandstanding and of endangering the cause of Czechoslovak freedom as a means of resolving his personal complexes.3

This third essay is one of the last texts that Kundera was permitted to publish in his native country; by 1970 he had been fired from his job and his work had been banned, together with that of Havel and hundreds of other contemporary Czechoslovak writers. In 1974 he emigrated to France, where he took a position at the University of Rennes and resumed writing. Havel, whose public activity led the authorities to offer him a passport in the hope that he too would leave, refused to emigrate, suffering persecution and long periods of imprison- ment in the 1980s before the dramatic reversal of fortune that found him in the president's office following the 1989 revolution that ended the Communist hold on power. The critic and émigré dissident Milan Jungmann, who was on the editorial staff of Listy when it published 'Czech Destiny', claims that Kundera was deeply affected by the polemic which his essay animated and that it is partly for this reason that he later shrank from political writing and has always fervently, if unconvincingly, denied the political nature of his own fiction.4

1 Milan Kundera, 'Õesky udël', Listy, 1, 1968, 7-8, pp. 1, 5. The expression 'õesky údel' was first employed by the historian Otakar Odlozilik as the title of a pamphlet previously published as 'Odvëky údel. Úvaha z fíjna 1938' ('Ancient Destiny: Reflections on October 1938') in Prague, 1938. Milos Havelka, Trvní diskuse o tzv. normalizad: polemika Milana Kundery a Václava Havia 1 968-1 969', in Antonín Kostlán, Veda v Ceskosfovensku v obdobi normalizace (1970-1975), Sbornik z konference, Praha, 21.-22. listopadu 2001, Prague, 2003, PP- 35-53 (P- 47)> Vyzkumné centrum pro dejiny védy <www.vcdv.cas.cz/publikace/praceiv.pdft> [accessed 4 December 2003] . 2 Vaclav Havel, 'Cesky údel?', in id., 0 lidshou identità: Úvahy, fejetony, protest?, polemiky, prohlásení a rozhovory z let 1969-1979, Prague, 1990, pp. 193-200.

Milan Kundera, 'Radikalismus a exhibicionismus', Host do domu, 15, 1969, 15, pp. 24.-2Q. 4 Milan Jungmann, Literárky - muj osud, Brno, 1999, p. 319.



TIM WEST 403 Kundera's refusal to characterize his work as 'political' is emblem-

atic of a writer whose fiction and polemics are suffused with paradox, and 'Czech Destiny' is no exception. The alert reader is challenged to reconcile Kundera's sanguine tone with the great personal disappoint- ment he must have felt and his assessment of these events only a few years later. The future exile's criticism of émigrés as 'weak people [. . .] capable of living only without risk' is only one of several aspects that may surprise the reader unfamiliar with the texts.5 Underlying the restraint of the first essay's political rhetoric is, paradoxically, an auda- cious belief in 'the great historical calling of small nations in a modern world at the mercy of great powers', their task entailing 'resistance against the frightful influences of global uniformity'.6 This, too, may surprise readers who know that for many years Kundera has written his novels in French. His characterization of Havel as one whose 'basic self-conception' is '[t]he position of one who stands face to face with an abnormal world and poses (with feigned naivete) his normal questions in order to de-mask it'7 perversely prefigures his praise of Havel a decade later as one who had 'transformed his own life into a magnifi- cent démystification of language' and who conducts himself 'as if words really mean what they are supposed to mean'.8

The forcefulness of Kundera's rhetoric renders its incongruity with his later opinions and activity all the more jarring, yet it is hardly remarkable that the views of a figure so intimately associated with the cultural and political changes in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and 1970s should evolve. More interesting is a paradox that characterizes the rhetoric itself, and it is that paradox that this paper shall identify and attempt to understand. The title of the first essay refers to the accident of geography that dooms the Czechs to strive endlessly for an unattainable existential security, and to Kundera's belief that the Prague Spring represents the fulfilment of a corresponding task: com- pelled by the precariousness of its existence to perpetually 'produce things of value', the Czech nation had now performed a revolutionary experiment by demonstrating the enormous democratic possibilities that lay unexploited in socialism. History, Kundera notes, has also fur- nished his compatriots with their 'greatest virtue': a rare critical spirit that guards against narcissistic romanticism (a tempting consolation following such a dramatic and ultimately disastrous experience), a

5 Kundera, 'Cesky udëP, p. 5. All translations in this article are by the author unless otherwise indicated. 6 Ibid. 7 'Radikalismus a exhibicionismus', p. 28.

Milan Kundera, Candide had to be destroyed', trans. K. Seigneurie, in Jan Vladislav, Vaclav Havel: Living in Truth, London, 1986, pp. 258-62 (p. 261).



404 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION

spirit 'not easily given over to deception by cheap propaganda'.9 As it happens, 'Czech Destiny' is itself flush with the lyricism the author had by then come to famously detest, and Havel's reply reproaches Kundera for flouting the critical rigour he simultaneously extols and for descending into the sentimentality his essay decries. Havel's choice to frame his criticism in terms of Kundera's rejection of the 'open present' in favour of the 'closed past' is an inspired one, for it strongly (and certainly unintentionally) echoes the typological criteria distinguishing the novel from the epic elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin.10 This, in turn, draws our attention to a surprising similarity between Bakhtin's and Kundera's own understanding of the forces at work in the novel, thus underscoring the absurdity of Kundera's brief, uncharacteristic dalliance with national ideology and its generic baggage.

To Havel and others, 'Czech Destiny' represented a tendency among reform Communists to seek historical alibis for their party's crimes, betraying a complacent eagerness to assign responsibility for all that had occurred since 1948 to impersonal, external forces.11 Jaroslav Stntecky called it 'constructive forgetting', employing a phrase we might expect to encounter in one of Kundera's later novels.12 Those novels have served a significant function in preserving the memory of the Prague Spring in the West, and indeed the preservation and manipulation of memory are an important recurring theme in these works. Is it not therefore appropriate to examine closely Milan Kundera's role in the event and its aftermath, and to consider whether that role is due for reassessment? This article answers the question affirmatively and argues that, by invoking an imagined destiny for the Czechs - a trope that is in the end deemed more cynical than naive - Kundera abandons the cause of reform and becomes complicit in that destiny's realization.

'The Czech Question' Kundera confesses in 'Czech Destiny' that he has often questioned the worthiness of a Czech national character rife with 'small-mindedness' and 'avaricious mediocrity', and he later acknowledges having posed

9 Kundera, 'Õesky udèT, p. 5. 'Epos i roman' ('Epic and Novel', 1970) was first delivered as a public lecture in

Moscow in 1 941 and had yet to be published in any language at the time of Havel's essay. It appeared one year later in the Soviet journal Voprosy literatury, 1. G. G. Bocharov, Trimechaniia', in Mikhail Bakhtin, Epos i roman, ed. C. G. Bocharov, Moscow, 2000, p. 296. Citations in the present article are from M. M. Bakhtin, 'Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel', in Michael Holquist The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, TX, iq8i, pp. 3-40.

See Jaroslav Stfítecky, 'Udël promëny a tváf sebeklamu', Host do domu, 16, 1969, 5, pp. 16-22. t2 Ibid., p. 19.



TIM WEST 405 the following question when confronted with declining national prestige and cultural independence in the years since World War Two: 'Had the re-establishment of our small nation at the centre of Europe been at all worthwhile? What values does it and will it contribute to humanity?'13 He answers his own question by recalling the very qualities that catalysed and fostered the Czech nation's 'transformation from a semi- literate, half-assimilated populace into a European nation, and this against a current of unrelenting Germanization': 'dispassionate rationalism, a sense of humour, [. . .] a critical spirit' and a history so crucially tied to culture that it is 'by far the most inward-looking and educated people in its half of Europe'.14 Admonishing the Czechs and Slovaks to apply this critical spirit to the crisis they face at the end of 1968, Kundera draws inspiration from the Prague Spring and the heroic resistance in the immediate aftermath of the August Soviet invasion and he urges his reader to consider events in the context of the centuries-long struggle for Czech self-determination. 'Real criticism', he asserts, is discernible from pessimism by its willingness to persevere in the absence of certainty about the future; those who demand immediate 'guarantees' are 'weak people' who have given themselves over to the 'psychosis' of irrational fear and pessimism.15

In addition to its intrinsic virtues, which are both a cause and an effect of its particular experience, Kundera believes that the Czech nation, like all other smaU groups which have withstood the fortunes of history, is to be admired for its very size. He describes a world divided into large nations so vast that they exist as a matter of course and are dominated by the awareness of their permanence and therefore never troubled by existential questions; and small nations, whose insignificance and fragility demand that they constantly justify their existence anew by creating things of value. 'Perhaps this explains why creation (cultural and economic) is often (beginning, for example, with the Greek city states) so much more intense in small nations than it is in large empires.'16

According to Kundera, the bold and unprecedented democratic initiatives of Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s were an

13 Kundera, 'Cesky udël', p. *. 14 Ibid., p. 1. The phrase 'dispassionate rationalism' renders Kundera's 'rozumová stfízli- vost' (lit. 'rational soberness'). Havelka cites the use of 'stfizlivost' by Frantisek Kovárna to describe the Czech character under German occupation [Kovárna, 'Õeská stfizlivost a õesky pathos', Prague, 1939]: 4"[S]oberness" (signifying Czech "acceptance of reality" [. . .]) and "pathos" (to indicate "the will to control reality") are employed for considerations about the uniqueness of the nation's cultural and political achievements, as well as to describe the "fundamental pattern" of Czech behaviour during dramatic historical situations, when pathos briefly outweighs soberness.' Havelka, p. 48. 15 Kundera, 'Cesky udèT, p. 5. 16 Ibid.



4O6 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION

expression of this Darwinian need to create by a country which has historically been known to make its mark on the world in the realm of ideas. As Kundera sees it, the policies espoused and implemented during the Prague Spring, far from the provincial concern Havel would later describe in his essay, were revolutionary in their attempt to establish a genuine social democracy, rising above both hegemonic and self-serving Soviet-style socialism but also vulgar and capitalistic Western-style democracy. Later, in 'Radicalism and Exhibitionism', he reminds us that this is nothing new to the Czechs, whose fate has always been to stand cat the crossroads of Byzantium and Rome' and who have

understood the possibility (as illustrious as it was onerous) which their destiny offered them: drawing on their ties with the two opposing cultures, they created a unique identity - a unique 'Czechoslovak ideology' - which declared in revolutionary fashion (nine centuries before the French Revolution) the equality of nations.17

The last claim is an allusion to an event that occurred in 863 when the Moravian duke Rostislav, seeking a means of distancing his lands from the Frankish political sphere, appealed to the Byzantine emperor Michael III to send Slavic-speaking missionaries who could translate the Gospel and teach it in the language of the intended proselytes. The resulting tradition, which fundamentally tied Czech self-identity to the written word, reached another milestone at the turn of the fifteenth century with the religious reforms advocated by Jan Hus, a basic tenet of which was the need for the availability of Christian texts to ordinary Czechs in their own language. Even as sovereign authority passed into the hands of the Hapsburgs and a growing German-speaking upper- class encroached upon the privileges of the Czech bourgeoisie and lesser nobility, a concurrent period of systematic Czech language codi- fication and intense literary activity culminated in a new translation of the Bible published by the end of the sixteenth century at Kralice, the work representing a standard against which all subsequent Czech literary texts were judged for most of the next three centuries.

The defeat of the Czech Protestant Estates by the Hapsburg crown at Bílá hora in 1620 was not only a disaster for the fortunes of the Czech Protestant nobility, but it also meant an end to the literary and philological tradition they had nurtured. Although not explicitly an object of persecution, the Czech language fell behind German as the language of administration, and its usefulness as a tool for Catholic indoctrination in the hands of Jesuit educators meant that the prevailing literary standard succumbed to local vernaculars, both in instruction itself and in published religious texts. When, nearly two

17 'Radikalismus a exhibicionismus', p. 24.



TIM WEST 407 centuries later, Enlightenment values and the liberal reforms of Josef II led the Germanized Czech nobility and the rising middle class to the scholarly exploration of the language spoken by its servants, its nurse- maids and its own ancestors, the Czech language of the Kralice Bible was a relic preserved only in dusty tomes and in the literary dialect of Protestant exiles living in Saxony and Hungary.

Viewed through the haze of centuries of national decline, the decades before Bílá hora came to be seen by the nineteenth-century ideologues of the emerging National Revival as a sort of cultural golden age. A generation of poets mined the national history for edifying and inspiring examples of greatness, and past glories became an argument against a putative lack of viability for the Czechs as a modern indepen- dent nation. The martyrdom of Hus in 1415 and the ensuing period of resistance to the papal Crusades were viewed as the birthing pains of a 200-year epoch of Protestant Czech sovereignty suffused with democratic-mindedness and a love of peace, and marked by a balanc- ing of Christian and Humanist ideals. These ideals, and the Czechs' willingness to defend them with arms, served not only the nation but humanity itself, in the Revivalist view, and it was the Czechs' unswerv- ing faithfulness to them which led ultimately and inevitably to the tragedy of Bílá hora. The crucial element of the nineteenth-century national reawakening was the rehabilitation of the Czech literary language as it had existed at the apex of this cultural arc; nationalistic philologists saw in it a uniquely Czech 'expression of Renaissance harmony and balance, created under the influence both of Humanism and living, popular speech'.18

Those who resisted the prevailing mythopoeic current were stigma- tized as 'national nihilists' for suggesting that these pleasing notions were closer to propaganda than scholarship.19 The Realist journal Cas^ founded in 1886 by associates of the philosopher and future Czecho- slovak president T. G. Masaryk, routinely injected a sceptical tone into a national conversation dominated by the voices of Revivalist ideologues. Later that year the young Czech critic H. G. Schauer was attacked for challenging his readers to weigh the merits of the ambi- tious national project against the costs of cultural isolation from the Germanophone world:

What is the role of our nation? What is our role in the history of mankind? What is the nature of our national existence? Are we as secure in our own house as we think we are? Is our national existence really worth the price?

18 Arne Novák, 'Reformation, Renaissance and Baroque', in Novak, Czech Literature, trans. Peter Kussi, ed. William E. Harlans, Ann Arbor, MI, 1986, pp. 45-85 (p. 72). 19 Vera Menclová et al. (eds), 'Schauer, Hubert Gordon', Slovnik ceskych spisovatelù, Prague, 2000.



4O8 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION Is its cultural value really so enormous? Are our national reserves so rich that they can provide sufficient moral strength to those who struggle for the nation in extremis?20

That same year, Masaryk and others proved the celebrated Králo- védvorsky and Zelenohorsky Manuscripts to be forgeries, an effort initially greeted with predictable hostility. Masaryk wrote numerous critical works dealing with the past and future of the national movement, including Ceská otázka {The Czech Question, 1895), a sober evalua- tion of the progress of the National Revival at the end of the nineteenth century. A remark by his colleague at Cas, Jan Herben, anticipated the argument made by Vaclav Havel nearly a century later in his criticism of Kundera's 'Czech Destiny': 'Our effort to always imagine things concretely meant that we needed to curtail our inveterate historicism. [. . .] People raised on historicism overrate the past and underrate the present and they suffer nothing short of a congenital defect of the spirit: lack of independence in thought, emotion and action.'21

Czech Destiny Kundera invoked Schauer and the spirit of patriotic scepticism of the Cas circle when he delivered the keynote address at the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union in June 1967, articulating many of the points he would underscore in 'Czech Destiny' eighteen months later. As in 'Czech Destiny', he argued that, as a small nation among large ones, the Czechs find their greatest justification in the value and endurance of their ideas. Relegated to the European periphery by the Second World War and by the cultural imperatives of Stalinism, they were again finding their voice in literature and, even more remarkably, film:

Yet are we as a society even aware of this? Are we aware of this opportunity to re-establish the lost thread of our great early internar literature, and that this is a chance that will not come again? Are we aware that our fate and the fate of our culture are one and the same?22

Kundera repeated Schauer's challenge, calling on Czechs to re- examine the costs and rewards of their resistance to the cultural and political hegemony of their neighbours. Noting the constant precariousness of their nationhood and the boldly existential nature of the establishment of the Czechoslovak state in 1918, Kundera regarded the Czechs' demonstrated will to survive the dangers of the twentieth century as a 'challenge to the future':

20 Quoted in Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizd'ala, 1986, ed.

and trans. Paul Wilson, New York, 1990, p. 178. 21 Jan Herben, Deset let proti proudu (1886-1806), self-published, 1, 1898, p. 63. 22 Otakar Mohyla, Josef Volráb (eds), IV. Sjezd Svazu ceskoslovenskych spisouatelù /protokol/,

Prague, 1968, p. 25.



TIM WEST 409 The entire narrative of this nation [. . .] allows us to ask perhaps more fundamental questions, to create perhaps more meaningful myths than those who have not undergone the same anabasis. I think it is fair to say that this nation survived more in this century than many other nations did; if its spirit was alert, then perhaps it knows more as well. This greater knowledge can be transformed into a liberating crossing of existing boundaries, a crossing of the boundaries of existing consciousness about man and his destiny, and can thus give Czech culture meaning, maturity and greatness.23

Kundera's speech shared with many others at the gathering the rhetorical aim of calling on the Party leadership to relax official censorship, a form of Vandalism' that threatened to suffocate a post-war culture which had cosmopolitan aspirations and which finally seemed to be coming into its own. The position paper drawn up by Writers' Union members at the conclusion of the Congress, while endorsing socialism, criticized the cultural policies of the 1950s and the aesthetic straitjacket of Socialist Realism.24

In September 1967 the Central Committee of the KSC took control of the Writers' Union weekly Literární noviny (Literary News) in reaction to the June Congress and the challenge it represented to official ideology. The election of Alexander Dubõek as First Secretary early the next year was followed by the journal's quick restoration to the Writers' Union under the name Literární listy (Literary Gazette) and by the appointment of Dr Eduard Goldstücker as the Union's chairman. Goldstücker, condemned to life in prison as a 'Zionist' spy during the show trials of the early 1950s, had from 1963 undergone a period of political rehabilitation that mirrored the progress of overall political and cultural liberalization, and he revealed his hopes for the new era in the first new issue of the journal:

I would wish that my words might arouse in the minds of my readers the notion of the unique nature of this moment, the chance which history is giving us - that we might make the attempt of combining that which is inseparable: socialism and freedom. I believe that no revolution in history has ever had such a real chance - and our lot is placing us before the most difficult trial.25

When 'Czech Destiny' appeared in the Union journal nine months later, the paper had ceased publishing yet again following the August invasion and it had reopened in November as Listy.

23 Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., pp. 7-13. Alan Levy, Rowboat to Prague, 1972, reprinted as So Many Heroes, Sagaponack, 1980,

p. 60.




List/s Jungmann writes that Kundera himself approached the journal's editorial staff with the offer to write 'Czech Destiny5.26 In the eighteen months since the Writers' Congress, Kundera had lost little of the optimism he shared with Goldstücker and none of the sense of mission. The essay appeared on the first page of the Christmas issue and it read as a serious and considered reflection on the year's events and on the nation's prospects and hopes for the future. Jaroslav Strítecky, a member of the editorial board at Host do doma who would later polemicize with Kundera over the latter's 'Radicalism and Exhi- bitionism', wrote that he had first read Kundera's essay 'with pleasure and with the awareness that this was meant as an idyllic Christmas meditation. For this reason the nationalistic tone did not really bother me and I thought it was offset by a comforting optimism that was hard to come by in those days'.27

The essay begins by citing the seventeenth-century patriot Pavel Stránsky, a figure closely linked to Bílá hora and to the fate of the surviving Czech nobility and bourgeoisie, who were subsequently forced into exile. By next magnifying the week-long period of resistance in August and juxtaposing it with previous conflicts, Kundera places the defeat in the context of its presumed historical tradition and imparts to the present moment some of the lustre of the past. Thus he reminds his reader that the problems they face together in 1968 are for Czechs 'eternal problems', the struggle for sovereignty an 'endless' one and the gunfire of August 'something by which the age-old Czech destiny is again realized':

August has cast a new light on our entire history. [. . .] I see the attic flat of a small palace in Paris, I hear Aragon's voice full of rage, a voice which curses violence, I see Aragon's face full of anxiety over the fate of my country, I hear the ardent words repeated over and over: cIt was the most beautiful week we had ever known.' I fear that, in that place, the declaration sounded absurd and strange, but my countrymen understand me. It was, after all, a week when the nation suddenly caught a glimpse of its own greatness, a greatness in which it had ceased to believe.

Having reminded the Czechs of their greatness and having sought to instil in them the resolve to endure what may be a long struggle, Kundera offers a warning: they must not allow their 'dispassionate rationalism', the historical asset that has guided them from the Renais- sance through Bílá hora and along the edge of cultural extinction to the present day, to degenerate into pessimism, that 'ideal climate for the cultivation of defeat'. More specifically, he cautions against the

26 Jungmann, p. 314. " Stfitecky, p. 16. 28 Kundera, 'Cesky udël', p. 1.



TIM WEST 4II

temptation to emigrate or to clamour for legal 'guarantees' due to fears that the political concessions made to Moscow since August are signs of erosion signalling an impending avalanche:

For whom is anything ever guaranteed? It is not my intention to criticize those who choose to live abroad, [but i]s a Czech citizen truly so incapable of taking the very risks assumed by those who govern him? Is he truly capable of living only without risk? Doesn't a measure of relative certainty for all depend precisely on the number of those who dare to stand their ground in times of uncertainty?29

These considerations are secondary, however, and the force of the essay lies in its restatement of Kundera's Writers' Congress thesis, which had become his steady theme since the threat of military intervention first loomed earlier that summer. The 'gateway to humanity' is a narrow one, he writes, impassable for large nations dulled and made brutal by the self-evidence of their enduring existence; small nations are 'the agents of resistance against the frightful influences of global uniformity, protectors of the variegation of traditions and ways of life, and guarantors that the original, the extraordinary and the idiosyncratic are at home in the world'. Again he poses Schauer's question, this time certain that he has seen it definitively answered: 'Is our national existence really worth the effort?'

The attempt to finally (and for the first time in world history) create a socialism [. . .] with a freely evolving modern culture and with people who have lost their fear, was an attempt with which the Czechs and Slovaks for the first time since the Middle Ages placed themselves at the centre of world history and addressed the world with their challenge [...]. This Czechoslovak challenge remains valid. Without it, the twentieth century would not be the twentieth century. Without it, tomorrow's world would not be the world that it will be.30

Given Kundera's conception, however right or wrong, of the geo- graphic and historical significance allotted to the Czechs in Europe, as well as his inclination to seek hidden layers of meaning in events by placing them against the sweeping backdrop of history, it is not surprising that years later he should view the Russian occupation of his country as 'the end of the West'. The 1985 essay 'An Introduction to a Variation' remembers the invasion as the engulfment of his world, one 'of reason and doubt, of play and the relativity of human affairs', by the 'Dostoevskfian] universe of overblown gestures, murky depths and aggressive sentimentality':

Faced with the eternity of the Russian night, I had experienced in Prague the violent end of Western culture such as it was conceived at the dawn of

29 Ibid., p. 5. 30 Ibid.



412 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION the modern age, based on the individual and his reason, on pluralism of thought and on tolerance. In a small Western country I experienced the end of the West. This was the grand farewell.31

Kundera notes that the Czechoslovak social democratic experiment was meant as a 'challenge' to others and never intended for outright export - 'Such messianism is alien to the mind of the small nation'.32 Yet the vision of the Czechs and their place in Europe articulated by Kundera between 1967 and 1969 is nothing if not messianic.

Indeed, Kundera's claim - that the Czechs and Slovaks, a people endowed by experience with a singular knowledge, find themselves placed by fate at the centre of history and in possession of a unique formula for the correction of Europe's social and political ills - is oddly reminiscent of Dostoevskii's belief in the mission of Orthodox Russia to one day save atheist, materialist Europe from itself. Yet few would argue with Kundera's assertion that the Czechs are not a people that dreams of imposing its will on others, and not merely because he reminds us that they are 'one of the least chauvinistic nations in Europe'.33 There is more about Russia than 'political extroversion' and emotionalism that is alien to Kundera. When Zosima declares in The Brothers Karamazov that a 'star will shine forth from the East', his is a messianism that speaks from a position of power reinforced and internalized by centuries of empire and full of serene confidence about the future.34 It is this power, not the messianism which impels and vindicates it, that is utterly incomprehensible to Kundera and 'is alien to the mind of the small nation'.

Czech Destiny? At the end of June 1968, exactly a year after the Writers' Union Con- gress, over one hundred prominent artists and intellectuals signed the political manifesto 'Two Thousand Words to the Workers, Farmers, Government Officials and Artists, and Everyone', written by Ludvik Vaculik and published in Literární listy and three other newspapers. Vaculik was an editor at Literární listy and one of several writers expelled from the Party for their activity at the Congress the previous year. Five months after Duböek's election as First Secretary, 'Two Thousand Words' urged Dubcek and other liberals to stand firm, conservatives to resign and Czechs and Slovaks to make it clear to their government that, if it carried out the mandate expressed by its citizens, they would stand behind it, 'if necessary with weapons'. The text concluded with

31 Milan Kundera, 'An Introduction to a Variation', trans. Michael Henry Heim, Cross Currents, 5, 1986, pp. 469-76 (p. 47Q- 04 Kundera, 'Cesky udêl', p. 5. 33 Ibid., p. 1.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, London, 1992, p. 313.



TIM WEST 413 a prediction: The spring has ended and it will never return. In the winter we shall know everything.'35

Among the factors precipitating the Soviet intervention two months later was the planned Fourteenth Party Congress of the KSC, the agenda of which included the election of a new Central Committee sure to be dominated by reformists. Within hours of the August 21 arrival of hundreds of thousands of foreign troops, First Secretary Dubcek and several other leaders were detained and quickly brought to Moscow for 'negotiations'. On 22 August the Party Congress, scheduled for September, was hastily and secretly convened in a Prague factory where over 1,200 of 1,540 invited delegates demanded the immediate withdrawal of the occupying armies, scheduled a general strike for the next day and succeeded in electing a new, reformist- dominated Central Committee and Presidium. In spite of a number of disastrous confrontations, including one with a column of tanks at the Czechoslovak Radio building that left twenty-five civilians dead, for several days radio and print news continued to illicitly broadcast and publish, citizens engaged astonished soldiers in debate on the streets and there reigned an atmosphere of hope and solidarity with the country's absent leaders. On 27 August the abducted officials were returned to Prague and they announced the signing of the Moscow Protocol, which invalidated the Fourteenth Party Congress, bound Czechoslovakia to a foreign policy dictated by Moscow and began the reversal of press freedoms and other newly-instituted reforms. That day Literární listy closed and, with seventy-seven civilians dead and over one thousand wounded, the brief period of popular resistance was effectively over.

When the reopened {Literární) listy published Kundera's 'Czech Destiny' three months later, national media directors and newspaper editors - including Listy's Goldstücker - had been purged, the Interior Minister sacked, the powers of the Information Minister attenuated, and the Central Committee and Presidium reshuffled. In a pronouncement emblematic of those uncertain months, Dubcek vowed that Czechoslovakia would never revert to the repressive policies of the pre-reform era, but that it must nevertheless recognize the Moscow Protocol. In an ominous speech to the KSÖ Central Committee in September, he confessed:

We did not take into consideration the strategic interests of our allies. [. . .] In this way, the trust of the Soviet Union in our party leadership was diminished, too. The most important task before us now is to dispel this lack of trust.36

35 Ludvík Vaculík, 'Dva tisice slov, které patii dëlnikûm, zemëdëlcûm, ufednikûm, umëlcùm a vsem', Literární listy, 1, 1968, 18, pp. 1, 3 (p. 3).

Levy, p. 309.



414 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION In October a bilateral treaty was signed agreeing to the stationing of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia for an indefinite period of time.

The trenchant tone of Vaclav Havel's 'Czech Destiny?', published in Tvár two months after Kundera's 'Czech Destiny', is evident from the start when Havel sarcastically declares his gratification at the condescending approval of the August resistance expressed by Kun- dera, cthat would-be gently sceptical, intellectual man of the world'.37 Seeking refuge in mawkish rhetoric and the certainties of past action, Havel says, is no answer to present uncertainty, nor is it a substitute for concrete action today. He answers Kundera's call to seek inspiration in the past by scornfully placing the latter's remarks in the tradition of the nineteenth-century historicist myth-spinners of the National Revivad:

Whenever a Czech patriot lacks the courage (without which, of course, real criticism is unthinkable) to look the cruel but open present in the face, admit all of its problematic aspects and without remorse draw the necessary conclusions, regardless of whether they ¿ire directed even against one's own interests, he turns to the happier but already closed past [where] no harm can be done [...]. It is a very attractive stance yet it is also a very insidious one: by emphasizing a one-sided and superficial vision of a happier past it subtly diverts our attention from the unhappier present, and it substitutes the complacent patriotism of closed memory for the less comfortable but animated patriotism of original and therefore open-ended action which precariously impinges upon the troubling issues of the day. [August was] a great promise to ourselves that there are certain values from which we shall never retreat! Yes, a return to the past is meaningful insofar as it is taken as a challenge to the present, but only thus.38

Havel then contrasts Kundera's praise for August with his reluctance even to grant sceptics the right to undertake similar action now, to say nothing of his own unwillingness to do so:

In other words, past actions - be they a thousand times more radical than today's - are accepted and adored without reservation at a time when they have been swallowed by the past and their assessment has been as it were 'ratified' by conventional wisdom and by the judgement of history and is therefore without risk; whereas with regard to present-day actions, which of course require support with greater urgency, we must practice reserve [because] they point toward the unknown.39

While neither author ever describes specific tactics or activities which the one rejects and the other advocates, there is the strong sense that Kundera is indeed unwilling to assert himself in a meaningful way from within the country even as he challenges those who have already

37 Havel, 'Cesky udël?', p. 193. " Lb!d> PP- !94-95. " Ibid., p. 195.



TIM WEST 415

emigrated and berates them for defeatism. Whether it is due to differing experience, differing prospects for the future or differing temperaments, it is evident that the two perceive the reality of their situation in fundamentally different ways. Havel, sensing the irrevers- ible nature of the path taken when Dubcek returned with the signed Moscow Protocol, has decided that Vaculik's prophecy was correct and that they now 'know everything'. Kundera cautiously chooses to reserve judgement:

Because something has happened which no one expected: the new political ethos has survived this awful conflict. [. . .] And not only has it not lost the support of the public but at the very moment of mortal danger it united the entire nation behind itself, a nation stronger in spirit than it was before August. [. . .] And in this there is tremendous hope for the future. And not some distant future, but a fairly near one.40

Havel disagrees, noting that the guarantees which Kundera so casually dismisses include freedom of speech and assembly and the assurance of a genuinely pluralistic politicai system and sovereign foreign policy:

Have those primary, those basic things survived, those things from which all the rest should follow and which should be its guarantee? [. . .] Kundera is amazed that we are always asking for some sort of guarantee - nothing, he says, is ever guaranteed. As if the little that has 'survived' and whose endurance so amazes Kundera hadn't survived precisely because that terrific polyphony of voices calling for guarantees has never subsided.41

The 'survival' of the 'new political ethos' of the past year, attributable to the virtue of dispassionate Czech scepticism, enables Kundera to end his essay on a supremely optimistic note: 'A nation thus endowed has every right to approach the uncertainties of the coming year with complete confidence. At the end of 1968 it has greater right to it than ever before.'42 Jungmann writes that President Ludvik Svoboda, whose readiness to capitulate would allow him to retain his post long after Dubcek was forced to resign, was so pleased by Kundera's tone that his staff called the journal, lauding the essay as a public appeal for calm.43

Years later Christopher Hitchens would praise Kundera as someone who 'profited greatly from cultivating the uses of pessimism' while in exile. His later strength was a 'Stoicism' that permitted him to see his condition clearly in all its grim hopelessness while retaining the hope that things would change. 'Apart from anything else', Hitchens observes, 'the presentation of the bleakest and starkest possible picture

40 Kundera, 'Òesky údeF, p. 5. " Havel, 'Cesky udël?', p. 196. *4 Kundera, 'Cesky udël', p. 5. Jungmann, p. 315.



4l6 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION can have the paradoxical effect of mobilizing the emotions and the intellect.'44 While it is tempting to regard Kundera's ostensible naïveté in 1968 as a reflection of inexperience, it is important to remember that the thirty-nine-year-old had already suffered his share of political bruises, having been expelled from the Party while at university in 1950 and subsequently readmitted in 1956. A revealing anecdote reported by his friend Carlos Fuentes indicates Kundera's assessment of his own security during the weeks before 'Czech Destiny' was published and gives us reason to suspect the candour of the essay's tone. In 1981 Fuentes recalled a December 1968 visit to Prague during which he and Kundera sought refuge in the sauna at Podoli in order to speak about topical matters without the fear of wiretaps. This was one of the few places, Fuentes writes, where Kundera felt confident to speak freely.45 Whatever his reason for suppressing it, it seems Kundera had already made his peace with the notion that the era of reform had ended, a notion that Havel was already expressing aloud.

Havel reserves his most intense criticism for Kundera's claim that the events of 1968 are the result of a unique Czech destiny, which he says is problematic for two reasons. First, by assigning blame to factors over which the Czechs have no control, such as geography (the dilemma of cthe small nation'), Kundera 'obscures our own concrete responsibility for our own concrete actions'. Secondly, Havel writes, the idea that there is anything remarkable about the society envisaged by Czechoslovakia's Communist reformers is a 'pompous illusion', serving only as a 'sweet-smelling balm on our wounds':

Freedom and the rule of law are the most basic preconditions for a normally and soundly functioning societal organism, and should any state attempt to re-establish them after years of their absence, it is doing nothing historically momentous but simply trying to remove its own abnormality, to become normal; this is the case regardless of whether this state calls itself socialist or anything else.46

Ludvík Vaculík, echoing Havel, wryly remembers the Prague Spring as 'perhaps even more important for Europe than for us, because it showed the Soviet Union for what it was. It showed that communism is unreformabk. Western intellectuals with some degree of soberness had to realize that to talk about "reformed" communism was foolishness'.47

The merits of the Prague Spring and the viability of the society it might have engendered will doubtless divide opinion well into the

44 Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contarían, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 85-86. Carlos Puentes, The other K , Tri-Quarterly, 51, Spring 1981, pp. 256-75 (p. 259). 4b Havel, 'Cesky udël?', p. 199. 47 Quoted in Miklos Kun, Prague Spring, Prague Fall: Blank Spots of 1968, trans. Hajnal

Csatorday, Budapest, 1999, p. 208.



TIM WEST 417 future. More troubling is Havel's first complaint regarding Kundera's conception of a Czech destiny, as it reminds us of Kundera's personal role in bringing about the very conditions that he assailed at the Writers' Congress, as well as the benefit he would have derived from successfully 'changing the subject'48 from that of the personal culpability of specific actors to one of abstract historical necessities. Havel tact- fully resists the temptation to dwell on Kundera's brief Stalin-era career as the author and translator of bathetic Marxist poetry,49 noting only:

Years ago one part of the nation (including, after all, Kundera himself) brought into being - by means of the severest encroachment upon the rights of another part - the very fact that today our affiliations are what they are; let us not forget that it was an act of someone's choosing, followed by the very vehement enforcement of that choice, and not the blind necessity of some national destiny!50

In an interview years later, Havel amplified this rather circumspect indictment of Kundera's refusal to confront the 'real causes of our present situation' and to examine the 'real possibilities for its solution':51

I fully understand and respect the frustration of former communists with things as they have turned out. I don't like it when they cushion their landing on the hard truth by referring to ancient national fate and thus [. . .] wash their hands of it, as if history had to bear responsibility for history!52

Havel continues, 'There is something of this historical alibi in Kun- dera's writing to this day', and indeed, in a stunning example of wilful forgetfulness that very same year in 'An Introduction to a Variation', Kundera utterly ignores the legacy of cultural 'vandalism' established by the regime whose crimes he had abetted as a young man and which he had decried at the Writers' Congress in 1967:

What in Diderot's day was an exception has, in Prague 200 years later, become the lot of all important Czech writers, who, banned from the presses, can see their works only in typescript. It began with the Russian invasion, it has continued to the present and, by the look of things, is here to stay.53 [my emphasis - TW]

Stntecky of Host do domu saw Kundera's 'constructive forgetting' as emblematic of the entire generation of Communists who had come of age in the late 1940s and, consistent with their role as the society's

48 Havel, 'Cesky udël?' p. iq8. 49 See Michal Bauer, 'Pfekladatelská õinnost Milana Kundery na pfelomu 40. a 50. let', Tvar, 1998, 5, pp. 6-7. 5U Havel, 'Cesky udël?', p. 198. J1 Ibid. 32

Disturbing the Peace, p. 180. An Introduction to a Variation , p. 476.



4l8 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION

'professional avant-garde', were now 'filling the vacuum' left by a dis- credited Marxism with a new nationalist ideology and simultaneously erasing the distinctions marking those who bore responsibility: 'National ideology [. . .] tries to delude us with the argument that we are all in the same boat, consistently overlooking the fact that each of us sits in it differently.'54 One recalls the revisionist view held by the conservative nineteenth-century historian Vaclav Vladivoj Tomek that Bílá hora had actually been a blessing in disguise: Hapsburg absolutism had halted the growth of divisions among the Czech-speaking lower nobility, thus forestalling the possibility of civil war and partition, a fate that later befell Poland.55 One detects a similar determination by Kundera that a cathartic period of subjugation by a foreign power is a fair price to pay if it is accompanied by a deepening understanding among Czechs of their historical mission, not to mention that it is the lesser evil if the alternative is a divisive and bruising national reckoning with the recent past.

Radicalism and Exhibitionism Host do domu published Kundera's 'Radicalism and Exhibitionism' the following month in March 1969. The first half of the essay is yet another articulation of his earlier themes in the form of a point-by- point refutation of Havel's article. The second half is a highly visceral reaction to what Kundera takes to be a personali attack upon himself, and he accuses Havel of refusing to engage him in an honest debate and of thereby unmasking himself as a self-promoting moral exhibitionist.

Havel's polemic, he writes, is built upon three fallacious 'objections' to Kundera's own essay and one 'prevarication', and Kundera briefly answers each of the first three points in turn:

1. To Havel's denial of the existence of a unique Czech destiny, he answers that 'there is no more reason in this than if he declared that he does not believe in human destiny and decided that he wasn't going to age. [. . .] Man is mortal and the Czech lands are in Central Europe'.

2. In answer to Havel's denial of the importance of the Prague Spring, he notes the absence of a precedent during fifty years of socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and he argues the superiority of a free civil society that is committed to socialist values over one in the thrall of commercial interests in which the realization of press freedoms is something 'dehumanizing' and 'stupefying'.

54 Stfitecky, p. 20. See Josef Pekaf, 'Po Bile hofe', in id., 0 smyslu ceskych dejin, Prague, 1990, pp. 193-239

(p. 198). See also, Jaroslav Werstadt, 'Rozhled po filosofii Ceskych dejin', in Müo§ Havelka (ed.), Spor 0 smysl ceskych dejin 1895-1938, Prague, 1995, pp. 777-809 (pp. 79Ï-93)-



TIM WEST 419

3. To Havel's assertion that the political ethos engendered by the Prague Spring has not survived that era's traumatic end, Kundera answers that Havel is a prophet of doom and is merely unwilling to live under conditions in which everything is not guaranteed from the start. Kundera goes so far as to declare that, 'in some places', conditions after August have even improved!

Seven months into an occupation that will last more than two decades, Kundera draws comfort from the fact that Reporter, the Journalist Union's weekly that had been shut down in October, is once again free to publish thanks to popular outcry, and he draws the conclusion that 'the public has learned to guard its freedom'.56 Milan Jungmann observes that Kundera's 'violent optimism' received a 'mortal blow' on 10 April when Listy published a memorandum issued by the government's Press and Information Committee announcing the institution of a 'pro- visional' policy of press monitoring to 'preclude discourse that threatens the basic interests of our national affairs'.57 Seven days later the KSC Central Committee met, finally forcing Dubcek's resignation as First Secretary and replacing him with Gustav Husák.

The 'prevarication' which follows the three 'objections' consists in Havel's alleged distortion of Kundera's warning against pessimism so that it is interpreted as a call to inaction: 'With dazzling presumption', Kundera marvels, 'he brands my attack on defeatism an attack on courage!' He continues:

Here I begin to note an interesting aspect of Havel's text: it does not stand out for any particularly incisive analysis of the situation; he does not even undertake to analyse in any real way my article (I doubt that anyone who has read my article would even recognize it in Havel's exposition), nor does he even try to prove me guilty of fallacies in my argumentation (of contradicting myself, of insufficient knowledge, etc.) so much as guilty of, above all else, an inferior moral position.

By way of example, Kundera identifies an implication of personal 'cowardice' on his part in Havel's claim that August is a closed matter, and he proceeds to accuse Havel of transforming a debate about the validity of examining the past into an ad hominem attack on Kundera's moral character. With this he altogether abandons his analysis of Havel's text itself and responds in kind:

Thus [. . .] has a substantive debate become a mere pretext for his own (and the only important) quarrel concerning who is the more radical, who is bolder, who is morally the more pure, Havel or the other. I am utterly uninterested in participating in such a narcissistic squabble. What interests me very much, however, as a phenomenon, as a theme for discussion, as

56 'Radikalismus a exhibicionismus', pp. 24-26. (Quoted in Jungmann, p. 31b.



420 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION a problem is this: Where does Havel's approach originate, what does it signify and of what is it emblematic in a wider context?

In answer to his own question, Kundera charges Havel with deliber- ately courting disaster, driven by his personal history as one marked as a class enemy and by his resulting complex as an outsider:

Vaclav Havel was from his early youth unequivocally rejected by the Czecho-Stalinist world in which he found himself, and he, likewise, unequivocally rejected that world: he would suffer no compromise with it. [. . .] The position of one who stands face to face with an abnormal world and poses (with feigned naïveté) his normal questions in order to unmask it is Havel's basic self-conception, his primary self-project, his original choice, as the existentialists would say. That position is [. . .] the only source of his dramatic vision; it is something without which Havel would not be Havel.

For this reason, according to Kundera, Havel is unable to acknowledge the importance of the Prague Spring, because to do so would mean 'surrendering [his] authority' as 'the spokesman and representative' of the world of normalcy to which the 'penitent, [. . .] abnormal world' of the Czechs had guiltily returned after twenty years. Nor is Havel able to acknowledge that their present situation is a

hopeful one, Kundera says, 'because from his point of view the idea of a courageous act really is bound to the idea of a hopeless situation' and, 'enthralled by [. . .] his own quarrel with the domestic world into which he was born', he is determined 'to confirm his own moral superiority' over that world. Noting that Havel does not seem dismayed by his own judgement that 'no hope has survived' even as he speaks repeatedly about the need for 'risky action', Kundera sees it as evidence that Havel is determined to bring about his own defeat by an amoral system, as this is the best way of exhibiting his moral superiority:

Unlike reasonable (which, in his mind, is to say cowardly) people he is not afraid of defeat. After all, he is not so wretched as to yearn for victory. More precisely, he does not yearn to see the just cause which he champions achieve victory; for his own greatest victory lies in the very defeat of the thing he so passionately defends - only in the glare of the cataclysmic defeat of his just cause will the full misery of the world and the full glory of his character be illuminated.

Such moral exhibitionism is rampant in post-August Czechoslovakia, Kundera says, its practitioners including both 'perennial complainants against the regime' such as Havel, and formerly zealous Communists who are 'driven by bad consciences and a yearning to shout down their past. [. . .] The time has come to begin to discern between exhibitionism and true radicalism', he declares, and, with victory in

58 'Radikalismus a exhibicionismus', pp. 27-28.



TIM WEST 421

mind, to undertake a truly radical programme which will proceed from the 'antipodes' of Havel's three faUacies outlined earlier.

This last argument (and the only passage in the second half of Kundera's essay which pretends at an examination of Havel's ideas and not his personality), that Havel advocates gratuitously risky action in spite of the fact ¿hat he sees the situation as hopeless, stems from a willfully careless misreading of Havel's words. 'This is truly interesting', Kundera observes. 'Havel states that no hope has survived, and yet - unlike in most people - in him this arouses neither resignation nor despair but, on the contrary, an intensified hunger for action. But what good is action if no hope has survived?'60 One might just as easily ask Kundera: 'If some hope has survived, when does it become time to secure that hope through action?' Havel's point, which Kun- dera purposefully distorts, is that there is no hope of restoring what has been lost or of retaining whatever remains as long as the country continues along its present course, that is, if the Party is permitted to reassert its control over political and civic life. Therefore, Havel says, Czechs must halt this reversal by means of committed (or 'risky') action, thereby moving in a direction which is more hopeful. Yet Kundera seems uninterested in understanding Havel's argument, having become completely invested in defending ideas on which he had staked his public reputation two years earlier and which in 1969 were becoming less relevant with each day.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, completed three years after his emigration, Kundera finds a name for what he called 'moral exhibitionism' in 1969. He calls it litost, which can mean 'regret' or 'grief in Czech, and he defines it as 'a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery'. To illustrate he describes a child whose parents force him to take violin lessons. The child is not talented and, feeling humiliated by his teacher, he intentionally plays badly until his teacher, driven mad, throws him out the window. Falling to his death, the child is 'delighted' by the idea that his remorseful teacher will hang himself. 'If our counterpart is the stronger', Kundera explains, 'all we can do is choose circuitous revenge - the indirect blow, a murder by means of suicide. [. . .] Everything our teachers called heroism may only be [a] form of litosC The history of the Czechs, he adds, is

an endless story of rebellions against the stronger, a succession of glorious defeats that launched their history and led to ruin the very people who had

59 Ibid., pp. 28-29. Here Kundera paraphrases a distinction drawn by Sartre: The revolutionary wants to change the world [...]. The" rebel is careful to preserve the abuses from which he suffers so that he can go on rebelling against them.' Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, 1950, trans. Martin Turnell, New York, 1967, pp. 51-52. For a discussion of true radicalism versus 'zmystifikovany' radicalism in Czech history, see Vaclav Havel, Jaroslav Stfítecky and Milan Uhde, Trialog o radikalismu', Host do domu, 16, 1969, 6, pp. 32-36.

'Radikalismus a exhibicionismus', p. 28.



422 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION done the launching - is a story of litost. When in August 1968 thousands of Russian tanks occupied that amazing small country, I saw a slogan written on the walls of a town: 'We don't want compromise, we want victory!' You must understand, by then there was no more than a choice among several varieties of defeat, but this town rejected compromise and wanted victory! That was litost talking! A man possessed by it takes revenge by his own annihilation.61

A situation he once saw as containing 'tremendous hope for the future' he regards in retrospect as 'no more than a choice among several varieties of defeat'. Such a reassessment is reasonable enough. Yet one wonders at which point Kundera passed from feeling 'tremendous hope' to feeling none at all and whether, en route, he ever passed through a stage that was only a little hopeful, and whether this stage lasted long enough to merit risky action. In any event, his con- tempt has not abated for those who 'would suffer no compromise', although time and geography have added an element of detached condescension.

Before leaving 'Radicalism and Exhibitionism' it is necessary to mention the self-immolation of Jan Palach. The act of protest against the Soviet occupation occurred in the middle of January 1969 and it is impossible to discuss the national debate during the early months of that year without considering the effect of Palach's act. The journalist Alan Levy observed that, in an era when such events were occurring in Southeast Asia and the United States, it was unthinkable that a Central European would undertake such a step, 'particularly a Czech, with his people's instinct to survive and endure'.62 Arthur Miller, whose play The Crucible (called Ordeal by Fire in Czech) replaced the scheduled programme in the National Theatre after Palach's death, responded publicly when he heard someone criticize the suicide as a 'super-individual gesture'. His words were reprinted in Listy:

Palach's death was like a work of art. People, and often society, protest against a great work of art because it forces them to make comparisons - making them feel smaller if they don't tend towards greatness, freedom and truth. It provokes them and places such great demands on them that it puts them to shame ... A hero is a man sacrificed by others, which is why they deny him. A hero illuminates the truth, which is why he is exposed to fire and sacrifice.63

In March an essay by Emanuel Mandler entitled 'Death, Myth and Reality' ('Smrt, mytus a realita') appeared in Tvár, which had published Havel's 'Czech Destiny?' the previous month. Mandler believes that it

61 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1978, trans. Aaron Asher, New York, iqq6, pp. 206-07.

Levy, p. 341. Ibid., p. 349.



TIM WEST 423 is a mistake to call Palach's act a 'suicide' (sebevrazdd) because it was a social, rather than a private, act and therefore the term obët ('offering', 'sacrifice') is more apt. He ties the act not only to the martyrdom of Jan Hus and Jeronym of Prague but also to a broader European Christian tradition of personal engagement as a means of challenging others 'to draw in the most rigorous way their own conclusions', thus making it impossible for them to live willingly in 'hypocrisy and moral humiliation'. According to Mandler, Palach's act signifies two things: his death was a protest against an unacceptable reality and thus an assertion that this reality is 'alien, [. . .] unnatural and [therefore] temporary'. And his sacrifice was a challenge to others to patiently undertake the task of proving him right.64

The public answered the challenge with a spontaneous and massive, albeit short-lived, display of opposition to the regime, but the intellectuals, Mandler says, 'utterly failed' them:

If anyone had a responsibility at this point to carefully consider the meaning of Palach's challenge, then it was the intellectuals. They, more than anyone else, could have carried out the order of the day and provided the growing popular movement with practicable means of properly orienting itself and making specific its very broad objectives. It is no secret how shrewdly the students responded to this task [...]. Where was everyone else?65

Part of the answer, he says, can be found in the resolution issued by the Czechoslovak Writers' Union central committee, which met on 22 January in the days between Palach's death and his funeral, attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners. The movement that had suddenly taken shape, the pronouncement stated,

signifies a great moral renewal and, from an ethical standpoint, it is almost without parallel in our national history. [Yet] it can prevail only in coordi- nation with the national leadership. By the same token, the representatives of the policies initiated last January can attain the objectives they have set only in cooperation with this movement. [. . .] All of our energy and reason must be employed not in demonstrating our convictions but in bringing about the victory of our new ideals.66

In other words, Mandler says, noting the careless conflation of the present 'national leadership' with those who had been responsible for the reformist policies of the previous January, the Writers' Union reacted with its own challenge to do nothing. In passing he mentions an exception to this failure, a document entitled 'An Observation about Cooperation' ('Pfipomínka ke spolupráci') which was drawn

64 Emanuel Mandler, 'Smrt, mytus a realita', Tvár, 1969, 3, pp. 1-4 (pp. 2-4). 55 Ibid., p. 3. Üstfední vybor SCSS, 'Jen ve spolupráci', IÀsty, 2, 1969, 4, p. i.




up in protest, signed by Havel and seven other dissenting voices and published in Listy.67

The recollections of Carlos Fuentes, with whom Kundera had discussed recent events in the Podoli sauna in December, are helpful in reconstructing the mood that winter and they suggest an almost mechanical passivity on the part of the Union that is entirely in agreement with the character of the January resolution:

We were invited by the Union of Czech Writers during that strange period, from the autumn of 1968 to that final spring of 1969. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had been to Prague, as well as Nathalie Sarraute and other French novelists, also Günter Grass. The whole point was to make believe that nothing had happened, that although the Soviet troops were hidden in the woods near Prague, the Duböek government could still save something, not admit defeat - still make a go of it with the humorous perseverance of the soldier Schweik.68

Whatever Kundera's role in the charade of normalcy perpetuated by the Writers' Union and in the preparation of the January resolution, it is difficult to read 'Czech Destiny' as anything other than an endorse- ment of these policies. And it is exceedingly difficult to read parts of 'Radicalism and Exhibitionism' and believe that, as he prepared his rebuke of a 'moral exhibitionist' whose greatest desire is to see the 'misery of the world and the glory of his character [. . .] illuminated' in the 'glare of [his own] cataclysmic defeat', he did not have Jan Palach very much in mind.

Epic and Novel In 1969 Kundera completed the novel Life Is Elsewhere, which represents his renunciation of the youthful lyricism that defined both his early poetry and the radicalism of his generation in the years following the Second World War. Yet even as he was cutting that chastening thread to his past, he was pursuing the lyrical chimera of national ideology by writing 'Czech Destiny', a work in which these dissonant impulses are plainly and involuntarily juxtaposed with one another. It employs florid, hyperbolic language as a means of praising the 'dispassionate rationalism' of the Czech spirit. It boasts that the Czechs are among the least chauvinistic nations in Europe while proposing a role for them that is breathtaking in its messianism. It invokes the criticism of Schauer while it evokes the cynicism of Tomek. It urges optimism in the face of uncertainty, having nonetheless declared that the struggle for sovereignty is an 'eternal' one and having fatalistically cited permanent historical necessities as the root of the present crisis.

67 Antonin Brousek et al., 'Pfipomínka ke spolupráci', Listo, 2, i960, 5-6, p. 2. 68 Fuentes, p. 261.



TIM WEST 425 With the emergence of the novel, Kundera has written, ca great

European art took shape that is nothing other than the investigation of [man's] being'.69 His collection of essays and interviews entitled The Art of the Novel is an exploration of the genre as an artistic form born of modernity, an era characterized by the 'apprehension of] the world [. . .] as a question to be answered'. The universe, previously believed to be the complete and perfect creation of an omnipotent God, was increasingly understood to be chaotic and ever-changing; human behaviour, no longer guided by universal and immutable values, was suddenly left to the 'fearsome ambiguity' of 'myriad relative truths'. This moral ambiguity - and the irony that accompanies it - lies at the heart of the novel as a means of philosophical inquiry.71

Bakhtin formulates a similar explanation of the novel which he contrasts to the epic, proposing that the genres represent two radically opposed ways of perceiving the world. The epic, according to Bakhtin, is marked by three formal characteristics that distinguish it from the novel: it describes a national epic past that is 'absolute and complete'; it is marked by an 'epic distance' that is unbridgeable to the present; and its medium is tradition - 'sacred and sacrosanct, [. . .] and demanding a pious attitude toward itself.'72

Events and heroes receive their value and grandeur precisely through this association with the past, the source of all authentic reality and value. They withdraw themselves, so to speak, from the present day with all its inconclusiveness, its indecision, its openness, its potential for re-thinking and re-evaluating.73

The novel came into its own during the Renaissance, Bakhtin says, when 'the present first began to feel with great clarity and awareness an incomparably closer proximity [. . .] to the future than to the past'.74 The novelist, 'drawn toward everything that is not yet completed', employs a form which is 'both critical and self-critical', is in 'living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the open-ended present)', and 'is permeated with laughter, irony and humour', which enable it 'to put to the test and to expose ideas and ideologues'.75

In her monograph on the Soviet novel, Katerina Clark cites this dichotomy of forms when she identifies a litany of 'contradictory 69 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 1986, trans. Linda Asher, 2nd edn, New York,

2000, pp. 4-5. This work is not to be confused with Kundera s similarly titled monograph on Vladislav

Vanõura, Umént románu: cesta Vladislava Vancury za velkou epikou, Prague, 1961. 71 The Art of the Novel, pp. 3-6. Bakhtin, pp. 13-ib. 16 Ibid., p. 18. " Ibid., p. 40. 75 Tl • I _ /* _ _ lDia., pp. 20-27.



426 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION features' of the Soviet Socialist Realist novel that are attributable, she says, to a 'fatal split' in the genre's mode as conceived by its theoretical founders. By striving to depict both 'what is' (reality, the novelistic world) and 'what ought to be' (idealized reality, the epic world), the Soviet novel straddles the unbridgeable distance between the novel and the epic with their opposing perspectives, thereby strain- ing the possibilities of the genre and dooming it to a kind of 'modal schizophrenia'.76

Can it be that Kundera is the victim of a similar split, and that this might explain the paradoxes that characterize 'Czech Destiny'? It is interesting to re-examine Havel's criticism in view of the framework suggested by Bakhtin:

Whenever a Czech patriot lacks the courage [. . .] to look the cruel but open present in the face, [. . .] he turns to a happier but already closed past when all were as one [...]. Of course today's struggle is open-ended, of course the result is as yet unknown, the judgement of the powerful and the judgement of history have yet to declare themselves. Of course this committed and risk-laden stance is built on doubts, for it springs from true criticism. [. . .] To be truly pessimistic [. . .] is to be always prepared to trade vigorous engagement with the open present for the mawkish reliving of the closed past.77 In Bakhtinian terms, the essential paradox of Kundera's rhetoric is

that he has created an epic for a people whose distinguishing national characteristic is, he insists, its defiance of epic values. By embracing 'what ought to be', he is unfaithful to 'what is' and, by invoking an imagined destiny, he implicates himself in its realization.

Clark notes that a group's 'absolute past' need not necessarily be located in the temporali past, and she cites Eliade's theory describing the division of time in cultures of traditional societies into the profane present and a transcendent Great Time. This Great Time, while usually situated in the past, may appear in both the past and future, particularly in modern messianic movements. This is true, Clark notes, of Stalinist Russia, which looked to past moments such as the Revolu- tion and certain episodes in the Stalin hagiography as well as, of course, to the Great and Glorious Future.78 The myth woven by Kundera in 'Czech Destiny' and 'Radicalism and Exhibitionism' is such a case: one that appeals to the collective memory of an idealized past, as well as to the hearer's forbearance in order to bring about the renewal of that past age. 76 Katerina Clark, 'What Socialist Realism Is and What Led to Its Adoption as the

Official Method of Soviet Literature', in ead., The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, Chicago, IL, 1985, pp. 27-45 (P- 37).

Havel, Cesky udëlr , pp. 193-94, X97- Clark, pp. 39-40.



TIM WEST 427

The intellectual and moral distance travelled by Kundera after 1967, when he first began to see the dilemma in the terms outlined in his Writers' Congress address, is considerable and is underscored by the following excerpt from an interview with Antonin Liehm given over a year before he wrote 'Czech Destiny':

Recently, while speaking with some Western intellectuals who expressed remarkable understanding and sympathy for the anti-cultural work of the Chinese Red Guards, I knew I was witnessing that vice of passionate self-denial which has proven so destructive in my own life. [. . .] The intellectual in our half of Europe lives in a quite different situation: he has already been suppressed many times, not only by himself but by circumstances; he has been rejected theoretically, practically, even economically. And thus he was finally forced into a situation that left him no alternative but to begin to understand his own importance, his own lot, to start defending his own liberty.79

It is a forceful passage, portentous in the danger it perceives as well as for the moral courage it promises, and for this reason it is ultimately disappointing as well. By the time he writes 'Radicalism and Exhibi- tionism', Kundera, like the child humiliated by his violin teacher and like other Czechs after August 1968, has had to confront 'the sudden sight of [his] own misery', and he has decided that 'understanding his own importance' need not necessarily mean 'defending his own liberty'.

He is persuaded that Havel's activism represents a form of narcissistic self-assertion that is the natural counterpart of the 'passionate self-denial' he mentions in the Liehm interview and is, ultimately, equally defeatist. Yet a careful reading of these essays suggests that it is Kundera who is courting defeat, and that his stormy reply to Havel's essay is nothing but a tortured assessment of his own condition. Even if one ignores the ways in which their respective commitments to the Czech national cause evinced themselves during the years of Normal- ization, one need look no further than these essays in order to realize that if one of these men is more preoccupied with his own public image and with the judgement of history than with the business of effecting real and positive change, it is Kundera.

'Outside his destiny', Bakhtin writes, '[the epic hero] is nothing; he is, therefore, a function of the plot fate assigns him; he cannot become the hero of another destiny or another plot.'80 Lacking the existential confidence of a messianic 'large nation' that can 'rest in the security of its vastness',81 Kundera's Czechs must surrender to the destiny from

79 Quoted in Antonin J. Liehm, 'Milan Kundera', in ibid., The Politics of Culture, trans. Peter Kussi, New York, 1068, p. 137. 80 Bakhtin, p. 36. 01 Kundera, 'Cesky udël', p. 5.



428 KUNDERA, HAVEL & THE CZECH QUESTION which they derive their ostensible moral strength: the destiny of insur- mountable weakness. It is a weakness that has grown comfortable to Kundera and it imparts to him the illusion of a transcendent vision that he will exploit in die years to follow, earning the mantle of the prin- cipled martyr while in exile. The notion that we direct our own fates for better or worse is a 'painful thought', Rebecca West observed, 'implying that the world we have embarked on is a leaky ship and may not keep afloat'.82 Kundera's unwillingness to embrace this notion in the winter of 1968-69 represents a severe abdication of his moral responsibility as an intellectual in the public sphere and as one who had only recently been a leading advocate of reform within the Communist Party. Painful or not, it is a notion consistent with the spirit of scepticism that Kundera claims to espouse and fundamental to any discussion that would pretend to resolve existential questions of the kind the Czechs faced in 1968.

82 Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia, New York, 1982, p. 900.



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Destiny as Alibi: Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and the 'Czech Question' after 1968

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