L’Immortalité
One of 91 copies from the deluxe issue on vélin de Rives (no. 24).
Presentation copy inscribed by Kundera to François Mitterrand: “Paris 1991. Pour François Mitterrand, avec ma grande admiration et ma fidélité. Milan Kundera.”
L’Immortalité features various fictional and historical characters, including Goethe, Hemingway, Rilke, Solzhenitsyn and François Mitterrand: “surely — of all the European statesmen of our time — the one who gave the greatest place to immortality in his thoughts. I remember the unforgettable ceremony organized in 1981 after his election to the presidency. On the Place du Panthéon an enthusiastic crowd had gathered, from which he withdrew: he climbed the wide staircase […], three roses in hand. Then, disappearing from the sight of the people, he found himself alone among the tombs of sixty-four illustrious dead, followed in his pensive solitude only by a camera, a film crew and a few million French people who, under the deluge of Beethoven’s Ninth, stared at their television screens. He laid the roses, one after another, on the tombs of the three dead men he had chosen above all others. Like a surveyor, he planted these three roses as three markers on the immense construction site of eternity, thus delimiting the triangle in the middle of which his palace would be erected […] Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, his predecessor as president, invited the garbage collectors to his first breakfast at the Élysée Palace in 1974. This gesture was that of a sensitive bourgeois, anxious to be loved by ordinary people and to make them believe he was one of them. Mitterrand was not naive enough to want to resemble the garbage collectors (no president can succeed at that); he wanted to resemble the dead, which shows greater wisdom, for, death and immortality forming an inseparable couple of lovers, he whose face merges with the face of the dead is immortal in his own lifetime.” (Milan Kundera).
François Mitterrand granted French nationality to Milan Kundera in July 1981, shortly after taking office at the Élysée.
From the library of François Mitterrand (Piasa, 2018, no. 334). The inscription was written shortly after the book’s publication and the acquisition of this copy (bought in 1990 at the Librairie Gallimard, and inscribed by Kundera the following year), with an autograph note by Mitterrand: “Milan Kundera, L’Immortalité ed. or. chez Gallimard, 1990, 600 [fr.]”.
Fine condition.