Milan Kundera
THE LEGACY OF
THE SLEEPWALKERS
One day, to register my rejection of the simplistic label
"East European dissident" that people insist on sticking on my books,
I defined myself as "a survivor of the last generation of the great
culture of central Europe ." What could I have been thinking of? Bar–
tok's music? Prague, the birthplace of structuralism? The small
Moravian village (I know its streets by heart) where Husser! was
born, or that other village not so very far from the first, where Freud
came into this world? Perhaps I was thinking of all those things at
the same time. But mainly I was thinking about the novel.
For more than a century France held undisputed prominence
in the history of the novel as an international phenomenon. After the
death of Proust, it slowly yielded ground, but even as it retreated, it
retained sufficient lucidity to erect (during the thirties) the cele–
brated road sign: "the era of the North American novel" (Heming–
way, Faulkner, Dos Passos). No one noticed the appearance, fifteen
years before Hemingway, of another movement whose influence
would be even stronger and longer-lasting and that allows me to
speak, retrospectively, of an "era of the central European novel."
Four great novels, two of them written in Prague and the other
two in Vienna, anticipate and determine, in my opinion, the orien–
tation of the novel as a genre after Proust: Kafka's
The Castle
(
1922),
Hasek's
The Good Soldier Schweik
(1923),
Herman Brach's
The Sleep–
walkers
(his
1931
trilogy), and Musil's
The Man without Qualities
(1930-1943).
At the time of World War I, a process began that is still far
from finished and that has been fatal for Europe, its culture, and its
survival. The small central European nations, always extremely vul–
nerable, were the first to suffer its effects. History has arisen before
them like an implacable and inexplicable monster against which hu–
man will is impotent. The great conviction which had been the basis
of modern times was called into doubt: can it still be stated that man,
as Descartes imagined, is really the lord and master of nature? Must
Editor's Note: This essay first appeared in the Mexican cultural quarterly,
Vuelta,
in
October 1982. It is translated from the Spanish by Alfred
J.
MacAdam.
