The Two Milan Kunderas | Hacker News Reader

The Two Milan Kunderas

drb.ie

44 pointsapollinaire16 comments

Yeah, well. The Dvořáček affair is certainly a serious allegation. Yet not something the general public can be a judge for. Given that the Czech authorities and courts did not pursue it, the rest of us can't either, if only for the lack of information.

As to the rest of it — authors routinely revise their works. The very notion that readers (or critics) get any say in this strikes me as bizarre. They get to observe the process and decide which version they like better, but nothing more. Ne supra crepidam.

> Yet not something the general public can be a judge for. Given that the Czech authorities and courts did not pursue it, the rest of us can't either

No come on. We're not a court of law and have no obligation to act within the constraints of one. There is enough information that people can reasonably believe one way or the other based on it, and judge accordingly.

Between Kundera and Havel [1] I am picking Havel 7 days a week. If you have a bit of time give read to Havel's timeless 'Power of the Powerless' [2] which challenges Kundera's world view.

[1] https://reason.com/2023/07/14/milan-kunderas-eternal-feud-wi...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120107141633/http://www.vaclav...

Summer Meditations deeply affected me as a student studying politics. Unbearable Lightness of being had a similar effect on me a few years later.

Depends on the rubric. Kundera was a much better writer.

To me, Kundera is a better writer. Havel is a better thinker and better person overall.

There is also the "Dating without Kundera" essay by idlewords, although I found him a bit unfair (but still hilarious) here:

https://idlewords.com/2005/11/dating_without_kundera.htm

> And since you don't yet know one another too well, you try to choose a shotgun of a book that fires a wide pattern, thematically speaking.

Excellent indeed.

Very good but Moskva—Petushki as a dating book? I don't think so.

"but also in his determined ‘erasures’ of past writing, be it private letters, early poetry or inconvenient passages in reissued essays and novels."

It occurs to me that there are a couple of stories in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that turn on this. The better match is a story about a man wishing to retrieve letters from a mistress he has broken with and would prefer to regret. One might also count the story about the woman who wishes to retrieve letters exchanged with her husband--only the letters are in Czechoslovakia and she is in France.

So there is assumption that 20 something year old, living with information propaganda portraying West as class-divided, colonial enemy, should somehow know the 'enemy' spy was a good guy? Especially considering this Dvoracek case was in the 50s with communists just emerging victorious against horrors of fascism making it quite easy to sell the story of social unity and equality. I imagine many young Czeck people would have bought into this way of life during the early communist rule before oppression became more obvious. Can we judge them for it?

First, doesn't this assume that Dvoracek was in fact a spy, deserter, etc.? Second, should we give Lewis Strauss a pass for his treatment of Oppenheimer on account of the Cold War?

(Edit: I know nothing about the Dvoracek case, having heard the name only just now.)

FWIW, a good chunk od western intellectual elite bought into communism as well, and this state lasted for half a century or more, way into 1950s.

> was in the 50s with communists just emerging victorious against horrors of fascism

If by "emerging victorious" you mean forcefully taking power with a Coup, ready to perpetrate their own horrors to stay in power at all cost, then we agree..

Also considering that the communists were backed by the Soviets, with decades of mass-purges of their own, it possibly didn't take much imagination to understand the type of regime being supported.

> I imagine many young Czeck people would have bought into this way of life

So much so that the communists need a coup to gain power.

It's very hard to judge someone young and naive in the 50s from today's point of view.

On the other hand, Kundera was an intellectual. For some uneducated it could have been waved away as nescience, but not for him. The criminal nature of the regime was not hidden. It put people in labor camps (a sentence which was often deadly) just for being a clergyman, a hero WW2 pilot liberating Europe or just for having homestead. It banned writers and other artists. On the other hand, the judicial murder of Milada Horakova [1] which I believe might have opened eyes to many hasn't happened yet, trailing Dvoracek's arrest just by few months.

Like I am disgusted by some of the effects of modern unbridled capitalism but I would not support any movement that restricts the liberty of fellow humans in such way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milada_Hor%C3%A1kov%C3%A1

Funny coincidence; two or three weeks ago I was browsing some books for sale at a Japanese centre, just looking at titles. On the spine of one paperback I see 存在の耐えられない軽さ (Sonzai no taerarenai karusa). I'm like, existence's unbearable lightness ... what? ... Ohhhh! That must be Kundera, wow. Looked closer; yup.

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