The Czech Wager, Milan Kundera (1981)

The Czech nation has participated in the history of the West for a very long time. It is old
and at the same time it is very young, because it nearly disappeared under the intense
Germanization which took place after the Thirty Years War, and it has reappeared for the
second time on the European stage only in the nineteenth century. Its face is therefore both
old and childlike; this ambiguity about its age is the first characteristic that leaps to the eye.

It is not thanks to armed force or to political cunning that the Czech people are still alive
today, but thanks to the huge intellectual work that resuscitated its written language.
Whence this second observation: the Czech nation was born from its literature, through its
literature, and the nation is thus necessarily tied to the destiny of its literature and of its
culture.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Czech nation has been on the
threshold of death. The Czechs know that they could easily have resigned themselves to
disappearance inside the German nation, and that, if they do exist, it is because they
have chosen to exist. And this is the third surprising point: their existence today is a choice,
a project, or, to use an expression dear to Pascal, a wager.

Indeed, Czech intellectuals of the nineteenth century had the courage to ask themselves
with great lucidity: would it not be better, from the point of view of humanity, to participate
in the great German culture, more refined and developed, than waste intellectual strength
by creating a new culture for a small nation? Would the Czech culture be able to find its
specificity again? And would it be able to transmute it into an irreplaceable value?

Let us be reminded here that, at about the same time Czech literature was being reborn,
Goethe expressed his well-known idea on world literature. According to him, national
literatures were no longer very significant, because the time of world literature had come.
This coincidence made the Czech wager more difficult, but at the same time gave it a very
important dimension. This is the fourth feature without which Czech literature cannot be
understood: to become a part of world literature was not only a difficult task, but also a
vital need. Czech literature needed to join the community of world literature, because only
in such a supranational space could it find protection and a guarantee of freedom.

Let me explain what I mean: a big nation resists only with difficulty the temptation of
considering its own way of life as a supreme value and of imposing it without remorse upon
the rest of the world. A small nation, on the other hand, cannot afford such ambitions. It
does not dream of refashioning the world to fit its own image, but longs for a world of
tolerance and diversity where it could live in equality.
The Goethean concept of world literature implies precisely this space of tolerance and
diversity where a work of art does not stand for a national achievement or prestige, but only
for its own value, and where the cultures of small nations can maintain their right to
specificity, distinction, and originality.

During the twentieth century, this vital need for a supranational space has found its
fulfillment in an almost symbolic way in two circles of Prague, without which, in any case,
modern Western culture is unthinkable.

The first circle (der Prager Kreis) was that of German-speaking, Jewish writers gathered
around Max Brod and Franz Kafka. Raised above the struggles between Czechs and
Germans they achieved for the first time a real integration of Czech, German, and Jewish
traditions of the Czech lands. In this sense, it is significant that Max Brod not only saved
the work of his friend Kafka from being forgotten, but has also made known to Europe the
Czech work of Jaroslav Hasek. It is equally symptomatic that the greatest Czech composer
of our century, Leos Janacek, might have remained unknown but for Brod’s obstinate
defense and exegesis.

The other circle was the so-called Prague Linguistic Circle, which consisted of an
international constellation of German, Russian, and Polish linguists centering on Czech
scientific work, and was the birthplace of structuralism. The Czech avant-garde—poets,
painters, theater people—clustered around this group, giving rise to the inimitable climate
of Prague modernism. While the French avant-garde could never completely abolish a
cultural Franco-centrism, instinctively considering other avant-gardes as mere byproducts
of the Parisian activity, Czech modernism managed to live in that precious space which
Goethe called world literature.

It was this climate that enabled Czech literature to answer the fundamental question asked a
century before: is it capable of enriching world literature as a whole?

In Hasek’s famous novel, while the successor to the Hapsburg throne is being murdered in
Sarajevo, thus starting the First World War, Svejk is at home with Mrs. Muller and tends to
his rheumatic legs. “So, they’ve killed our Ferdinand,” she says. Svejk is surprised.
“Ferdinand? Really? But which one? The one who used to pick up dog turds? Or that
apprentice hairdresser who once drank the hair lotion by mistake?”

This is not ignorance or stupidity speaking, it is the refusal to concede History a value, to
grant it seriousness. The depth of blasphemy contained in The Good Soldier Svejk has never
been fully assessed: what is to my mind the greatest comic novel of our century was written
on the most cruel subject one could imagine—war.
It is not war that is grotesque in Hasek’s novel, but History, that is to say the concept which
pretends to rationalize the irrational stupidity of war, pretending to give it sense. European
thought formed by Hegel and by Marx conceives of History as being the embodiment of
reason, seriousness par excellence. The unserious, the absurd only have a place on the edge
of History, or against the background of its seriousness.

The Good Soldier Svejk brutally disrupts this order of things and asks a question: what if
that rationalization which means to present the chain of events as reasonable were only a
mystification? What if history were simply stupid?

At the time that Svejk was wondering whether the murdered Ferdinand was the same fellow
who used to pick up dog turds, Kafka wrote in his diary: “Germany has declared war
against Russia. Afternoon, swimming pool.” He undoubtedly did not experience war as a
German did, conscious of belonging to a great nation engaged in the making of history, but
as a Jew from Prague, who knew that neither the Jews nor the Czechs were making history,
but were submitting to it.

Just as Beckett strips man to his biological essence, Kafka strips history to the bare will for
power, which is ahistorical and has no content outside itself. While for Hasek the language
of history sounds like babble, the Tribunal or the Castle are mute; without self-justification,
without ideology, they are pure power that does not even try to explain the “why” of its
existence.

About the time Kafka let his surveyor wander through the labyrinths of the Castle, Karel
Capek wrote his play RUR, in which robots (those machines created by man) take over the
world. The non-historical will for power suddenly appears under the features of a fantastic
totalitarianism, the step forward of which has been substituted for what one thought was
historical progress.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the great philosopher of small Denmark,
Kierkegaard, formulated the first important answer to Hegel, by opposing to the impersonal
rationality of history the irrational reality of the individual. Seventy years later, the three
great novelists of another small country attacked historical rationality itself, directly and in
an unforgettable way.

I have quoted Hasek, Kafka, and Capek to show very briefly that Czech culture (and the
culture of the Czech territory) has joined that great discussion which is world literature, and
that it began to speak about things which only it could talk about. And it talked about them
not only in its novels, but also in its poetry, its painting, and its music.

I would like, moreover, to stress that all the cultures of the small Central European
countries have, at the beginning of the twentieth century, become important centers for
world culture, to which they have bequeathed Viennese psychoanalysis, the structuralism of
Prague, the new aesthetics of the novel through the works of Kafka, Musil, and Broch, the
dodecaphonia of Vienna and the music of Bartók, and, at last, the absurd theater of
Witkiewicz. All these small countries have shown a dynamism typical of young nations,
together with the experience of ancient nations, and have supplied a new and surprising
vision of the world which, often enough, shocks through the lucidity of its relentless
skepticism born of defeats and experiences painful to a degree unknown to bigger peoples.

And just when Central Europe experienced its biggest flowering, the absurd sentence of
Yalta split in two this great seat of modern Western culture and allowed its major part to be
incorporated into Russian civilization. Once again, history appeared to the eyes of Czechs
the way it appeared to Hasek’s: as the embodiment of nonsense and stupidity.

The persecution of art in Russia resembles that in Czechoslovakia, but its historical
significance is different. The terror in Russia, cruel as it is, does not threaten the existence
of the Russian nation; it is but a phase in the history of a relatively young civilization,
which likely has an immense future ahead of it.

On the other hand, the same persecution in Czechoslovakia aims at nothing less in the long
run than the death of Czech culture, to which, as I have said at the beginning, the existence
of the nation itself is inseparably bound. Russian totalitarianism’s cultural concept is
absolutely incompatible with the spirit, the wager, of Czech literature.

First: The unity of the world as devised and realized by Russian totalitarianism destroys the
only frame within which Czech literature can survive, the frame of world literature in the
Goethean sense of the term, that is to say, this space where the different visions of the
world meet, confront, and complete each other, and where the originality of work and
culture is spontaneously considered as an asset and as a value.

Second: The Czech nation has always been a part of the West, of its common history,
which runs from the gothic through the Reformation, and from the Reformation up to
modern times. It is true that Czechs have historically had a certain sympathy for Russia as a
Slavic nation. However, from the moment Russia reaffirmed itself, under Soviet rule, as a
distinct civilization, grafting the Marxist ideology on the old messianic, anti-Western
tradition of its past, it became incompatible with the essence of Czech culture. It tears
Czech culture forcibly out of its thousand-year-old setting and attempts to incorporate it
within a history which is wholly alien.

Only this radical incompatibility between the essence of Czech literature and that of
Russian totalitarianism can explain this apparently paradoxical phenomenon: between 1948
and today, Czech culture has known one of the greatest moments of its history. Indeed, by
an almost biological reflex, it has been able to summon up all of its strength to defend
against the cultural colonization coming from the East, and has managed to create, in spite
of the regime, against the regime, alongside the regime, mainly during the Sixties,
considerable room for freedom which it has filled with its own creations.

The Russian invasion of 1968 put an end to the cultural emancipation of the country and
has rapidly, and in full consciousness, led to the gradual strangling of Czech literature.
Since then, and up to our day, contemporary Czech literature (at least that which rises
above the level of pure propaganda or simple entertainment) has been banned from all the
printing presses of the country, and therefore practically remains only in two forms: as
typewritten literature or printed in a foreign country.

And yet these tragic conditions have given Czech culture still greater lucidity and a still
greater interior freedom. In the shadow of its own death, Czech literature lives through its
great era, always true to the essential character of its destiny: it entered the European stage
as a gamble, and this it remains: can a nation, by only the strength of its own culture, resist
against such concentrated political pressure? And for how long?

But today it is not only itself which is involved in this wager: is there still room for a small
nation in this world of superpowers? In times when immense civilizations are starting to
collide, is the Goethean concept of world literature, as a space for tolerance and diversity,
anything more than an anachronistic dream, spent long ago?

But the wager of Czech literature is more general still; in the world of total politicization,
does culture itself still possess independence, weight, meaning? Is the death of a literature a
tragedy, or a mere episode?

This wager of Czech literature challenges more specifically the Western world as such.
Does it still exist sufficiently as a cultural unity, with enough solidarity and vitality to feel
the amputation of one of its members? Or is the West too, unconsciously, preparing itself
for its own demise?

A hundred and fifty years ago, Czech literature took a wager which did not concern anyone
but itself. Today, that wager affects the whole Western world.