Back in the Eighties, John Podhoretz wrote in his Washington Times column that the two novels you had to read were Bright Lights, Big City and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Good call. Jay McInerny’s debut was a classic young man’s book. Milan Kundera’s novel was a book closer to middle age, and to history: a story of regrets and second chances, set in the time of the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion that crushed it.
Kundera was a relativist who opposed communism because it was a dogma. Its oppressions, he argued, arose from its dogmatism. His hero, literary and intellectual, was the Enlightenment atheist and polemicist Denis Diderot, and his favorite work of Diderot’s was the oddball novel Jacques the Fatalist. It is a dialogue between an officer and his servant, Jacques. Voltaire’s much more famous Candide, despite its mild nihilism, is formally traditional: Its events, however manic, unfold in a straightforward, linear way. Diderot’s tale twists and turns in a fashion that is jokey, postmodern, and IMO tiresome; I don’t believe I ever managed to finish it. In Kundera’s view a good dose of Diderot would be the cure for what ailed us.
This provoked an acrid response from the Russian dissident Joseph Brodsky who, if not a Christian, was a Christian fellow traveler. Brodsky pointed out that Diderot’s strain of the Enlightenment had a very mixed legacy, the radicalisms it fostered ultimately giving way to Marx — so that when the tanks rolled into Prague, Brodsky concluded, there was every reason to think of them, not the Spring, as Diderot’s legacy.
This exchange was conducted in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, since both men were then exiles. I noted it for its inherent interest, and for the contrast it presented with the brutal emptiness of the late Soviet empire, still ruling, but so soon, and so unexpectedly, to fall. Brodsky died, rather young (56) in 1996. Now Kundera, 94, has joined him. R.I.P.