Jacques Rupnik pays homage to 'great legacy' of celebrated novelist, thinker & friend Milan Kundera
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00:00 Joining us was a man who advised then Czech President Václav Havel after the Velvet Revolution.
00:07 Jacques Rupnik, professor at Sciences Po, is with us.
00:12 Thanks for joining us here on France 24.
00:15 You knew Milan Kundera very well.
00:17 You were with him just a week ago.
00:21 That's right.
00:22 And it's a sad day for not just his friends, but it's a sad day, I think, for those who were attached to his literary genius and to his thinking about Europe.
00:38 So I think this is a great legacy of this man, both as a novelist and as a thinker.
00:46 And the two complemented each other.
00:50 He talked about the novel as being the art form where you can't cheat because it's so intimate.
00:59 And it was his intimate writing that, again, broke through the iron curtain.
01:07 That's right. He he he made this distinction between poetry, the lyrical art.
01:15 You can write wonderful verses, but they don't have to be true.
01:23 Whereas the novel is the art of truth.
01:27 You cannot you cannot produce a novel based on complete nonsense.
01:35 That was his his his view of of the novel, which I think you had mentioned in your introduction, the unbearable lightness of being.
01:45 This is probably the book that is best known around the world.
01:49 For me, the best or the one that I feel most attached to is the joke.
01:54 The novel he published in France in 68, but in Prague the year before.
02:00 And in that novel, he basically makes a portrait of the country in the whole post-war era, as seen by the four four different characters.
02:13 Each of them has a different version of that story.
02:17 And that's, I think, why he's a great writer.
02:21 He's not the narrator with a message telling you this is what you have to think about it.
02:26 But he shows the complexities, the ironies, of course, of of history and that tragic moments, too.
02:35 So that is Kundera, the novelist. Yeah.
02:39 He just a word on the joke, because it's in 1967.
02:44 So this is before the Prague Spring and he pulls no punches in that book.
02:51 That's right. I mean, he the novel starts with a postcard that a young man sends to his girlfriend, who is a very enthusiastic communist.
03:04 And he writes, you know, the optimism is the opium of the people.
03:13 Long live Trotsky. And it's supposed to be it's a kind of joke.
03:17 And it's and he he sends it off. Of course, she has a dutiful communist, you know, shows it immediately to her superiors.
03:25 And and the whole machinery starts working. He gets kicked out from the university.
03:30 He becomes an unperson, et cetera. And the whole book is about the revenge he wants to take on the person that expelled him from the university then.
03:43 And of course, being Kundera, it's a revenge that falls flat on its face.
03:48 I will not describe any more, but I invite your viewers to read the joke.
03:55 Great, great novel. But I think that what is important about Kundera is not just his novels, it is essays.
04:02 He's thinking about Europe. He's a great European.
04:07 And since he lived both and wrote Czechoslovakia, he wrote in Czech and then he has his life in France and he did something very daring.
04:19 He shifted to French and wrote beautifully in French.
04:25 Sorry, and he wrote beautifully in French and he wrote very well in French.
04:29 So this is so he's a bridge between the two Europe's.
04:33 And he is really famous for an essay he wrote in 1983, and which is called The Tragedy of Central Europe or the Kidnapped West.
04:43 What he meant by that, he says in his essay is Central Europe is culturally Western, politically East and geographically in the center.
04:55 This is a tragedy of Central Europe. It is sort of torn apart between belonging to the Soviet fold and culturally being Western.
05:04 And you could say that 1989 is a way for Central Europe to reconcile its culture, its politics and its geography.
05:18 So that was an essay which incidentally was republished now and has had 20 translations in one year.
05:29 So you have an you have an author who wrote something 40 years ago.
05:34 It was not republished since it's published now, translated in 20 languages.
05:40 And you had to ask yourself why. Two reasons.
05:44 One is what he describes about Central Europe, the tragedy of small nations whose existence is not guaranteed.
05:55 So they survive through the richness of their culture, to their contribution to European culture.
06:00 Why is this interesting today? Because this what he was writing about Czechoslovakia, Hungary, to Hungary, to others.
06:11 It applies to Ukraine today because the question of a small nation is not a question of size, the number of its inhabitants.
06:20 But the idea that it is a nation whose existence is not self-evident is not guaranteed.
06:27 That is the shared predicament of Ukraine today and the nations of Central Europe before.
06:34 So this is, I think, a very interesting insight. And the second insight concerns Russia, because for him, Russia is the constitutive other for Central Europe.
06:46 It's a he he says it's a different civilization. So he doesn't say it's superior, inferior.
06:54 So it's another civilization, but which happens to be threatening for the nations of Central Europe.
07:01 Well, again, I think what he has to say about Russia is very relevant for today.
07:06 And it explains why the essay is re-translated, republished all over Europe today and beyond.
07:15 I mean, the latest news is it's translated in Thailand, in Korea, in Brazil, etc., etc.
07:22 So this is an author who can write about Europe, change the mental geography of Europeans through his writings, through his essays and become read worldwide and appreciated as a great European worldwide.
07:43 A French, Czech. Yeah, that's something that speaks to somebody like me. But beyond that, a great European.
07:50 Jacques Rupnik, he spoke to you. He didn't speak much to journalists.
07:55 So is there one anecdote in particular? The man who moved to Paris in the 1970s, one crucial moment during that arc of history you've just described, where you bumped into Milan Kundera, where you exchanged with him.
08:11 Well, you know, the exchanges were multiple, but I think what I recall from all of them is his ironic detachment.
08:25 You know, he would probe, he would try a subject and let you develop it.
08:32 And once you discover that you've gone perhaps too far in your argument, he would have a little smile. And yeah, he knew where he wanted to get you in your argument.
08:43 And I think that that's that's of course, it's his very playful approach to human relations and to ideas, you know.
08:54 So, yeah, so that I think is. And of course, I think a great moment for him was his.
09:07 The moment he lost his Czechoslovak citizenship, he was deprived of it by the regime.
09:15 And soon after that, adopted French. And, you know, for many people, including Kundera, exile is a difficult thing.
09:23 People think exile, oh, you just go and you you are you become successful and you are you know, you escape the harshness of the of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
09:35 Well, exile can be very difficult. Yet he would consider exile also as something liberating.
09:44 And in the end, he got that citizenship, that Czech citizenship back after, of course, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
09:52 I want to thank you so much for sharing those insights and those moments with us, Jakub Nik.
09:59 My pleasure. Stay with us. We'll be crossing very soon to the Lithuanian capital where the future of Europe is on the table in a keynote speech that Joe Biden is going to be giving very shortly.
10:13 There you see his Lithuanian counterpart addressing the crowd in the courtyard of Vilnius University.
10:19 You're watching France 24.
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