Prague, February 1948. A photograph of the new Communist leader on a balcony, a fur hat on his head, a comrade at his shoulder. Four years later the comrade is hanged and painted out of the picture. Milan Kundera built the most famous opening in Czech literature on what was left: the hat. A scholar has since checked the print, and the story is not quite what the photograph shows.
Why we’re pointing you there
Everyone quotes Kundera’s line about memory and forgetting. Michael Cummins reads the page it’s on, and finds that Kundera gave the line to a character who is busy trying to erase his own past, and knew exactly what he was doing. From there the essay follows one fur hat through four sets of hands: the state’s, the novelist’s, Kundera’s own on his early work, and Nietzsche’s sister’s on her brother’s notebooks. Descartes supplies the frame, from a window in 1641: we see hats and cloaks in the street, and the men beneath them are something we judge, not something we see.
The hardest section concerns a half-page police report from 1950 that surfaced in 2008 with Kundera’s name on it. The essay lays out what the document says, what is contested, who the witnesses are related to, and decides nothing, which is the only honest thing to do with it. It makes exactly one guess about Kundera, labels it as a guess, and gives its grade. Read it for the ending, where the record does something the novel never mentions.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
