Milan Kundera understood that the paradise of totalitarianism remains in hell. That makes his look at the 20th century essential and crucial to conjure up the sectarianisms of the 21st century.
As a sign of history, the Czech writer died in the same handful of days that the Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan regimes once again showed their functionality with the Russian president who ordered the invasion of Ukraine.
Just like the populist leaderships that support them, they perceive themselves as “progressive” and entrench themselves in leftist discourses, but they censored the participation in the EU-CELAC summit of the president of an invaded country, to favor the warmongering expansionism of the invader. And they did so just as the Russian president expanded the homophobic legislation he pushed through the Duma in 2013, destroying the drive toward sexual diversity that Boris Yeltsin’s government had pushed for in 1993.
Vladimir Putin’s first retardant step was to prohibit the dissemination of all kinds of information about “non-traditional sexual relations”, that is, that imply recognizing sexual diversity. That step towards the marginalization and censorship of homosexuality was self-justified in “the purpose of protecting children from information” that denies “traditional family values.”
In 2022, he tightened the laws aimed at socially canceling homosexuals and now he took another step towards the times when the “crime of sodomy” existed. The last blow to the LGTBQ community was to prohibit all types of medical intervention for sex change, be it by surgery or medication. The argument used? “prevent the degeneration of children” Russians.
Like the obscurantist sectors of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, Putin represses sexual diversity by accusing those who are not heterosexual as “degenerates”. In that, too, he is an ultra-conservative. But leftist regimes and their allies who consider themselves “progressive” side with the Russian president, siding with the Ukrainians, against sexual diversity and liberal democracy.
The writer who died just when authoritarian leftism exhibited the same contradictions and obscurities that characterize extremist right-wing and recalcitrant conservatism, revealed that absurd trait of totalitarian ideologies. “Man’s struggle against power is the struggle of memory against oblivion,” wrote Kundera. That is why it is important not to forget what he denounced with several of his books: totalitarianism, which is absolute authoritarianism. The Joke was his first novel. In it he describes the darkness of totalitarianism, explaining it as a space that does not allow for humor.
The discursive paraphernalia, the spectacular scenery and the ornate stories that sacralize one’s own position and demonize the opposite, enter into what Kundera described through the German word that he rescued in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”: kitsch.
That term is used as a synonym for cheesy, or in bad taste, but the meaning that the Czech writer gave it is deeper: that which appears to have greatness that it does not have; the deceit that consists of disguising the futile as crucial and giving the appearance of transcendental to the inconsequential.
The first of May in the Warsaw Pact countries were celebrated with massive events that radiated the feeling that those peoples had embraced the prevailing ideology. All the symbology and the leading role of the masses were the imposing wrapping of an abysmal void. Everything was a monumental simulation of the supposed vigor of convictions, to hide the ocean of doubts, fears and disappointments in which the individual was shipwrecked in the totalitarian society.
In the novel he published in 1984, he uses the nineteenth-century term used by critics of the “avant-garde” to describe the deception of the mass events that communism organized in all the cities of the Warsaw Pact, to celebrate May Day. The masses in the streets described a popular acceptance that did not exist. The monumentality and the multitude were the envelope of a void. What seemed to have the full weight of history was in reality an unbearable lightness.
This deceptive packaging also characterizes the ultra-conservative discourse and the historical discourse-interpretation of authoritarian leftism and the populisms that support it. Grand lies that are exposed when regimes such as those of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua close ranks with an ultra-conservative leader who practices territorial expansionism causing catastrophic wars.
Like religions, the ultra-conservatism and the dogmatic left embrace the absolute convictions that they postulate as unique truths. At the antipodes, Kundera denied the unique truths. As the Czech philosopher Vaclav Belohradsky explained, “Kundera’s great thesis is that the truth that does not recognize an opposite truth is kitsch.”
It was not the only revealing word that valued Milan Kundera. From his exile in Paris, he continued to write novels that revealed the dark nature of communism, such as the “Book of Laughter and Oblivion.” In its pages, Kundera uses a word from the Czech language that does not have an exact translation, but the author describes it as the atrocious sensation caused by “the sudden vision of one’s own misery.” That word so revealing of the human torment that causes inhabiting the totalitarian system, is “litost”.
From the dystopian absurdity, another great Czech writer, Franz Kafka, had shown traits of totalitarianism before totalitarianism existed. Although it was published in 1925, the novel The Trial was written much earlier and Kafka did not want to publish it, a good time betrayed by his friend Max Brod.
The Trial described the absurdity of totalitarianism before Stalinism turned the regime created by Lenin into a totalitarian system, and before Hitler spawned his own criminal monster.
Kundera did not imagine the totalitarianism that he described in his novels “The Joke” and the “Book of Laughter and Oblivion”; he lived it and suffered it in the country that at that time was called Czechoslovakia. That is why his work has great political value, as well as philosophical lucidity: showing a system that can return to the countries that suffered from it.
Because of this always latent danger in a world that is forgetting everything, he reflected on Nietzsche and the eternal return in the pages of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
