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By:
Zulfiqar Halepoto
When
in 1968 the Russians occupied my small country, all my books were banned and
I suddenly lost all legal means of earning a living. A number of people
tried to help me; one day a director came and proposed that I write a stage
adaptation, under his name, of Dostoyevsky's 'The Idiot'.
So I reread 'The Idiot' and realized that even if I were starving, I could
not do the job. Dostoyevsky's universe of overblown gestures, murky depths
and aggressive sentimentality repelled me. All at once I felt an
inexplicable pang of nostalgia for Jacques le Fataliste.
Wouldn't you prefer Diderot to Dostoyevsky
No, he would not. I, on the other hand, could not shake off my strange
desire; to remain in the company of Jacques and his master as long as
possible, I began to picture them as characters in a play of my own.
Why the sudden aversion to Dostoyevsky
Was it the anti-Russian reflex of a Czech traumatized by the occupation of
his country? No, because I never stopped loving Chekhov. Was it doubts about
the esthetic value of the work? No, because my aversion had taken me by
surprise and made no claims to objectivity.
What irritated me about Dostoyevsky was the climate of his novels: a
universe where everything turns into feeling; in other words, where feelings
are promoted to the rank of value and of truth.
On the third day of the occupation, I was driving from Prague to Budejovice
(the town where Camus set his play 'Le Malentendu' 'The
Misunderstanding'). All along the roads, in the fields, in the woods,
everywhere, there were encampments of Russian infantrymen. At one point they
stopped my car. Three soldiers began searching it. Once the operation was
over, the officer who had ordered it asked me in Russian, 'Kak
chuvstvuyetyes' that is, How do you feel? What are your feelings?? His
question was not meant to be malicious or ironic. On the contrary. ?It's all
a big misunderstanding, he continued, but it will straighten itself out. You
must realize we love the Czechs. We love you!
The countryside ravaged by
thousands of tanks, the future of the country compromised for centuries,
Czech Government leaders arrested and abducted, and an officer of the
occupying army makes you a declaration of love. Please understand me: he had
no desire to condemn the invasion, not in the least. They all spoke more or
less as he did, their attitude based not on the sadistic pleasure of the
ravisher but on quite a different archetype: unrequited love. Why do these
Czechs (whom we love so!) refuse to live with us the way we live? What a
pity we're forced to use tanks to teach them what it means to love!
Man cannot do without feelings, but the moment they are considered values in
themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds of behavior, they
become frightening. The noblest of national sentiments stand ready to
justify the greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swelling with lyric
fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred name of love.
When feelings supplant rational thought, they become the basis for an
absence of understanding, for intolerance; they become, as Carl Jung has put
it, 'the superstructure of brutality.'
The elevation of sentiment to the rank of a value dates back quite far,
perhaps even to the moment when Christianity broke off from Judaism. 'Love
God and do as you will,' said Saint Augustine. The famous saying is
revealing: it shifts the criterion for truth from the outside inward, into
the arbitrary sphere of the subjective. A vague feeling of love ('Love God!' the Christian imperative) supplants the clarity of the Law (the imperative
of Judaism) to become the rather hazy criterion of morality.
The history of Christian society is an age-old school of feelings: Jesus on
the cross taught us to cherish suffering; chivalric verse discovered love;
the bourgeois family made us nostalgic for domestic life; political
demagoguery has managed to 'sentimentalize' the will to power. It is this
long history that has fashioned the wealth, strength and beauty of our
feelings.
But from the Renaissance on, this Western sensibility has been balanced by a
complementary spirit: that of reason and doubt, of play and the relativity
of human affairs. It was then that the West truly came into its own.
Milan Kundera is a Czech writer who has written a number of highly acclaimed
books including 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' This excerpt is from an
essay titled 'An Introduction to a Variation.' |
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