Updated 21.7.2023: Milan Kundera, from his essay Une rencontre (2009, not translated into Czech), on the role of literature for the Czech nation: 'The Czech nation was born (and several times) not thanks to its military outbursts, but thanks to its literature. And I do not mean literature as a political weapon. I mean literature as such. Moreover, no political organization subsidized the Škvoreks, who as publishers could rely only on their own strength and sacrifices. I will never forget that. I was living in Paris at the time, but the heart of my free country beat in Toronto. With the end of the Russian occupation, there was no reason to publish Czech books abroad. From then on, Zdena and Josef Škvorecky occasionally visited Prague, but always returned to their homeland. To the homeland of their old exile."
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Simón Bolivar: "All those who serve the revolution plough the sea."
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Without the past, there is no present, let alone a future. His work is applicable to any time, to any linguistic, cultural and social experience.
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You never know what's true and what's false. No one can be absolutely certain. - The novel exposes ideologies and, more importantly, the illusions that ideologies create. The novel is all-encompassing, and precisely because it can expose things, it is always inherently anti-ideological. - History has become kitsch because it is written by the winners of wars and elections. The comic is more horrible than the tragic, which still retains the illusion of dignity. The comic haunts us like a shadow, like a burden. France has become the new home for my books, so in a sense I'm just following my books. I've gradually come to realise that I don't write for one particular audience. I write novels for everybody, for readers in every country and every time. - The person leaves, the work doesn't. - Loneliness and madness are banished to space with a strange friendship. Faulkner longs to be nullified as a man, to be erased from history and to leave no trace of himself but printed books. - The hostility of the Czech dissidents who accused him of putting himself at the head of the Czech opposition. - The key to understanding Kundera lies nowhere else but in his novels. Where are we going? Does one know where one is going? It's all about being who you are, not pretending. Le Figaro: The sacred monster of literature. His literature and his voice will be missed. An exceptional writer, one of the greatest of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are over two thousand seven hundred translation items! He sees the madness of darkness in the future. All the themes are out of time and valid anywhere in the world, including the Czech Republic.
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