Kundera, europenii şi Europa
Kundera, Europeans and Europe

Summary/Abstract: The present essay tries to picture the image of the modern European as seen by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera in six of his novels: The Identity, Life Is Elsewhere, Immortality, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Slowness. As critic Kvĕtoslav Chvatík writes, Kundera „didn’t have to find the story of his life, it was it that found him”. Kundera places Europe between two extreme points: the first one is War and the second one is Culture. The two are connected like “the sky and the earth, they are its glory and its shame but they are inseparable. The end of one of them will be the end of the other one.” Fear of death makes one feel alive and lacking it, one is no longer aware of this gift he possesses, no longer aware of himself. The “forgetting of being”, thus motivates the absence of truly valuable personalities and reflects the acute lack of a referential system of values in Modern Europe. As a conclusion, Kundera’s novels reveal Europe and Europeans as seen from the inside and from the outside, like a geometrical unfolding of a prism made of mirrors.

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