Milan Kundera: Speech made at the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers
30. April 2008 08:18
Dear friends!
Dear friends! When the Union's central committee was preparing this Congress it decided to abandon the usual introductory speeches, which were always exceedingly long, authoritative and boring, and give each of you instead a written statement of its views on various topical issues of cultural policy. A lot of you contributed to this through your own suggestions, e.g. Laco Novomesky, Jaroslav Seifert, Juraj Spitzer, Kosik, Brabec, Chvatik, Stevcek and many others. It was discussed at two sessions of our own central committee and its penultimate version came under very heavy fire at a full meeting of the Ideological Department of the Party's Central Committee. Please don't expect anything theoretically sophisticated. The idea is much more modest, yet also much more ambitious, namely to try and get agreement on a number of elementary viewpoints the general acceptance of which, we feel, would help the further growth of our literature. Don't regard it, again, as a final text, but as a draft for our concluding resolution and as a working document, then, designed to incorporate the whole spirit of the discussion we are about to have. One thing is missing in this draft: an evaluation of the literature produced over the past period. The omission is deliberate. We all remember so well those congresses and, in particular, those conferences where one book after another was lined up as if for Judgement Day: some were then sent on to Paradise and blissfully lost sight of, while others were consigned to Hell and are still being read. Obviously the criteria we used in those days were wrong ones, and perhaps our assessments today would be a fraction more accurate. But that isn't the point. The very principle of authoritative, institutional evaluation is, I feel, basically unsound. If any institution is capable of making a sensible decision this will be thanks to its awareness of its own limitations and its refusal to substitute its own judgement for the free process of perceiving values. Our own Union for one has no desire to displace that long-term process of literary appreciation, involving the whole gamut of critics and theorists. It feels not the slightest obligation to back Impuls against Orientace or Orientace against Impuh, to support Jarmila Glazarova versus Bohumil Hrabal or vice versa. Our central committee realises that its job is to enable everyone to express his opinion and carry on a free argument. And it knows from bitter experience that it is much harder to provide guarantees of this kind than to pass snap judgements about a process which, in terms of human life, is never-ending. Still, there is one general judgement about the writings of the last four years which will probably stand up fairly well. It has been a period of expansion. I hope I need not document this point with a list of titles. We all know the output and each of us has his own preferences. The main thing is that a variety of works appeared— good works in great number—and that some fields like the cinema (which largely belongs to literature and concerns us there- fore) have flourished as never before in the country's history. For Czech and Slovak literature, and probably for Czech art altogether, these have been the best years since 1948: perhaps since 1938. The best for thirty years, then. This ratio—four to thirty— represents the grim side of an otherwise gratifying verdict and is something to remember, I suggest, as a footnote to all our thoughts and worries. Seeing that I am up here on the platform, perhaps you would allow me at this point to give you my own thoughts, and you can count this as my contribution to the debate. I shall only be talking about Czech problems, but I am sure that what I say applies to Slovak problems too. Dear friends! N o nation has been on earth since the beginning of time and the very concept of nationhood is pretty recent. Despite that, most nations look upon their own existence as a self-evident destiny conferred by God, or by Nature, since time immemorial. Nations tend to think of their cultures and political systems, even their frontiers, as the work of Man, but they see their national existence as a transcendent fact, beyond all question. The some-what cheerless and intermittent history of the Czech nation, which has passed through the very antechamber of death, gives us the strength to resist any such illusion. For there has never been anything self-evident about the existence of the Czech nation and one of its most distinctive traits, in fact, has been the unobviousness of that existence. This emerged most clearly in the early nineteenth century when a handful of intellectuals tried to resurrect our half-forgotten language and then, a generation later, our half-moribund people too. The resurrection was a deliberate act and, like every act, involved a choice between the arguments for and against. The thinkers of the Czech Revival, though they decided in favour, knew the arguments on the other side as well. They realised as Matous Klacel for one pointed out, that germanisation would provide an easier life for the Bohemian populace and better career prospects for its children. They knew that belonging to the majority people gave more opportunity for more influential brainwork, whereas using the Czech language, as Klacel admitted, meant that 'fewer people will be acquainted with the scholar's efforts'. They were well aware of the tribulations of small nations who, to quote Kollar, 'think by halves and feel by halves', and whose culture is 'usually petty and stunted, not fully alive but only clinging on to life without growth or blossom, merely vegetating and sending up suckers but no sturdy trunks'. This consciousness of the balance of argument meant that the question 'To be or not to be? And if so, why?' was built into the very foundations of modern Czech history. When the men of the Revival opted for 'To be', this was a great challenge to the future. It now fell to the nation to justify their choice in the course of its own history. It marched well with the logic of this basic unobviousness in Czech life that Hubert Gordon Schauer, in 18 8 6, should fling in the face of the Czech community (a small one, but already snuggling cosily back into its own pettiness) those shocking questions of his. Should we not have contributed more to mankind, he asked, if we had harnessed our spiritual energies to the culture of a great nation, a culture already flourishing on a far higher plane than our own embryonic affair? Had the re-establishment of the nation really been worth the bother? Was the cultural worth of the Czechs great enough to justify their existence as a nation? An secondly, was it great enough to save them from denationalisation at some later date ? Czech provincialism, quite content to go on vegetating, naturally regarded this conversion of certainties into question-mark as an attack on the nation, and accordingly cast him out. Yet on five years later the young critic Salda was calling Schauer the greatest figure of his generation and describing the article in question as a patriotic deed in the truest sense of the word. No was he mistaken. For Schauer, after all, had only put a sharp point to what the great revivalists knew the whole time. 'Unless', wrote Palacky, 'we exalt our own nation's spirit to higher and nobler activities than those of our neighbours, we shall not preserve even our natural prerogatives.' And Neruda insisted that 'it is our duty now to set our nation on a level of awareness and education equal to the rest of the world, and not merely so as to win recognition for it but to assure its very survival'. The men of the Revival saw the nation's existence as dependent on those cultural values which the nation might create. They measured these values, moreover, not in terms of their direct utility to the nation alone but by the criteria—as we used to say—universal humanity. They wanted to belong to the world and to Europe. And this reminds me of something quite peculiar to Czech literature, which has given rise to a type of man very rare in other literatures, namely the translator as a significant, even a dominant, literary personality. For when you come to think of it the biggest literary figures in the century before the Battle of the White Mountain were all translators: Rehof Hruby of Jeleni, the first translator of Erasmus anywhere, Daniel Adam of Vele-slavin, or Jan Blahoslav. Jungmann's celebrated translation of Milton is a foundation-stone of Revivalist Czech. Our output of translations from foreign languages is still among the finest in the world and translators in our country have the status of literary personalities. It is clear why such an important role was assigned to translation: it was the practice of translation which enabled Czech to mould and perfect itself as a language on a par with other European languages and in possession of a European vocabulary. Moreover, it was in the form of translations that Czechs had been making their own, Czech-language, contribution to European literature and that literature had been acquiring its own, Czech-reading, European readers. For those European nations who partook in the mainstream of history the European context comes quite naturally. But Czech history displays an alternation of periods of wakefulness with periods of sleep, so that we missed several important phases in the development of the European spirit and every time were obliged to acquire it again at second hand and fill it out for our-selves. For the Czechs nothing was ever a self-evident possession: not even their language nor their European status. Their participation in Europe was an eternal dilemma: whether to allow Czech to degenerate into a mere European dialect and Czech culture into mere European folklore, or to be one of the nations of Europe with all that that implies. The second course alone can guarantee true survival. But this was an extraordinarily difficult course for a nation which through-out the nineteenth century had perforce devoted most of its energies to laying foundation-stones—everything from secondary schools to the Encyclopedia. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially in the inter-war period, a cultural blossoming took place quite unprecedented in Czech history. In the brief space of twenty years a whole constellation of geniuses fell to creating works that raised Czech culture, in all its individuality, up to European standards again for the first time since the age of
Comenius. This great period, so short and intense that it still awakens nostalgia in our hearts, was for all that a period of adolescence, of course, rather than maturity. Czech writing was still pre-dominantly lyrical; it was still limbering up and all it needed was time, peaceful and free from disturbance. That the growth of such a tender culture should have been interrupted for nearly a quarter of a century altogether, first by the German occupation, and then, close on its heels, by Stalinism, isolating it from the outside world, cutting short many of its varied domestic traditions and degrading it to the level of sheer propaganda—this was a tragedy that bade fair to relegate the Czech nation once more, and this time permanently, to the cultural periphery of Europe. If in the past few years Czech culture has taken a new leap forward and today constitutes the most successful aspect of the nation's activity; if many outstanding works have appeared and some branches of art, such as the cinema, are achieving higher standards than ever before; then it is this which ranks as the paramount national event of the past period. Yet is the community in any way appreciative of the fact? Does it realise that the opportunity has come to continue the great adolescence of our inter-war literature, and that this opportunity can never come again? Does it realise that the fate of our culture is its own fate? Is the belief of the Revivalists any less true today, that the nation's existence cannot be guaranteed without solid cultural values ? The national role of culture has certainly changed since the Revival and we are hardly threatened with national oppression today. Yet I believe that culture is no whit less essential for us as the nation's justification and surety. In the second half of the twentieth century we have seen the great prospects of integration opening up. Human progress has been for the first time fused into a single world-wide development. Small units are combining into larger ones. International cultural efforts are being concentrated and coordinated. Travelling has become a mass activity. With all this, the role of a few world languages, the most important ones, becomes enhanced, and the more international every part of our lives becomes, the more restricted is the field for the languages of small nations. I was talking recently to a Flemish-speaking Belgian, a theatrical worker who complained about the threat this native tongue. The Flemish intelligentsia, he said, was becoming bilingual and giving preference to English as the road to more direct contact with foreign academic life. In such a situation a small nation can only protect its language and its individuality by the cultural standing of that language, by the uniqueness of the values it has created and which the world associates it with. Plzen beer, of course, is also a 'value'. The trouble is that the outside work drinks it under the German name of Pilsner Urquell. Pilsner is not enough to justify the Czech's claim to have a language of their own. And the world of the future, as unification proceeds, will quite ruthlessly and quite rightly ask us to present our accounts and justify the existence we chose for ourselves a hundred and fifty years ago, and will ask us why we made that choice. It is of paramount importance that our whole national community should be fully aware how vitally essential to us our culture and literature are. For Czech literature—and this is another of its special features—has very little of the aristocratic about it: it is a plebeian literature closely linked to the wide national public. That is its strength and its weakness. Its strength, in that it affords it background of firm support where its language finds a clear echo; its weakness, because it is not yet emancipated from the public's level of education and liberality of mind and is highly susceptible to any displays of popular philistinism. I sometimes dread that our present-day culture may be losing that European standard which the Czech humanists and Revivalists had in mind. The world of Graeco-Roman antiquity and the world of Christianity, those two mainsprings of the European spirit which give it its strength and tension, have almost disappeared from the consciousness of the educated young Czech—an irremediable loss. For there is an iron continuity in European thought that outlasts each intellectual revolution and has created its own vocabulary, its own fund of metaphor, its own myths and themes, without knowledge of which cultured Europeans cannot communicate. I read a horrifying report recently describing the knowledge of world literature attained by our future teachers of Czech. I should hate to be told what their familiarity with world history is like. Provincialism is not just a literary trend; it is first and foremost a problem that effects the whole life of the country, starting with its schools and its newspapers. I recently saw the film Sedmikrásky (The Daisies) which tells of two gloriously repulsive girls, smugly satisfied with their own delightful mediocrity and gaily wrecking everything that transcended their own horizon. It struck me that what I was watching was a very topical parable with far-reaching implications, a parable about vandalism. Who are the vandals today? Not your illiterate peasant setting fire to the hated landlord's mansion in a fit of rage. The vandals I see around me these days are well off, educated people, satisfied with themselves and bearing no particular grudge. The vandal is a man proud of his mediocrity, very much at ease with himself and ready to insist on his democratic rights. In his pride and his mediocrity he imagines that one of his inalienable privileges is to transform the world after his own image, and since the most important things in this world are the innumerable things that transcend his vision, he adjusts the world to his own image by destroying it. A youngster knocks the head off a statue in the park because the statue insults him with its more-than-human size, and it gives him pleasure to do so because every act of self-assertion gives a man satisfaction. People who live purely in their own immediate present tense, without culture or awareness of historical continuity, are quite capable of turning their country into a wasteland with no history, no memory, no echo or beauty. Vandalism today assumes more forms than those the police can prosecute. If the public's legal representatives, or the competent officials, decide that a statue, a castle, a church or a hundred-year-old lime-tree is superfluous and order its removal, this is just another form of the same vandalism. There is basically no difference between legal and illegal destruction, between destruction and prohibition. A Czech deputy recently asked in Parliament on behalf of twenty-one other deputies for the prohibition of two serious and intelligent Czech films. One of them ironically, was this parable of the vandals, Sedmikrdsky. He inveighed brutally against both films, while positively boasting that he understood neither of them. The contradiction in such an attitude is only on the surface. The two works had chiefly offended by transcending the human horizons of their judges, so that they were felt as an insult. (Applause.) In a letter to Helvetius, Voltaire has the marvellous sentence: I do not agree with what you are saying, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.' This is one way of putting the basic moral principle of modern civilisation. To go back in history beyond this principle is to take a step from the modern period into the Middle Ages. All suppression of opinions, including the forcible suppression of wrong opinions, is hostile to truth in its consequences. For the truth can only be reached by a dialogue of free opinions enjoying equal rights. Any interference with free dom of thought and word, however discreet the mechanics and terminology of such censorship, is a scandal in this century, a chain entangling the limbs of our national literature as it tries to bound forward. One thing is surely indisputable. If our art has blossomed, it is because intellectual freedom has increased. The fate of Czech literature is vitally dependent, just now, on the degree of intellectual freedom that exists. As soon as one mentions 'freedom', of course, some people seem to have a fit of hay-fever and object that freedom must have its limits in a socialist literature. Why naturally, every freedom has its limits imposed, say, by the state of contemporary knowledge, or education, or prejudice and so forth. But no new progressive movement has ever described itself by its own limitations! The Renaissance did not define itself in terms of the cramping naivete of its rationalism, which only became apparent after a lapse of time, but in terms of its rationalistic transcendence of previous limitations. Romanticism saw itself as a crossing of the frontiers set by the canons of classicism, as the new territory won beyond those frontiers. And the expression 'socialist literature' will have no positive meaning until it, too, implies a liberating transcendence of limits. In our society it is counted a greater virtue to guard the frontiers than to cross them. The most transitory political and social considerations are used to justify all kinds of constraint on our intellectual liberty. But great policies are policies that set the interest of the age above the interest of the moment. The quality of Czech culture is, for the Czech nation, the interest of a whole epoch. This is all the truer at a time when the nation is faced with quite exceptional opportunities. In the nineteenth century we lived on the margin of world history. In this century we live in its very midpoint. This, we are well aware, is no bed of roses. But the miraculous soil of art turns suffering into gold. It even turns the bitter experience of Stalinism into a paradoxical, indispensable asset. I hate to hear Stalinism equated with fascism. Fascism, based on undisguised anti-humanism, brought about a fairly simple moral situation; it left the humane principles and virtues untouched, for it presented itself as their antithesis. But Stalinism was heir to a great humane movement which, even amidst the Stalinist malaise, preserved some of its attitudes, its thoughts, its slogans, language and dreams. To see such a movement degenerate in front of one's eyes into something quite contrary and strip itself of every human virtue, to see it turn love for humanity into cruelty toward people, turn love for truth into denunciation and the like—this was to witness unbelievable aspects of basic human values and qualities. What is history? What is Man in history? What, indeed, is Man at all? N o one could give the same answer to any of these questions after experiencing such changes as before. N o one left this episode of history the same man as he entered it. And Stalinism, of course, is not the only issue. The whole course of our nation's history, torn between democracy, fascist enslavement, Stalinism and socialism, and further complicated by its unique nationality problem, features every important issue that has made our twentieth century what it is. This enables us, perhaps, to put more searching questions and create more significant myths than people who have not undergone such an anabasis. Our nation then has experienced, I daresay, more than many others have in this century and, if its genius has been alert, it will now know more than the others. This greater knowledge might prove to be that liberating transcendence of old limits, that crossing of the boundaries of traditional wisdom about Man and his destiny which could confer upon Czech culture a meaning, maturity and greatness. So far these are only prospects, possibilities—but perfectly realistic ones, as many a work created during the past few years has shown. Once more, however, we must put the question: Is our public aware of these possibilities ? Does it know that they are its own possibilities ? Does it know that history never offers such chances twice? Does it know that to miss the chance means to let slip the whole of this century for our Czech nation? 'It is a matter of general knowledge', wrote Palacky, 'that it was the Czech writers who, instead of letting the nation perish, brought it to life again and gave it noble aims to accomplish.' It is the Czech writers who were responsible for the very existence of the nation and remain so today. For it is upon the standard of Czech literature, its greatness or meanness, its courage or cowardice, its provincialism or its universality, that the answer to the nation's existential question largely depends, namely: Is its survival worth while? Is the survival of its language worth while? These, the most fundamental questions at the very roots of our latter-day nationhood, are still awaiting a definitive answer. Everyone who, by his bigotry, his vandalism, his want of culture or liberality, thwarts the new blossoming of our culture, threatens the very life of the nation as well.
Union June 27-9, 1967