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director tried to help him earn money. He asked Kundera to write a
dramatic version of Dostoevsky's
The Idiot,
but to his own surprise
Kundera had some problems with the idea. "... I re-read
The Idiot,
and I understood that, even if I had to die of hunger, I could not do
the work. That universe of excessive gestures, of obscure profundi–
ties, of aggressive sentimentality repelled me. I felt an immediate
and inexplicable nostalgia for
Jacques Ie Fataliste."
Soon he began to
imagine Jacques and his master as characters in his own play.
But, he asks, "Why that sudden aversion to Dostoevsky?" He
wonders if it was an anti-Russian reflex caused by the invasion of
Soviet tanks. No, he answers, because he never stopped liking Che–
khov. Was it doubt about the value of Dostoevsky's work? No, again,
because that would have taken thought, objectivity, and his aversion
was more visceral than intellectual. "What irritated me about Dos–
toevsky," Kundera says, "was the
climate
of his books; the universe
where everything becomes sentiment; in other words where senti–
ment is raised to the level of truth and value."
Sensibility, in its sympathetic, emotional sense, is indispens–
able to man, according to Kundera, but it is frightening from the
moment it becomes a criterion of truth, a justification for behavior.
When it replaces rational thought, it becomes "the foundation of
close-mindedness and intolerance," or, asJung said, the "superstruc–
ture of brutality."
For Kundera, the elevation of emotion to the level of value is
rooted in Western history, perhaps beginning when Christianity
separated itself from Judaism. In his preface to
Jacques et son Maitre
he
quotes Saint Augustine's famous dictum: "Love God and do as you
will," and judges the phrase as significant because it moves the crite–
rion for truth from the external world to the interior one of the heart,
to what Kundera calls the "arbitrariness of subjectivity." From that
point, love replaced the clarity ofJewish law, becoming the standard
by which to judge behavior: "Jesus on the cross taught us how to
adulate suffering; chivalric poetry discovered romantic love; the
bourgeois family made us feel homesick for the hearth; political dem–
agogy succeeded in sentimentalizing the desires of those in power."
From the individual figure on the cross to the political symbols of the
state, the power of sentiment is broadened but, beginning with the
Renaissance, a complementary spirit of reason and doubt, and an
awareness of the relativity of all human things, balanced Western
sensibility. "It was then that the West entered on its plenitude,"
Kundera says, and when the weight of what he calls "heavy Russian
