"It is extremely easy to condemn gulags, but to reject the totalitarian poesy which leads to the gulag by way of paradise is as difficult as ever," Milan Kundera declared to Philip Roth in an afterword to his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980). The notion that the origins of the totalitarian impulse lie in man's age-old longing to return to the Garden of Eden is now a familiar one. Yet the use of the word "poesy" in this context jars. Perhaps because there does not seem to be an awful lot of poetry in, say, Marx's lip-smacking invocations of "force" as the "midwife of history"; nor are Hitler's hate-filled rants in Mein Kampf particularly redolent of lyricism.
But such prosaic unsubtleties are of no moment to Kundera. In the same interview he makes his point even more emphatic: "People like to say: Revolution is beautiful, it is only the terror arising from it which is evil. But this is not true. The evil is already present in the beautiful, hell is already contained in the dream of paradise, and if we wish to understand the essence of hell we must examine the essence of the paradise from which it originated." In other words, behind every death squad, behind every concentration camp, behind every boot crashing into a human face, stands a noble, inspiring vision of man living in harmony with himself and with his fellowman. With a vengeance, then, Milan Kundera, formerly a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, has embraced an awesomely disenchanted view of the world. All ideals, everything high-minded, serious, and purposeful are to be mistrusted. Whoever still speaks of Being in terms that appear to connote substance, quiddity, matter, man's inescapable destiny, will as likely as not turn out to be working for the secret police.
Un-utopian Vision
Do the five words that comprise the title The Unbearable Lightness of Being suggest that Kundera has finally hit upon the kind of un-inspiring, un-utopian, un-serious, and un-ideal vision of the world whose universal acceptance would ensure that never again would his erstwhile countrymen--or, come to that, his newfound neighbors in Pairs--have to suffer under the likes of Reinhard Heydrich and the SS, Klement Gottwald and the SNB, Leonid Brezhnev and the Red Army? To judge by the ecstatic reception that this, his most recent, novel enjoyed when it appeared in 1984, as one critic tried to outdo the other in thinking up ever more extravagant terms of praise, one might indeed have been tempted to conclude that the English critic George Steiner is right: Living under a totalitarian regime gives a writer a spiritual depth and an imaginative power denied to him by our own "free"--but irredeemably shallow--societies. Yet, strangely enough, though Kundera is one of the most "intellectual" of contemporary novelists and though the "profundity" and "seriousness" of his work has been repeatedly attested to, hardly anyone has ventured to examine the cogency of his metaphysical claims, in particular his insistence on ascribing just about everything that is wrong with the world--yesterday, today, and tomorrow--to man's longing for utopia.
In part, this reluctance can be explained by the seductiveness of Kundera's undoubted charm and intelligence. In part, also, one does not wish to be accused of showing bad manners toward a refugee from "paradise"--a country fenced in by barbed wire and minefields, in other words--by appearing reluctant to draw just those lessons from Kundera's particular experience of enchantment and disenchantment with utopias that he
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