“Czech Destiny”1 by Milan Kundera
1.)
It was the 24th of August. I was visiting the house of a friend’s father, there was gunfire in the
distance, and on the table a transistor radio played as I absently inspected a shelf of ancient
books. I opened one written in 1633 by Pavel Stránský entitled On the Czech State. And I read…
“…if we ask a man knowledgeable about Czech affairs whether the Czech lands are a contractual
ally of the German empire or whether they are a feudal or vassal region, he will firmly insist that
they are a friend, joined by an age-old alliance, and by no means a servant or ward.”
And a bit further: “And even if we grant that German emperors have had and now have absolute
sovereignty over the Czech lands and that the Czechs have refused to submit to them, the
sovereign should have duly availed himself of the rule of law rather than the strength of arms.
For it is accepted that anyone cedes his own rights when he uses force to claim what belongs to
him and when he ignores the rights of others and, moreover, that duress is not to be employed
when it is possible to act in concert with the law. It is said that the alliance, treaties and
friendship into which Czechs and Germans entered long ago bind us more narrowly surely than
do those of any other kingdoms; yet the price of alliance and friendship must not be sovereignty,
laws, rights, customs or freedom, neither of the German nation nor the Czech…Whenever it has
seemed that these boundaries were crossed by one side or the other – just as, when one friend is
stronger than another, the relation tends to resemble friendship with a lion – the road to enmity
has been opened…”
And further: “For Czechs would sooner occupy any rank among equal nations than be first
among willing subjects bound by even the most splendid of servitudes.”
The gunfire outside returned me to the present but Pavel Stránský’s words drew me, with the
gunfire, into the embrace of the Czech past, into its immense distance, reminding me that we
continue to live that same national history with its “eternal” dilemma, with its perpetual tension
between alliance and autonomy, with a sovereignty for which we perpetually struggle and which
we perpetually approach yet never attain, and I was reminded that this gunfire is no bolt out of
the blue, no shock, no absurdity, but rather something by which the age-old Czech destiny is
realized yet again.
2.)
The period beginning in 1939 and ending only recently has left Czechs with little to feel proud
about. Paltriness, readiness to adapt, reluctance to assert ourselves politically, the reign of
1
Milan Kundera, “Český úděl,” Listy 7-8 (1968): 1,5. Translation by Tim West. The essay, also known in English as
“The Czech Lot,” “The Czech Fate” and “The Czech Deal,” was published in December, 1968. Václav Havel’s
response, “Czech Destiny?,” which adds a provocative question mark to Kundera’s title, appeared in February, 1969.
Kundera replied to Havel a month later with the essay “Radicalism and Exhibitionism.”
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avaricious mediocrity, general crassness – it all arouses in us an extreme skepticism about the
Czech character and casts a bitter light on the history that formed it.
I often thought in those days about the Czech National Revival which, in the middle of feverish
Europe, floundered atop its own small pile of sand, a Revival that rapped Mácha’s knuckles with
its pedant’s ruler, a Revival incapable of forging values relevant to greater humankind, a Revival
filled with trifling acts and devoid of great deeds. I thought of the legacy of this small mentality
that has left its imprint even on the Czech twentieth century, on 1938, on the years following the
Second World War, on 1956 – unable to respond seriously and meaningfully to the stimulus of
the 20th Congress – and especially on the epoch of Antonín Novotný, in whose insipidness I saw
the very embodiment of the spirit of Czech smallness.
During that time I wrote a play which I described to friends as anti-Czech. A certain retired major
instructs his young son-in-law: “Czechs have never mounted the barricades – they attended the
Sokol instead. Those floor exercises did more for this nation than ten revolutions.”
When I returned from Paris two months ago, I was surprised to realize in retrospect that in
various debates and published interviews I had employed markedly patriotic (and even very
hopeful) language. Where had it suddenly come from? Was it just civic discipline that led me to
praise my homeland when in a foreign country? No: I’m not so disciplined. The change in my
attitude was brought on by the unforgettable experience of this past August. In innumerable
conversations both at home and abroad I have come again and again to the conclusion that it is a
rare nation indeed that has withstood such a test and has shown such steadiness, reason and unity
as we have.
August casts a new light on our entire history. This is not to say that the skeptical criticism
belonging to the Czech character no longer obtains, but it has been filled out by a view from
another angle: Yes, the thread connecting Czechs to the heroic tradition of Žižka’s mace was
broken long ago, but Hussitism also signifies the tradition of a people whose “every grandmother
knew the Word better than any Italian priest,” and this tradition of popular learning and
contemplation remains with us to this day.
Yes, instead of great political action, the Czech National Revival knew only the marginality of
public education campaigns, the national struggle’s weapons of choice were amateur theater,
song and verse, and yes, the Czech arts were yoked to the rattling wagon of the national
education movement. But it is also true that the fate of the modern Czech nation has always been
linked to culture so crucially and to a degree so unlike most other European nations that it is
easily the most meditative and educated people in its half of Europe, one not easily deceived by
cheap propaganda.
Yes, the Czech nation stood aside during the great European conflicts of the last century; but at
the same time it achieved a tremendous thing: its own metamorphosis from a semi-literate, halfassimilated populace into a European nation, and this against a current of unrelenting and
systematic Germanization, against the designs of the power to which it had become subordinated,
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and from that time forward it has known how to put forth its greatest effort in the face of the
most unfavorable circumstances.
Yes, the Czech nation does not stand out for its spirit of romantic heroism, but the virtue of this
absence is that it leaves room for a dispassionate rationalism, a sense of humor and a critical
spirit which the nation turns inward upon itself, making it one of the least chauvinistic nations in
Europe. If its national pride has ever been roused to anger, it must have been frightfully
aggrieved; moreover, this anger is not short-lived or fleeting, as feelings are, but tenacious as
reason itself.
I see an attic flat in a small palace in Paris, I hear Aragon’s voice full of rage, cursing violence, I
see his face full of anxiousness over the fate of my country, I hear my own ardent words repeated
over and over: “It was the most beautiful week we have ever known.” There, I fear, the
declaration sounded absurd and strange, but my countrymen understand. It was, after all, a week
when the nation suddenly caught a glimpse of its own greatness, a greatness in which it had
ceased to believe.
3.)
Having thought of Paris, I now recall a little pub in the Latin Quarter where I once had lunch
with the outstanding Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. He asked me whether I knew that Czechs
are traditionally regarded warmly in Mexico. He then explained how, in the middle of the last
century, the liberal policies of President Juaréz fell out of favor with three European powers,
which then sent their armies to occupy Mexico. But the Czech detachments arriving with the
Austrian army refused to have any part in the occupation of a liberal-minded country. Many of
them remained in Mexico and, because they included many musicians, Mexican music today is
greatly indebted to them. And their memory remains a glorious one.
For there is the glory of conquerors, and there is the glory of those who have never been
conquerors. There is the arrogance of nations who boast of the exploits of their Napoleons and
Suvorovs, and there is the pride of those who have never exported brutality. There is the
mentality of great powers, and there is the mentality of small nations.
Existence and even global significance are automatically guaranteed to a large nation by sheer
virtue of the number of its inhabitants. A large nation doesn’t torture itself over justifications for
its existence; as an overwhelming matter of course it simply is, and it endures. It rests in the
security of its vastness and, not infrequently, becomes intoxicated by it as if it were a value in
and of itself: “Spacious is my homeland/Vast with fields, forests and rivers.”2
A small nation on the other hand, if it has achieved any significance in the world, must constantly
generate it anew, day in and day out. The moment it ceases to produce things of value, it loses the
justification for its existence, and in the end it may finally actually cease to exist because it is
fragile and destructible. The production of things of value is bound to the question of its very
being, a circumstance that may help explain why cultural and economic creativity are often so
2
Lyrics of the Soviet anthem “Song of My Homeland.”
3
much more intense in small nations (beginning, for example, with the ancient Greek cities) than
they are in large empires.
Awareness of its own vastness, abundance and permanence thoroughly saturates the collective
consciousness of a large nation: each carries within itself a piece of the same “arrogance of the
multitude;”3 it tends to see in its grandness a preordained calling to save the world, it tends to
mistake its (boundlessly immense) self for the world, its culture for world culture, so that it is at
once politically extroverted (oriented toward the outer reaches of its own sphere of influence) yet
culturally highly egocentric.
Alas, wretched large nation! The gateway to humanity is narrow and so difficult for you to pass
through...
I believe in the great historical calling of small nations in a world that is at the mercy of great
powers yearning to smooth its edges and readjust its dimensions. Because they are constantly
searching for and creating their own visage, because they must struggle for their independence,
small nations are the agents of resistance against the frightful influences of global uniformity,
protectors of the variegation of traditions and ways of life, and guarantors that the original, the
extraordinary and the idiosyncratic are at home in the world.
4.)
Yes, I’m convinced of the great calling of small nations. I’m convinced that a world in which
Guatemalan, Estonian, Vietnamese and Danish voices are heard as often as the voices of
Americans, Chinese and Russians would be a better, happier one. Yet I know that the path is
treacherous and difficult for small nations. It is one of frequent lapses into indolence and
insignificance and periods of lethargy and slumber, differing from that of large nations in that
each period of slumber carries with it the threat of permanence.
The Czech nation itself again faces the choice between thriving and merely subsisting and even
the question of its very existence. This notion confronted me years ago when I realized that an
unenlightened political ethos was stifling Czech life and relegating Czech culture to the
negligible terrain of the European hinterland. I recalled Schauer’s penetrating question: Had the
re-establishment of our small nation at the center of Europe been at all worthwhile? What things
of value does it and will it bring to humanity?
When I posed that question a year ago in the summer from the rostrum of the Writers’ Congress,
I couldn’t anticipate just how dramatically the whole of Czechoslovakia would answer it only a
year later. By attempting to finally (and for the first time in history) create a socialism without an
omnipotent secret police, with freedom of the written and spoken word, with respect for public
opinion and with policy that is grounded in it, with a freely evolving modern culture and with a
people who has lost its fear – the Czechs and Slovaks placed themselves at the center of world
history for the first time since the Middle Ages and addressed the world with their challenge.
3
“pýcha množství” – likely a word play on Pýcha moci, the Czech title of Senator J. William Fulbright’s 1966 book
The Arrogance of Power, published in Czechoslovakia in 1967.
4
This challenge was not founded on any desire to replace the current socialist model with another
equally imperious and exportable one. Such messianism is alien to the mind of a small nation.
The meaning of the Czechoslovak challenge lay in something else: to demonstrate the enormous
democratic possibilities that remain unexploited in the socialist experiment, and to demonstrate
that these possibilities may develop only when the political independence of a given nation has
been fully realized. This Czechoslovak challenge remains valid. Without it, the twentieth century
would not be the twentieth century. Without it, tomorrow’s world would not be the world that it
will be.
The significance of the new Czechoslovak policies was too far-reaching to expect them to go
unopposed. The conflict was, of course, more drastic than we’d anticipated, and the test which
the new ethos underwent was severe. But I refuse to call it a national catastrophe, as our rather
tearful public tends to do these days. I would even venture to say, in spite of public opinion, that
the significance of the Prague Autumn may yet surpass the significance of the Prague Spring.
Because something has happened which no one expected: the new political ethos has survived
this awful conflict. Of course it has retreated, but it hasn’t unraveled, it hasn’t collapsed. It hasn’t
re-established the police state; it hasn’t consented to the doctrinaire shackling of intellectual life,
it hasn’t renounced itself, it hasn’t betrayed its own principles, it hasn’t handed over its members,
and not only hasn’t it lost the support of the public but at the very moment of mortal danger it
united the entire nation behind itself, a nation stronger in spirit than it was before August.
Furthermore, even if the present options of its political representatives are limited, a broad
spectrum of the public, the youth in particular, preserve an awareness of the pre-August
objectives in their uncompromising entirety. And in this there is tremendous hope for the future.
And not some distant future, but a fairly imminent one.
5.)
But what if this new ethos continues to retreat until it quietly becomes the old ethos? What if the
avowedly “interim” concessions stretch into an interim that lasts decades?
Of course, nowhere is it guaranteed that the achievements of 1968 won’t be spoiled and
ultimately thwarted. But for whom is anything ever guaranteed? When has anything ever been
guaranteed for the Czech nation, which is condemned, to cite Pavel Stránský, to live in friendship
with a lion? Has it not stepped falteringly for centuries along the footbridge between sovereignty
and submission, between worldliness and provincialism, between being and non-being?
Ever since the Middle Ages not even God is a certainty to the clear-thinking man, but the hazard
in Pascal’s wager. Those who surrender to depression and defeatism these days, lamenting
insufficient guarantees, complaining that it might all end badly, that we could once again find
ourselves in the marasmus of censorship and show trials, that this or that could happen, are quite
simply weak people who know how to live only under the illusion of certainty.
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In early September when five of our statesmen issued a statement calling on Czechoslovaks
living abroad to return and offering personal guarantees for their full safety, I heard some people
argue: How can they claim to guarantee our safety when they can’t even guarantee their own?
It’s not my intention to criticize those who choose to live abroad and I understand that everyone
has the right to live wherever he pleases, but I object to such utterly ignoble reasoning. Is a Czech
citizen really so incapable of taking the very risks assumed by those who govern him? Is he truly
capable of living only without risk? Doesn’t a measure of relative certainty for all depend
precisely on the number of those who dare stand their ground in times of uncertainty?
The thing that has always impressed me most about Czech patriotism is the sobriety of its vision.
The architects of the National Revival themselves realized the many disadvantages consequent
upon the destiny of being Czech, and the reawakening of the Czech nation was seen not only as a
task but as a problem. The greatest of Czech patriots began his career by shattering patriotic
illusions and myths and characteristically calling his book The Czech Question.4 At the root of
Czech patriotism lies not fanaticism but criticism, and that is what impresses me about my nation
and it’s what I love about it.
Yet today Czech criticism comes in two forms. In the first, a critical attitude becomes a routine, a
bad habit, a nervous tic which automatically (which is to say mindlessly) rejects any kind of hope
and affirms every suggestion of despair; it’s the criticism of the weak, criticism degenerated into
mere pessimism; such criticism is not a rational stance but a foul mood, a psychosis, and the
ideal climate for the cultivation of defeat.
And then there’s real criticism, which is the enemy of psychosis and which knows that an attitude
of pessimism is just as deceptive as an attitude of optimism; this criticism knows how to expose
illusion and false certainty, yet at the same time it’s full of self-assurance for it knows that it is
the very force, the value, the power on which it’s possible to build a future. This criticism, which
produced the Prague Spring and which in the autumn withstood the onslaught of lies and
irrationality, is not the property of some elite but has proven to be the greatest virtue of the entire
nation.
A nation thus endowed has every right to approach the uncertainties of the coming year with
complete confidence. At the end of 1968 it has a greater right to it than ever before.
4
Tomáš G. Masaryk (1895).
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