Recently, as I was finishing reading Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I came across a news item regarding a recently surfaced intelligence report showing that Kundera informed on a suspected spy in the Czech Republic in 1950 when he was a student. Kundera has broken his customary media silence to deny the report.
Regardless of whether or not he did behave as the enthusiastic young commie he was at the time, for one to feel that this is some sort of betrayal or that it besmirches his reputation would be, in Kundera’s terms, pure kitsch.
I was reminded of the passage I had read only days earlier, which I reproduce below, not really as a comment on this recent story, but rather for its own sake:
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Sabina once allowed herself to be taken along to a gathering of fellow émigrés. As usual, they were hashing over whether they should or should not have taken up arms against the Russians. In the safety of emigration, they all naturally came out in favour of fighting. Sabina said, ‘Then why don’t you go back and fight?’
That was not the thing to say. A man with artificially waved grey hair pointed a long index finger at her. ‘That’s no way to talk. You’re all responsible for what happened. You, too. How did you oppose the Communist regime? All you did was paint pictures …’
Assessing the populace, checking up on it, is a principal and never-ending social activity in Communist countries. If a painter is to have an exhibition, an ordinary citizen to receive a visa to a country with a sea coast, a soccer player to join the national team, then a vast array of recommendations and reports must be garnered (from the concierge, colleagues, the police, the local Party organization, the pertinent trade union) and added up, weighed, and summarized by special officials. These reports have nothing to do with artistic talent, kicking ability, or maladies that respond well to salt sea air; they deal with one thing only: the ‘citizen’s political profile’ (in other words, what the citizen says, what he thinks, how he behaves, how he acquits himself at meeting or May Day parades). Because everything (day-to-day existence, promotion at work, vacations) depends on the outcome of the assessment process, everyone (whether he wants to play soccer for the national team, have an exhibition, or spend his holidays at the seaside) must behave in such a way as to deserve a favourable assessment.
That was what ran through Sabina’s mind as she listened to the grey-haired man speak. He didn’t care whether his fellow-countrymen were good kickers or painters (none of the Czechs at the émigré gathering ever showed any interest in what Sabina painted); he cared whether they had opposed Communism actively or just passively, really and truly or just for appearances’ sake, from the very beginning or just since emigration.
Because she was a painter, she had an eye for detail and a memory for the physical characteristics of the people in Prague who had a passion for assessing others. All of them had index fingers slightly longer than their middle fingers and pointed them at whomever they happened to be talking to. In fact, President Novotny, who had ruled the country for the fourteen years preceding 1968, sported the very same barber-induced grey waves and had the longest index finger of all the inhabitants of Central Europe.
When the distinguished émigré heard from the lips of a painter whose pictures he had never seen that he resembled Communist President Novotny, he turned scarlet, then white, then scarlet again, then white once more; he tried to say something, did not succeed, and fell silent. Everyone else kept silent until Sabina stood up and left.
- from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, 1984
