L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être [The Unbearable Lightness of Being]

Paris, Gallimard, (9 January) 1984.
1 vol. (150 x 220 mm) of 393 p. and [2] f. Tender green buffalo, blind spine, title in cream oeser on front cover, matching suede-coloured endpapers and flyleaves, gilt edges on endpapers, covers and spine preserved, folder and slipcase edged (binding signed by Renaud Vernier – Claude Ribal, 2024).

First edition.

One of the first 23 copies on Arches vellum (no. 4).

We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.

Milan Kundera won the Prix Médicis étranger for this novel in 1973. This was the beginning of a long collaboration between the publisher and the author, who recalls: ‘In 1967, The Joke was published in Prague; without telling me anything, my publisher passed it on to Gallimard, where, as the rules require, it was given to a reader, a Czech woman living in Paris, to read; she thought it was rubbish. As the saying goes, what starts badly will end well. Antonin Liehm, a brilliant Prague intellectual, brought the book to Louis Aragon who, unable to read it, recommended it to Claude Gallimard with the promise of writing the preface himself. And the plot of chance continued: Aragon received the translation in August 1968, just as Russian tanks were invading Czechoslovakia. Oh, the tanks, what publicity! It determined everything. Under the Russian occupation, foreign writers occasionally visited their closely watched Czech colleagues. But no major publishers. The only exception was Claude Gallimard. He came several times. And I emphasise: not as an entrepreneur in search of a bestseller, but as a major European personality who was trying to support a culture that was being killed off. Encouraged by Claude, I completed two more novels, the manuscripts of which he brought back with him to Paris, one after the other. In his own subtle, almost timid way, he encouraged my wife and me to emigrate […].’ We know what happened next.

Here is what Bertrand Poirot-Delpech had to say about him, with his characteristic lucidity and vision: ‘A Czech in Paris since the Russian invasion of 1968, Milan Kundera is becoming one of the best living examples of the fruitfulness of cross-fertilisation in literature. His latest novel brings to perfection the synthesis, begun by The Joke, Ridiculous Loves and The Farewell Waltz, between two European traditions of the philosophical tale: the Eastern tradition, which led from Goethe to Kafka, Musil, Gombrowicz, and that of eighteenth-century France, somewhat lost along the way and which our guest revives, enriched by his forced exile, then chosen […] In the great washing that Europe at the end of the twentieth century subjected to its beliefs in man and in history, we will have to reckon from now on with the sumptuous scepticism of Kundera, which excludes neither gaiety nor tenderness’ (Le Monde, 27 January 1984).

Kundera is the only author to have seen his books published during his lifetime in the three most famous collections of Éditions Gallimard: ‘Du monde entier’, devoted to foreign authors; “collection blanche” for Belgian authors, and “Pléiade”: he is one of fourteen authors to have seen and touched their works printed on bible paper in the famous collection during their lifetime.

A fine copy.