L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être

Milan Kundera received the prix Médicis étranger for this novel in 1973, marking the beginning of a long collaboration between author and publisher. Kundera later recalled: “In 1967, La Plaisanterie was published in Prague; without telling me, my publisher passed it to Gallimard, where, as the rules required, it was given to a reader — a Czech woman living in Paris — who found it worthless. As the proverb says, a bad beginning can make a good ending. Antonin Liehm, a brilliant Prague intellectual, brought the book to Louis Aragon, who, without being able to read it, recommended it to Claude Gallimard, promising to write the preface himself. And the conspiracy of chance continued: Aragon received the translation in August 1968, just as Russian tanks were invading Czechoslovakia. Ah, the tanks — what publicity! That settled everything. During the Russian occupation, foreign writers occasionally visited their closely watched Czech colleagues. But no major publisher did — except Claude Gallimard, who came several times. And I stress this: not as a businessman looking for a bestseller, but as a great European figure trying to support a culture being put to death. Encouraged by Claude, I finished two more novels, whose manuscripts he carried back to Paris one after the other. In his subtle, almost shy way, he encouraged my wife and me to emigrate […].” The rest is well known.

Bertrand Poirot-Delpech wrote with characteristic lucidity: “A Parisian Czech since the Russian invasion of 1968, Milan Kundera is becoming one of the finest living examples of the fertility of cross-cultural literature. His latest novel perfects the synthesis, begun with La Plaisanterie, Risibles Amours and La Valse aux adieux, between two European traditions of the philosophical tale: the Central European one running from Goethe to Kafka, Musil and Gombrowicz, and the eighteenth-century French tradition, largely lost along the way, which our guest revives, enriched by his forced and then chosen exile […]. In the great reckoning that late-twentieth-century Europe is imposing on its beliefs in man and history, one will henceforth have to reckon with Kundera’s sumptuous skepticism, which excludes neither gaiety nor tenderness.” (Le Monde, 27 January 1984)

Kundera is the only author to have seen, in his own lifetime, his books published in the three most celebrated series of Éditions Gallimard: “Du monde entier,” devoted to foreign literature; the “collection blanche” for French authors; and the “Pléiade” — he is one of only fourteen authors to have seen and held their own works printed on bible paper in that famous series during their lifetime.

A magnificent copy, in a superb binding by Renaud Vernier.

A copy of exceptional quality.