He stopped writing in his native Czech language and switched to French, as a kind of final acceptance of exile. The Prague spring was an illusion, and then pain. Czechoslovakia was a difficult homeland, because on the other side of the Iron Curtain, it was less afraid of spies than of being told by its neighbors. Milan Kundera (1929-2023) described communism with his whole body, because that is what he suffered: as a brutal, incarnate and life-destroying dictatorship. But perhaps this is precisely where the lucidity of his work comes from: the constant search for the metaphysical meaning of individuality.

His relief was humor, as understood through the Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and a treatise on the spiritual and cerebral freedom with which a certain vision of literature can contribute to the life of a community, generally prone to fanaticism and unwavering seriousness proposed by totalitarianism. Therefore, he presented humor as the most liberating individual experience, as a catharsis in which memory itself becomes able to breathe, to project a path towards the future. Kundera understood that we laugh and mock ourselves to keep walking, to leave behind.

But yes, he preferred to think about the individual, at a time when writing was supposed to convey the collective passions and energy of historical achievement. Faced with the literary movement of an epoch, he gave priority to the poet and his most intimate crisis, his inevitable disintegration, his possibility of redemption. The poet in Kundera’s work is a young sailor in the silence and storm of language, for whom only wandering awaits sometimes, and if he were to learn or understand anything, it would be for no return. A poet grows when he loses, because poetry is a mystery.

He thought deeply about the radical autonomy of the novel, which he considered an intellectual synthesis in which all aspects of thought, such as poetry or philosophy, as well as the sharp evolution of life, are combined with its official story and, above all, with its complex counter-story. He preserved the Kafkaesque notion of the novel as an ax on ice, but explored the healing of those wounds, for example, through eroticism, which is lived as an aesthetic, historical, deep philosophical and metaphysical experience. And it talks about coincidences – today we would say synchronicities – in which life is revealed as a solution to a puzzle.

I once went to Prague in his and Kafka’s footsteps. Once, as one of his characters, I wrote a horoscope for a newspaper, not so much with superstition as with desire. Sometimes he helped me realize that the novel is an ontological experience, which is born from the alchemical inspiration for beauty. Andrés Ortiz Lemos believes that Kundera’s first and great love was beauty and its strange ways of manifestation, and it was precisely this inalienable attachment to beauty that allowed him to identify ugliness, such as that of totalitarianism. In 2019, he returned the Czech citizenship that was previously taken away from him. They didn’t give him the Nobel. He never needed it. (OR)