La Valse aux adieux
One of the copies stamped for the press service.
Presentation copy inscribed by Kundera to Maurice Nadeau: “à Maurice Nadeau, en respectueux hommage (et avec mon remerciement retardé sur son jugement extrêmement exacte (sic) sur La vie est ailleurs). Milan Kundera. Paris, janvier 1976.”
Kundera thanks Nadeau for a review of La Valse aux adieux, in which Nadeau wrote that “this great and courageous book, in which beings and events are stripped of their deceptive appearances, acts on the reader like a jet of vitriol… Kundera cannot believe that the ideal of emancipation must lead to new masters, crueler still than the old ones… To transgress our condition is perhaps nothing other than discovering within ourselves the possibility of transgressing it, beginning by becoming master of our own territory, with our own strength.” This lesson in humanism, “tinged with reactionary individualism,” was one the Czechs would not hear for a long time to come: Milan Kundera was banned in his own country. (Maurice Nadeau, Les Lettres nouvelles, no. 176).
A fine copy, complete with its first-printing dust jacket.