Alena Dvořáková writes for the Dublin Review of Books about a controversial writer:
There have for a while now been two Milan Kunderas, characters so different as to suggest Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There is Kundera the good European, celebrated as an eminent writer, a defender of freedom of speech, a voice of remembering against the politics of forgetting, and a spokesman for a mythical entity called Central Europe which could yet save the West from decline – if only the Westerners would heed its call to return to their values. If the good Kundera has any blemish, it might be his representations of women – but for every repulsive Helena, Irena or Laura, his defenders will say, you get a fascinating Sabina, Tamina or Agnes, so the man could surely not be a complete misogynist. Then there is the other, darker Kundera, a libertine and philanderer for whom misogyny has not been much of an issue because he has greater sins to hide – at the very least he is viewed with suspicion ‘back home’ as the great mythmaker who made his name on the back of elegant but less than truthful simplifications of the reality of communism, as well as fibs about his own past.
The good Kundera – the best-known twentieth century Czech writer – has been ubiquitous, his work available in many languages. Meanwhile, the darker Kundera – a constant presence on the Czech scene, the Kundera of Laughable Loves and The Joke who later sold out – has mostly skulked in the background, among the people of whom we know nothing, muttering in their incomprehensible Czech. This Kundera-in-hiding might make an occasional appearance in the writing of Western critics, but mostly [only to] be dismissed as a spectre without substance, the creation of those left behind (sometimes also called dissidents) who, filled with envy, cannot but consider the willing and successful emigrant as a traitor to the mother country. Imagine, he even dared to switch his writing language from Czech to French! And he chose not to return home after 1989! The bad faith of these Czech begrudgers would be inferred from their attempts to smear Kundera’s good name with baseless accusations, for example that he was a police informer. […]
But it is only recently, and on the Czech side, following the publication in 2020 of Jan Novák’s controversial biography (in Czech) of the first half of Kundera’s life (1929-1975), that the two Kunderas have been confronted one with the other. The polemic that ensued made one thing clear: the good Kundera is an idol with feet of clay whose demolition is long overdue.
Novák’s biography should be required reading for everyone interested in Kundera or his work. He has managed to avoid the Stockholm syndrome that so often turns critics and biographers into Kundera’s willing captives, reduced to quoting or paraphrasing the master’s words. Whatever reservations one might have about some of his facts and interpretations, he has assembled an incredible amount of relevant material – from extant secret police files to invaluable testimonies by friends, lovers, colleagues and more casual acquaintances – and skilfully used it to come up with the first even remotely convincing portrait of Kundera, unrivalled in detail and informativeness. Crucially, Novák has succeeded in placing Kundera’s habitual responses to events and topics in the appropriate context, in a way that illuminates the difficult times as well as the author’s choices. There is now a better chance than ever that a new Kundera might emerge: one who is less of an idol, more of a fallible human being; a writer whose words are to be examined (rather than rehearsed) to get a better measure of his ideas and images of humanity.
I remember enjoying The Unbearable Lightness of Being back in the ’80s, when everybody was reading it, but I don’t remember much about it; at any rate, it’s interesting to get an inside (Czech) view on him.
“Novák’s biography should be required reading for everyone interested in Kundera or his work” is alas an overly ambitious proposal if it has not yet been translated into any language other than Czech …
I read multiple works by Kundera back in the Eighties and enjoyed them at the time, but have not gone back to them since at least the early Nineties and have no good sense of whether I would still enjoy them or instead find that they’d aged poorly. Perhaps relatedly, I have no sense of whether he is someone who is still attracting new (non-Czech) readers who were not yet born when he first became well known to Western audiences or just ended up stuck with a certain generational-cohort fanbase that has aged in place.
I’ve often been reminded of the forced, snuffling laughter of two high schoolers in the Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and it remains for me a symbol of settings in which attitudes are subject to policing.
The rest of Kundera I too have forgotten.
Through his L’Art du Roman, I discovered Witold Gombrowicz, whom I consider one of the most special and unusual writers that I read.
the best-known twentieth century Czech writer
That strikes me as doubtful. Is he really better known worldwide than Rilke or Kafka?
The pair of them are not Czech writers. They were German writers. It is hard for Americans to see the world from the blood rather than soil point of view. And here the language is the main determiner. But there were quite famous early 20th century writers like Hašek and Čapek and another one, Havel, famous mostly not for his literary works, but a famous writer in a sense as well.
Čapek was not a great literary innovator or anything, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed almost every piece of his that I’ve read.
The pair of them are not Czech writers. They were German writers.
What of Korzeniowski, then? Was he a Polish writer (by blood), a Russian writer (by soil), or a British writer (by language)? None of these labels seem to fit.
Čapek was not a great literary innovator or anything
Certainly R.U.R. was innovative.
“when everybody was reading it”
LH, wow.
Here “everybody” began reading him – and Murakami somewhere around 2000.
Not only he does not seem to be the “best known” Czech writer – he seems to be the “currenly fashionable” one.
Drasvi, I remember looking for Russian translations of Kundera in Moscow in 1991, on the theory that a Russian translation ought to be closer to the Czech than an English translation. Plenty of other dissident and anti-Communist writers were being translated and published, so I assumed THE Eastern European (as we then thought of him) writer that absolutely EVERYONE (who had any literary pretension) read must have reached Russia. But apparently not, I never did find a Russian translation.
Fairly or unfairly, Kundera and Martin Amis are linked for me. They were both very popular with similar crowds in the late 1980s, vaguely misogynistic, and I suspect no one under 40 reads either of them today.
The pair of them are not Czech writers. They were German writers.
No, they were both Austrian writers. You wouldn’t call Mark Twain an „English“ writer because he wrote in English.
“any literary pretension”
I remember someone attempted praicing him in presence of my friend (studied Classics and set some records for snobbery). He was quite dismissive (I don’t know if he even read him*. I did not but I also haven’t watched Star Wars).
I am sure there are such characters among English speakers as well:)
*Or wait…. perhaps I confused everything and he DID and I asked about his opinion…
Then indeed even he.
just to add my two cents about canon, reputation, whatever – like others, i would have thought of havel, capek, hasek, and kafka before this guy. in fact, i didn’t even know he was czech!
and this is not to contradict what was said before, but to add to it – i believe conrad was born in what today is ukraine.
Is he really better known worldwide than Rilke or Kafka?
Are you really being serious or just provocative? As D.O. implies, nobody (except apparently AG) thinks of them as Czech.
in fact, i didn’t even know he was czech!
That’s odd, but it’s your personal thing, not an indication of general reputation.
LH, wow.
Is it that surprising that Kundera was popular at different times in the US and Russia?
Not only he does not seem to be the “best known” Czech writer – he seems to be the “currenly fashionable” one.
That… doesn’t make sense. He’s fashionable but not well known? (I presume you’re talking about Russia.) And who is the “best known” Czech writer according to you?
Havel’s fame in Anglophone countries may largely depend on his non-literary activities, but OTOH that he was a literary figure who due to contingent historical circumstances then found himself in a political role that a writer in a less dysfunctional and historically-troubled society probably would not have is an integral part of his reputation as a political figure. And also led to increased sales-in-translation of some of his not-obviously-political writings.
Sure. But I doubt he was ever more famous than Kundera as a writer.
I admit that putting an author in a national/ethnic frame can be a tricky business. Americans are by default writers in English and saying that someone is an American author if they write in Spanish, and not adding anything, is plain misleading. Irish writers are by default the ones who write in English, not Gaelic. What language do Swiss authors write in? Not at all clear. But not distinguishing Czech/Prague writers by language before 20c’s hell broke loose can be done only as a joke.
“That… doesn’t make sense. He’s fashionable but not well known? (I presume you’re talking about Russia.) And who is the “best known” Czech writer according to you?”
No, it does:
Trump is better known globally than, say, the Beatles.
Before him Obama was better known than the Beatles.
Before him…
and so on. It makes sense to distinguish these kinds of fame.
But I omitted an important part: she said “twentieth century”, so what I meant is that in 20th century we read differnet Czech authors.
When a translated novel (say, Harry Potter) all of a sudden becomes popular here, I by default assume that it is because it became popular globally at about the same time.
It never occured to me that there is such a huge gap for this specific novel.
“Kafka” – I do think of him as a Czech author. Among other things.
Rilke lived in many places (WP says he spent in Prague his childhood and then a few years as a teenager) but Kafka is an author from Prague.
@D.O. …and I totally can imagine myself informing someone that Kafka is an author from Prague without telling her that he wrote in German. I also can imagine myself saying that he wrote in German without saying that he’s a Jew, or telling that he is a Jew without mentioning the rest.
Because he was still living there, Kafka presumably became a citizen of the First Czechoslovak Republic when it emerged in late 1918 and held that citizenship for the last few years of his life. But in that polity’s first national census (in 1921), barely 65% of the total population was either Czech or Slovak. By 1950 that proportion had increased to over 90%, due to the combined effects of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and theft of territory by Stalin. Perhaps it would have made some sense by the time Kafka was sent across the border to die in a sanitarium in Austria to talk about a “Czechoslovakian” national identity that tried to comprehend the millions of residents who like Kafka were neither Czech nor Slovak, but not a “Czech” one.
Rilke had been gone from Prague/Bohemia for a long time before the degringolade of 1918 and spent most of his post-1918 life in Switzerland. I doubt he ever acquired a Czechoslovakian passport.
@hat: “best-known … Czech writer” seems to me pretty ambiguous as between “best-known Czech who is widely known to be a writer” and “best-known Czech known solely for their literary work and not for anything else.” You wouldn’t think that e.g. Martina Navratilova would be a candidate either way even though she has authored or co-authored a number of books in a number of genres while having name recognition among many who have never heard of either Havel or Kundera etc., but Havel’s not a pure non-literary celebrity who incidentally wrote memoirs, mystery novels, and how-to-lose-weight-and-stay-fit books on the side.
Who’s the “best-known 20th century Slovak writer,” by the way?
In the translation and language-services business, multiple times a Czech client has insisted to me that a text meant for English-speaking audiences reference Hašek and Švejk. Czechs seem to believe that Hašek is still widely read outside their borders, and that foreigners recognize Švejk as iconic as Czechs do. I have had to explain that, no, relatively few people today know this book.
Mr. Brewer’s point about Havek thrust unexpectedly to a political role, and that perhaps driving sales of his books, reminds me of a case that might be the opposite. Léopold Sédar Senghor’s role as president of Senegal so eclipsed his work as a poet, that I am not sure that his work even stayed consistently in print in France (recent editions may spring from a fresh drive to present multicultural voices).
Prior to 1918 I expect there were some ethnic Czechs living in present-day Czechian territory who were L1 Czech-speakers whose published writing was primarily-to-exclusively in German. This would especially be the case for mathematicians and scientists, but perhaps others as well? Presumably at least some of the math/science folks would have kept publishing in German post-independence because they wished to be read internationally.
So there can be posthumous fights between 21st century identity groups about who gets to claim people like that, but for those who lived and wrote in the days when there was no Czech-controlled-or-dominated political entity it becomes more tendentious to relabel non-Czechs as Czechs-in-hindsight.
de.wikipedia:
People named René, BTW – with é – still occasionally occur in Austria and Germany. Only Swiss people are ever called Renat.
Czech wikipedia FWIW has its relevant article on “Franz Kafka,” with a note “Možná hledáte: František Kafka,” linked to the separate article on František Kafka (1909-1991).
saying that someone is an American author if they write in Spanish, and not adding anything, is plain misleading
nonsense. just as it’d be nonsense to say the same of abe cahan, celia dropkin, or isaac bashevis singer. (and, at heart, a very familiar kind of xenophobic integral-nationalist nonsense.)
I agree with rozele.
I wouldn’t deny the americanness of Isaac Bashevis Singer, but I feel like it isn’t widely emphasized. I myself was surprised to eventually learn that the author of these shtetl stories that I knew of, because they were vaguely part of the culture or I had read one or two in school, lived and worked in the USA. I must have subconsciously assumed that he was active before the Holocaust, or that he went to Israel after the war, or anything else really.
Czechs seem to believe that Hašek is still widely read outside their borders, and that foreigners recognize Švejk as iconic as Czechs do.
Švejk remains iconic in Austria, Poland, Russia and Germany. So not surprising that Czechs feel like all foreigners know him.
Writers who move around mid-career create difficulties for certain sorts of categorization. Some are well-organized like Nabokov, where everything he published before relocating to the U.S. was in Russian and pretty much everything afterwards was in English (although he drafted his first novel in English while still in Paris), so it’s administratively convenient to say that the later stuff is part of “American literature” while the earlier stuff isn’t, especially if no one happens to be in the room making claims for Switzerland with respect to the late-career stuff. Other writers may not have the same sort of clean break in their oeuvre.
It would seem rather imperialist or appropriative to claim that Solzhenitsyn was an “American writer” with respect to the works he wrote while living in Vermont, and that might still be the case if he had died there before changed historical circumstances made a return from exile possible.
Fun fact: the wiki article on Singer asserts that “Singer is the only American Nobel Laureate in Literature to not receive a Pulitzer Prize award or citation.[citation needed]” This would appear to be true only if Milosz (naturalized as a U.S. citizen 10 years before his Nobel) is not an “American” in the relevant sense. (Milosz of course sometimes claimed to be a Lithuanian who wrote in Polish the same way an Irish poet might write in English, although after both Lithuania and Poland were freed from the Soviet yoke he chose to live in the latter. This stuff is complicated.)
https://noe.orf.at/stories/3113665/
Here is an example where Kafka even needed a visa to travel between Prag and another Czechoslovakian town (because the train had to travel through Austria).
Are you really being serious or just provocative? As D.O. implies, nobody (except apparently AG) thinks of them as Czech.
I thought an interesting conversation (as opposed to a series of emotional outbursts) might result, and indeed it has.
degringolade
This word is new to me; I had to look it up, as it was obvious that my first idea (‘being changed so as not to be a gringo any more’) couldn’t be right.
Maybe Wikipedia is an integrationist website, but here are the beginnings of the biographies of 3 authors mentioned by rozele
Abraham “Abe” Cahan (Yiddish: אַבֿרהם קאַהאַן; July 7, 1860 – August 31, 1951) was a Lithuanian-born Jewish American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician. Cahan was one of the founders of The Forward (Yiddish: פֿאָרווערטס, romanized: Forverts, lit. ’Forward!’), an American Yiddish publication, and was its editor-in-chief for 43 years.
Celia Dropkin (Yiddish: ציליע דראַפּקין, December 5 [O.S. November 23] 1887 – August 18, 1956) was a Russian-born American Yiddish poet, writer, and artist.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער; November 11, 1903 – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish-American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator. Some of his works were adapted for the theater. He wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated his own works into English with the help of editors and collaborators.
For comparison, the word “English” in the article for Faulkner appears only once, “He skipped classes often and received a “D” grade in English. ” and for F. Scott Fitzgerald also once, “His father, Edward Fitzgerald, descended from Irish and English ancestry, and had moved to Minnesota from Maryland after the American Civil War to open a wicker-furniture manufacturing business.” It appears 7 times in the Hemingway’s article and from some of those lines one can infer that papa Hem was indeed writing in English.
I would never deliberately set out to use a word John Cowan didn’t know, because that seems far too difficult a challenge to meet save by sheer unintended blind luck. If he likes the word, let me commend to his attention a poem about the word from the April 5, 1913 issue of Quack magazine.* It can be found by searching in the Google books corpus for the opening lines “Reading a naughty gallic bard / With my _vocabulaire française_ / I found a word, _Dégringolade_” etc. etc. Some may criticize the poet’s use of italics.
*Apparently one of several unrelated periodicals of that title published over the years.
It did not, funnily enough; the city belonged to Austria, but its train station (where Kafka regularly met his lover) did not, so the train stayed in Czechoslovakia the whole time… 1920 was a very confusing time, says the article.
I’ll criticize his French grammar instead.
Re 1920 being a confusing time, there’s some complicated interaction between how seriously borders are to be taken and how you should ideally draw new ones to minimize logistical difficulties when e.g. the territory being newly divided has pre-existing infrastructure like railroads. From the late 1880’s into the 1990’s many Canadian trains (both freight and passenger) traveled between Quebec and New Brunswick via a short-cut route that crossed the U.S. (northern Maine) for about 200 miles. Until at least close to the end of that period, passengers with through tickets did not need, when the train first passed into American territory, to go through even the fairly minimal formalities (in those days) required of people entering the U.S. from Canada by road. This meant you could in principle sneak into the U.S. w/o any formalities by “unexpectedly” disembarking from the train at one of the stops in Maine even though your ticket had said you’d be staying on longer, which allegedly some folks with a desire to avoid interacting with the border authorities occasionally did. Although presumably they had some sort of preplanned rendezvous with a confederate in the U.S., since the Maine stops were all in pretty small rural communities where a suspicious stranger hopping off the train and needing to ask for assistance in further travel arrangements might draw unwelcome attention.
Until the 1960’s, there were American long-distance NYC-Chicago passenger trains that went between Buffalo and Detroit via the “short-cut” route through Ontario, I presume with the same lack of border-control formalities.
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was intentionally built straddling the American-Canadian border. Canadian patrons can cross the border on the uncontrolled sidewalk outside to reach the entrance.
@JWB: That particular Quack was published in Shanghai. That would explain the abundant high-larious cartoons about Chinese, albeit with more fluent Pidgin Chinese (e.g. page 181) than one would presumably expect an in a U.S. racial cartoon. It also explains the magazine’s overall meagre access to comic talent.
“…österreichischer Lyriker deutscher und französischer Sprache.”
It is important that Rilke is a poet.
Kafka (German spelling of a Czech word kavka /kafka/, the kaw-kaw bird, jackdaw, galka in Russian) is more translatable.
At least if his prose is valued among German speakers for its style (as it is not valued elsewhere), they haven’t informed me. Arabic kāfkāwī (كافكاوي) clearly refers not to the style:-)
“…multiple times a Czech client has insisted to me that a text meant for English-speaking audiences reference Hašek and Švejk. ”
I’m sure some people here saw on T-shirts of football players (in the Spanish league) “Azerbaijan. Land of fire” and wondered why fire (and why spanish football). Of course this is an advertisment of the country itsels… But some people here also bought Chinese tea which advertises the fact that it is grown on some (obscure for you) mountain.
Krakonošova směs made me wonder who is Krakonoš (depicted on a pack of tobacco) and Pivovar Krakonoš where Havel once worked would have the same effect.
There is clearly some place for unfamiliar references in advertisments and other texts.
For some years now the Long Island Railroad has permitted travel between two stops both of which are in NYC at a special flat fare, as for example between Penn Station and Jamaica (which is in Queens). However, this is not quite true. Until recently, even though Far Rockaway station (which is at the end of its branch) is also in NYC, a trip between Penn Station and Far Rockaway required full fare because there were intervening stops outside the city. As of this year, however, it is possible to buy a ticket at Far Rockaway at the flat fare and use it to travel to Penn Station or other NYC stops, but not vice versa, since there would be nothing stopping you from paying the flat rate and getting off the train early at one of the stops outside the city.
Not to be confused with Krkonoše, a place with lots of Early Permian vertebrate fossils…
Tirol and Salzburg border each other, but the train stays on the plain and goes through Germany. The phenomenon (which is much older than the Schengen treaty) even has a Wikipedia article in English.
“Azerbaijan. Land of fire”
Azerbaijan, anciently Media Atropatene, was famous for its naphtha (a Median word, I think).
Yes, and of course when oil became valuable at the end of the 19th century the territory around Baku was full of literal pillars of flame.
The Tirol-Salzburg route crossing Bavarian territory is apparently just one instance of a widespread European phenomenon, although I think more commonly associated with shifting frontiers rather than purely topographical consideratons for laying track. Numerous examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privileged_transit_traffic
In North America we obviously have substantially fewer international borders proportionate to area, and in most-to-all instances the current borders were finalized before railroad construction had made it to that part of the continent. Indeed, in one famous instance the causation worked the other way: the U.S.-Mexico border was adjusted in 1854 via the so-called Gadsden Purchase in large part to assure that one feasible trans-continental railroad route would not need to pass through Mexican territory. What with civil wars and whatnot, it took almost another three decades for the rails to actually be laid through the newly-American territory, but the ultimate route (which to this day you can travel via long-distance passenger train between New Orleans and Los Angeles) was pretty close to what had been originally sketched out as optimal.
When I was in Linz last year they had just extended the Vienna – Linz line to Munich, IIRC? Does it not go through Salzburg?
Very much so, but the extension happened in 1860… do you mean the upgrade from two to four tracks? That hasn’t been done on the entire line yet, though.
@D.O.:
wikipedi’istn are trying to get as much information as possible into the first sentence that a reader will see. i’d be mildly surprised if they didn’t try to assemble a noun-phrase encompassing place of birth, working language, politics, and ethnicity, as well as occupation(s) and site of residence.
that doesn’t make it “misleading” to identify them as “american [sic] writers” without specifying their language, regardless of the number or set of labels involved (cahan is an american socialist editor and writer, just like debs or du bois; dropkin a russian-born american writer, just like nabokov or rand; singer an american writer and memoirist, just like kaysen or hemon).
David Marjanović : I mean the whole “high speed European rail” project. They were advertising it. It’s a recent thing, trying to connect European rail networks.
Ah, not the rail networks as such, but the TGV, ICE* and similar networks.
* Intercity Express, not the American inquisition.
The border-crossing railway that isn’t: Vennbahn.
My office just got (a part of) the design project for a police station crossing the Swedish-Norwegian border, shared between the local police forces on both sides.
Čapek was not a great literary innovator or anything, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed almost every piece of his that I’ve read.
I would have considered the How it is Made and Tales from Another Pocket series as fairly innovative, but I’m not sure if they actually were innovative for the period.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed almost every piece of his that I’ve read, but that “almost” includes some that I didn’t like at all, like Krakatit (and a few others that were so unmemorable I forgot the names).
Of his two (by far) most famous works, War with the Newts is above average even for him, and R.U.R. is lesser-than-average of his work but still very good; out of the ones I can name offhand, I would put at least How it is Made, Tales from One Pocket, and The Great Doctor’s Tale above both of those. The Absolute at Large (unfairly obscure) takes points for science-fictional innovation – it’s one of the first works (1922) to invoke Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence.
(On the most famous 20th century Czech writers, I would put both Hašek and Čapek [mostly for R.U.R.] above Kundera, but Kafka far above all three of those if he counts as Czech. I would not be much surprised if there’s a Czech-American author who ranks above all or most of those but whose Czech origin is not well known.
*checks Wikipedia* …there aren’t any but I honestly expected to recognize at least some names. There are a few vaguely-famous American writers of minority-Czech origin who are nevertheless listed as Czech-Americans, perhaps most notably Clifford Simak; I don’t believe those qualify.)
Are you really being serious or just provocative? As D.O. implies, nobody (except apparently AG) thinks of them as Czech.
FWIW when I asked my brother about the most famous 20th century Czech writer he (also) suggested Kafka, and when I asked who’s in next place (with a clarification that apparently Kafka is not necessarily counted as Czech) he (expectedly) named Čapek. He had apparently forgotten that Hašek was Czech, and did not recognize the name Milan Kundera.
(To quote said brother: Выгнали из чехов, Франца-то нашего…
…I’ve long believed that he would probably be a good participant on LH if/when I manage to convince him to do it.)
there’s some complicated interaction between how seriously borders are to be taken and how you should ideally draw new ones to minimize logistical difficulties when e.g. the territory being newly divided has pre-existing infrastructure like railroads.
although I think more commonly associated with shifting frontiers rather than purely topographical consideratons for laying track
A major rail connection to southern Russia (Krasnodar Krai and thereabouts) had long gone through a piece of Ukrainian territory near the border town of Chertkovo; post-2014, when that became a big problem, a new Ukraine-avoiding route had to be built around that section, and after relatively quick construction it was opened in 2017.
Outside Europe, there’s the Choum tunnel, where a Mauritanian railway had to go through a small corner of (then still Spanish, AFAIK) Western Sahara for strong topographic reasons, but apparently the disagreements were so serious that a tunnel had to be cut through solid rock just to keep the railway line (just barely) on Mauritanian territory. After tensions cooled down the reasonable route was successfully built, and now that line does indeed briefly go through Western Sahara (in one of the last areas still controlled by the unrecognized state’s government).
EDIT:
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was intentionally built straddling the American-Canadian border.
…you’d expect that the library is on one side and the opera house is on the other – but nope, the border splits both parts in half. I wonder why they did that.
He had apparently forgotten that Hašek was Czech, and did not recognize the name Milan Kundera.
Of course I was talking about the situation in America, where Kundera (at least for a while) had far greater fame than he arguably deserved and most people have never heard of Hašek; I have no idea about the situation elsewhere.
I’m not a fan of R.U.R. Yay, robots. I rarely like SF in general, though. I did like War with the Newts, because it mixes despairing dystopia with plain silliness.
The short stories are reading candy, but with a distinct flavor.
No one has mentioned Hrabal, who was, at least in the 1980s/90s far better known in the Anglophone literary world* than Čapek or Hašek.
*specifically grad students, and the sort of people who read Granta.
Kundera (at least for a while) had far greater fame than he arguably deserved
Who’s to say what’s “deserved”? He was very much a part of the 1980s Zeitgeist. His writing has a mix of sincerity and cynicism that a lot of Gen X writers aspired to, and Kundera is less facile than, say, Brett Easton Ellis. My generation found Kundera both exotically other and approachably familiar in a way that other Eastern European writers couldn’t pull off. I was always a little suspicious of the Czech dislike of Kundera in the 90s because it seemed to smack of the provincial jealousy of the kid who makes it out. Maybe that’s unfair, but I don’t actually find Hrabal or Capek more interesting than Kundera. (Hašek, yes)
Who’s to say what’s “deserved”?
Hey, I didn’t say he didn’t deserve it! I’m just trying to reflect the discrepancy noted in the posted essay. I certainly enjoyed him back in the day — I’m just not sure I’d enjoy him as much if I read him now, as JWB says in the first comment above.
I had clean forgotten until Vanya’s comment that for a while many decades ago I, personally, was one of “the sort of people who read Granta.” I assume the failure of memory was perhaps to smooth over potential embarrassment?
Clifford Simak was Czech? Didn’t know that.
@LH, you say “As D.O. implies, nobody (except apparently AG) thinks of them as Czech.”
and to rozele’s “(and, at heart, a very familiar kind of xenophobic integral-nationalist nonsense.)” you say “I agree”.
What is so different?
Did Simak identify as Czech? I know him as an American author.
@Vanya: That’s Bret Easton Ellis, with one t Obviously, I care about such things.
I think both The War Against the Newts and R. U. R. are excellent works of science fiction. They are similar in themes, and I think that if R. U. R. had been a novel instead of a play, it would be unambiguously superior. (Plays are tricky, and I don’t entirely know how to evaluate them. I have plans for a course in literature, which I have been told I would probably be allowed to teach if I had at least one science fiction novel that sold. The idea would be to read triplets of works: a classic, s historical fiction piece about the main individual, and then a SF version of the story. I could fill most of a semester with the Sutras, Siddharth, then Lord of Light; and Utopia, A Man For All Seasons, and Past Master. I am just unsure how to handle A Man For All Seasons, since I feel reading the play doesn’t do justice to the material, but the film version, although I love it, gives up the post-modern aspects in favor of realism.)
Brett : Lord of Light was translated atrociously to Bulgarian, unfortunately. Whole chapters were cut, especially at the end.
on the trains and borders tip: i remember being warned when returning from odessa to budapest in 2006 to be sure to take the route that goes through uzhhorod, rather than the one via kishinev. the moldovan government apparently had a nice set-up going where if you didn’t already have a transit visa, you’d have to wait at least one night to get it, thus subsidizing the local hotels as well as the state. my sister tells me there’s a similar, though more elaborate, scheme with the ferry timetables between newfoundland, st. pierre, and miquelon.
Everybody was reading L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être / The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the mid-80s, so I read it too. I won’t go into my opinion of the book as a work of art, but I do recall the crucial role played by vaginal odors in the novel. Now I am wondering, what is the derivation of the name Kundera? Not from Czech kunda?
“kunda”
Alteration of root vowels here and in pizda and (Russian) manda is very neat (R. jelda is penis). Consonants not so. If the later were *tanda (from tandoor, cf. Moroccan Ar. ṭābūn) instead..
Rodger C: “naphtha (a Median word, I think)”
Probably not originally Median; the dictionaries most likely to be up to date, OED (revised 2003) and AHD, favor an origin from a Semitic language. The history of naphtha was previously discussed here under Phthore, as a fellow -phth- word.
I picked up Die Zeit yesterday and found a passionate defense of Kundera as an insightful and surprisingly relevant essayist – at least on the topic of Central Europe and Russian colonialism.
https://www.zeit.de/2023/53/der-entfuehrte-westen-milan-kundera-essay
I don’t know what of this comes from Kundera and what from the author (in the context of the Ukrainian war), but the author is right that my Russian soul is just the other side of my Rohheit! (remember the fingal story?)
It remains to explain where my intellectual depth comes from.
From my stupidity I suppose?
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was only translated into Mongolian in 2016 under the title “Тэвчихийн аргагүй хөнгөн оршихуй”. From what I can tell it was translated from the French.
Christmas morning we had more people than usual in our living room at once and had moved furniture around etc., so I found myself sitting in an atypical-for-me location right next to some of my wife’s bookshelves and noticed an old paperback copy of Kundera’s “Laughable Loves.” What was more interesting, however, is that it was shelved with three other paperback English translations, of works respectively by Tadeusz Borowski, Danilo Kiš, & Bruno Schulz, all packed within a single slipcase and originally marketed together per the outside of the slipcase as “Writers from the Other Europe” (Philip Roth, General Editor). This was apparently a Seventies Thing, more details of which can be found here: https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=7808
By the time I became aware of Kundera as a vogue college-town author in the Eighties, he was a free-standing attraction, not simply part of this exotic “scene.”