The Czechs in a Nutshell

He is definitely more educated and cultivated than Slovakia’s “terminator” Vladimír Mečiar, and contrary to the ex-Yugoslav Katzenjammer Kids, Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Miloševic, he must be described as a democrat. But when one compares his political rhetoric in the 1990s with the practical results of his governments, he reminds of that type of married man who brags to all his hospoda pals that he has found himself a young and beautiful mistress (see: Sex), while in reality he is a homosexual.

Actually, there is no need to concoct parabolas. Tomáš Ježek, one of Klaus’ former colleagues from the Academy of Sciences and later minister of privatisation, once presented in Czech media an alleged real-life story that’s even more apt:

During the World Championships in football in Mexico in 1986, Klaus, Ježek and a couple of other academicians were watching the match where Diego Maradona scored with his “magic hand”. Everybody agreed that Maradona was a real creep — except Klaus. To him, Maradona had just done everything in his power to win the match, and the only fault was that he got caught. If that story is true, it may seem that the Czech president regards football much in the same way as he regards politics.

Kundera, Milan

If there exists an ultimate and living proof that the biblical words “a prophet has no honour in his own country” correspond to reality, it has to be Milan Kundera. While people all over the globe praise Kundera as a brilliant novelist who more than once has been close to the Nobel prize, in his mother country he seems to arouse more disapproval and downright anger than respect and admiration.

Of course, the fact that he is an emigrant, even an extremely successful one (see: Egalitarianism), doesn’t exactly guarantee him raging popularity among his ex-countrymen. Some would even say that Kundera, in the eyes of the overtly Prague-fixated Czech intellectuals, has a drawback, since he was born in Moravia. But this goes deeper.

Both the intensity with which many Czechs revel in hating the star novelist and the contempt with which Kundera treats his Czech readers bear all the signs of a relationship that has turned irreparably sour. It’s something like an ex-husband and his former wife soon after an ugly divorce.

It’s hard to say when it started. The writer Ladislav Verecký, for instance, believes the first tensions appeared after the Soviet invasion in 1968. In a heated debate in one literary magazine, Kundera, at that time 39 years old and famous for several collections of poetry, theatre plays and not least his latest novel, The Joke, clashed with another prominent intellectual, Václav Havel, in their evaluation of the Prague Spring's legacy.

In short: while Havel claimed that the attempts to reform the communist regime were meaningless because communism was irreformable (history later proved him right), Kundera, who personally engaged himself in the reform movement, felt that such attempts made sense.

According to Verecký, the discord grew stronger after Kundera left Czechoslovakia in 1975 and settled in France. Instead of using his international fame and position as an exiled writer to help promote the Charter 77 dissidents in their non-violent fight against the Husák regime, Kundera preferred to concentrate on his career as a writer. Later literary successes proved this choice, at least from a pragmatic point of view, to be a wise decision.

However, this petty quarrelling was nothing compared to the hullabaloo that broke out when Kundera published the novel that was to become his biggest success ever — The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In his biting travesty of the gloomy daily life in Czechoslovakia under normalization, Kundera managed to enrage both the communists as well as the dissidents. The red establishment reacted as expected, and attacked the novel for being artistic trash that didn’t hesitate to distort “socialist reality” just to achieve commercial success.

Amazingly enough, the dissidents this time fully agreed with their communist oppressors. In the novel, Kundera’s hero Tomáš, a brilliant surgeon, was degraded to a window cleaner because of his support for the Prague Spring reformists. But Tomáš didn’t despair and used the advantages of his new profession (i.e., transparent windows) to conquer a veritable host of willing women. This, the dissidents objected, was definitely not the fate of Czechoslovakia’s persecuted! Actually, many of them were forced to work as window cleaners, so maybe the true reason for their rage was an uneasy feeling of being unsuccessful conquerors?