FRED MISURELLA
World domination, as everyone knows, is divided between de–
mons and angels. But the good of the world does not require the
latter to gain precedence over the former (as I thought when I
was young); all it needs is a certain equilibrium of power.
If
there is too much uncontested meaning on earth (the reign of the
angels), man collapses under the burden; if the world loses all its
meaning (the reign of the demons), life is every bit as impossible.
91
In the context of Kundera's work, this passage bears close scru–
tiny . His sense of private and public evil, his little essays on the loss
of personal and cultural memory, and the absolute futility of his
characters' attempts to regain their pasts, or to change their present
lives, bespeak a determinism that is exemplified by despotism and
the presence of Russian tanks. Yet at the same time there is his com–
mitment to art, the world of order and meaning, "the reign of the
angels," and in that context the writer's task in troubled times is to
exercise creativity, to remain aloof from political events at the same
time he uses them in his compositions.
In "Litost," one of the stories in
The Book of Laughter and Forget–
ting,
a Czech student attends a meeting of his country's major living
poets . Kundera imagines the meeting as a symposium of the great
European writers, giving the participants names such as Goethe,
Voltaire, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Lermentov. But his description
of the meeting is skewed by the perspective of time, distance, and
height - the Olympian height of art:
I watch them from the distance of two thousand kilometers. It is
now the autumn of 1977. For eight years my country has been
drowsing in the sweet, strong embrace of the Russian empire,
Voltaire has been thrown out of the university, and my books are
banned from all public libraries, locked away in the cellars of the
state. I held out a few years and then got into my car and drove
as far west as I could, to the Breton town of Rennes, where the
very first day I found an apartment on the top floor of the tallest
high-rise . When the sun woke me in the morning, I realized that
its large picture windows faced east, toward Prague .
Now I watch them from my tower, but the distance is too
great. Fortunately the tear in my eye magnifies like the lens of a
telescope and brings their faces closer.
The mixture of aloofness and feeling in this passage, the combi–
nation of poignant loss and art, are typical of Kundera's writing.
They occur again in his cruel eroticism, in the mockery he makes of
