Slovo a Smysl (Aug 2015)
Dlouhé loučení Milana Kundery s Julkem Fučíkem a odpovědnost žánru První verze Umění románu a druhá verze Posledního máje // Milan Kundera’s Long Goodbye to Julek Fučík and the Responsibility to the Genre. The First Version of The Art of the Novel and the Second Version of The Last of May
Abstract
The article focuses on Milan Kundera’s works from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, particularly on Poslední máj (The Last of May) in the versions of 1955 and 1961, and Kundera’s first Art of the Novel (Umění románu), a study on the works of Vladislav Vančura, finished in 1959. The article argues that these works are interesting not only from the point of view of Kundera’s then Marxist-Leninist political stance, but also with respect to genre theory and practise as it can be retraced in his writing before the appearance of the famous novels of the mid-1960s. The article demonstrates that the relationship between lyricism and the novel in these early works exhibits many features which are to be found in his later work. The novel takes up a privileged position — albeit with a different and more explicitly political, party-bound motivation, representing the “great epic” required by “the people”. The article also contains reflections on Kundera’s role in the Czechoslovak Stalinists cult of Julius Fučík, related to the genre issues mentioned insofar as Fučík is placed by Kundera in the same category as Vančura in the first Art of the Novel.
