You must be mine or die upon the rack, if I want you, Keats' cry rings through the ages. Why should Jaromil be jealous? The redhead girl now belongs to him more than ever. Her fate was his creation. It was his eye watching her as she urinated into the pail; it was his hand touching her when a guard treated her roughly. She was his victim, his creation; she was his, his, totally his own!
Jaromil was no longer jealous. That night, he slept the deep sleep of a real man.
Kundera actively hates poetry as much as he hates the crimes perpetrated under the banner of poetic political slogans. But he is certainly wrong when he equates the surrealistic slogans of the May 1968 revolt in Paris ("L'imagination au pouvoir." "La poesie est dans la rue!" "Soyez realistes demandez l'impossible!") with the Stalinist slogans Jaromil is editing for the May Day parade in Prague some twenty years before. Nothings was more foreign to the spontaneity and libertarian spirit of the May 1968 revolt than the oppressive regimentation of the Stalinist era in Czechoslovakia; the Parisian May had probably more in common with the Prague Spring of 1968 (in which Kundera played an active role) than he suspects.
Maybe that is so, because of his theoretically biased premises; while Kundera equates lyrical poetry, in its quest for the absolute, with revolutions that often turn into dictatorships, the novel is the art of reason, maturity, and truth, where you cannot cheat. That is why there are no great Stalinist novels. But Stalinist poetry (like Nezval in Czechoslovakia or Kundera himself in his youth) left us beautiful verse because through the magic of poetry, all statements become the truth, provided they are backed by the power of real experience. And the poet certainly experiences deeply, so deeply their emotions smoulder and blaze. The smoke of their firely feelings spread like a rainbow over the sky, a beautiful rainbow spanning prison walls....
Life is Elsewhere won Kundera the Medici Literary award for the best foreign novel published in France, a sign of international recognition and interest for his work as well as the efforts of a whole generation of writers whose fate is so closely parallel with that of their country.
Although everybody was ready to weep crocodile tears when half a million troops from the Warsaw Pact armies marched in, in August 1968, to crush Czech hopes for a socialism reconciled with democracy, the pity was short-lived. For the Western establishment, detente and attractive trade prospects have superceded the initial expressions of humanitarian sympathy mixed with "red-scare" rhetoric. To people on the left, especially pro-communist intellectuals in Europe, the more blatantly violent repression under right wing dictatorships, has made them forget the much "duller" horrors of the Czech "normalization," and close ranks with the socialist camp, But, as is well known, "fellow trave'lers" have always proved to be warm supporters of "socialism in one country," so long as it was not their own.
When Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius), the leading seventeenth century philosopher and founder of modern pedagogy left Czech lands in 1620 to avoid persecution, fored Germanization and Catholicization, he was invited to become the first president of Harvard; he turned the offer down. What on earth had that obscure place on the other side of the ocean to offer the most prominent Czech intellectual of his time?
Ironically, today, when Czech intellectuals continue to see no way to insure national survival other than by making a significant contribution to world culture, most people at Harvard are ignorant of, or indifferent to the efforts of these people in "this faraway country of which we know nothing.