I was surprised to learn that the novelist Milan Kundera celebrated his 90th birthday on Monday. I had no idea he was still alive. He has taken up residence in that old people's home that many former luminaries of western culture now occupy — the one with the sign above the door saying ‘Forgotten, but not gone'. In Kundera's case, his decline into obscurity is probably connected to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Czech émigré was all the rage in the mid-1980s when he was a critic of his country's brutal regime. Now that the Soviet Union and its satellite states are a distant memory, he seems less relevant.
I think the time is ripe for a Kundera revival, although not for the obvious reason, which is that communism is back in vogue. I think a good case can be made along those lines — and, indeed, the novelist Ewan Morrison has made it. In a recent essay, Morrison points out that Kundera warned of the dangers of airbrushing inconvenient facts from history in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. We see this today with attempts to gloss over the genocides perpetrated by Stalin and Mao.
In China, for instance, there is only one memorial to the victims of the Great Famine (1959-62), in which up to 43 million people died — a homemade structure, built by a farmer, about the size of a garden shed. As Kundera wrote: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.'
But even more topical than The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is Kundera's first novel, The Joke. Published in 1967, it concerns the fate of a student called Ludvik Jahn, who falls foul of the communist authorities when he makes an inappropriate joke. On a postcard he dashes off to his girlfriend, who is at a Communist party training camp, he writes: ‘Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!' When this is communicated to party officials back in Prague, he is dismissed from his post at the students' union, then kicked out of his university.
That, in turn, means he can no longer defer his military service, and he soon finds himself in a special unit of the Czechoslovakian army reserved for young men considered ‘enemies of socialism'. As he's laboring in a coal mine alongside his fellow ne'er-do-wells, he realizes that a silly joke he didn't give a moment's thought to has completely changed his life — and not for the better.
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