Radek Novák

Milan Kundera’s critiques of other writers. The rest of the page is generated by Gemini 2.5

Based on the three books you provided—The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, and Encounter—here are Milan Kundera’s opinions on other writers, listed exhaustively for each.

Anatole France

Kundera expresses a deep admiration for Anatole France, whom he sees as unfairly maligned and placed on a “blacklist” by the Surrealists and later critics.

On The Gods Are Thirsty: Kundera considers this novel a profound exploration of the “Gamelin mystery”: how a decent man can harbor a monster and become an executioner. He values it not as a political condemnation of the French Revolution but as an examination of the human mysteries within it: “the mystery of the comical infiltrating the horrors, the mystery of the boredom that accompanies dramas, the mystery of the heart that finds delight in the sight of heads rolling, the mystery of humor as the last refuge of the human.” He praises its “lightness of style” in dealing with the “weight of the Terror,” a quality he finds unique in the 19th century and reminiscent of Voltaire or Diderot. He notes that the novel’s structure, where the protagonist’s life is “eaten whole by history,” is a handicap that invites readers to misinterpret it as a mere historical illustration, but is also what reveals the horror of the situation.
On France’s Style and Attitude: He admires France’s character Brotteaux as a model of a man who “refuses to believe,” representing a skepticism that is an alternative to faith-based opposition. He notes that France did not have “enormous respect for the heart,” quoting a passage where France observes that those who judge with their hearts are the ones who always convict.
On France’s Blacklisting: Kundera attributes France’s fall from grace to the Surrealists (Aragon, Breton, Éluard) who attacked his “irony,” “skepticism,” and “heartlessness.” He sees this as an example of how literary reputations are made and unmade by the “fashionable drawing rooms” and their “glittering nastiness.”

Louis Aragon

Kundera sees Aragon through the lens of a shared love for the novel.

On His Relationship with Surrealism: Kundera speculates that Aragon’s break with the Surrealists was driven not just by politics but by his “loyalty to the novel,” an art form “depreciated” by Breton and his circle.
On His Post-War Novels: Kundera expresses his admiration for Aragon’s later novels, such as Holy Week and The Kill.
On Anatole France: He quotes a letter from Aragon dismissing his youthful pamphlet against Anatole France as a worthless “insolent little piece,” suggesting Aragon’s later regret or disavowal of that act.

Honoré de Balzac

Kundera views Balzac as a pivotal but ultimately limited figure who marks the beginning of the “second half” of the novel’s history.

Discovery of Man in History: He credits Balzac with discovering “man’s rootedness in history.” Before him, the novel’s world was a journey through limitless space; in Balzac, the horizon disappears behind social institutions like the police, law, and the State. Time is no longer idle but is a train called History.
The “Second Half” of the Novel: Balzac, along with Scott, inaugurates the 19th-century aesthetic of the novel, which is characterized by the imperative to imitate reality, the concentration on a single plot, and the composition of novels as a series of minutely described scenes. This, in Kundera’s view, led to the novel having to include “filler” and “bridges” between important thematic moments.
Competition with the État Civil: Balzac’s aesthetic required characters to be “living” and to “compete with the state registry of citizens,” a demand modernists like Kafka and Musil would later reject.
Personal Aversion: Kundera admits that for a long time he was “deaf to Balzac’s art” because he disliked the “rustle of spiders hard at work”—the meticulous, descriptive, illusion-fabricating aspect of his novels.

Charles Baudelaire

Kundera mentions Baudelaire primarily in the context of his influence and his place in modernism.

On Modern Poetry: He notes that Les Fleurs du mal (1857) was a pivotal work where lyric poetry discovered its “rightful territory, its essence.”
On Symbolism: He quotes Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances” to illustrate the “system of symbolic thought” that underlies the irrational behavior of Hermann Broch’s characters, where one thing is confounded with another (“the sounds, the scents, the colors correspond”).
On the Avant-Garde: He notes that Apollinaire awarded a “turd” to Baudelaire in his 1913 manifesto, an example of the avant-garde’s rejection of its predecessors. He also notes that Gombrowicz cited Baudelaire, alongside Rimbaud and Rabelais, as one of his masters.

Samuel Beckett

Kundera sees Beckett, alongside Francis Bacon, as a great artist who closes an era rather than opening one.

An Artist of the End: He sees Beckett’s work as belonging to the “very last period of dramatic art,” a time when the author’s text is no longer the primary driver of the theater’s evolution.
Solitude: He describes Beckett as an isolated figure, unlike the earlier modernists who were surrounded by a “gang” of supporters. He quotes Bacon saying of his time (and by extension Beckett’s), “Today there is absolutely nobody to talk to.”
Rejection of Politics: Kundera notes that Beckett, like Bacon, shows no interest in the great political questions of his time. Instead, he confronts the “physiological materiality of man.”
Defense of his Work: He admires Beckett for taking great pains to protect his work from distortion, attaching detailed stage directions to his plays, supervising productions, and publishing his own production notes as a definitive standard. This, for Kundera, represents the “supreme concept of author.”

Marek Bieńczyk

Kundera praises his novel Tworki for its originality in portraying the relationship between horror and idyll.

On Tworki: He sees the novel’s setting in a psychiatric hospital during WWII not as a gimmick but as a natural refuge from horror. The gentle, “virginal loves” of the young characters are a product of this proximity to terror: “the crueler history is, the lovelier the world of refuge appears.” He praises the book’s ability to transform the “banal of banalities” (like a girl on a swing) into poetry and song.

Giovanni Boccaccio

Boccaccio is presented as a crucial forerunner to the art of the novel.

Precursor to the Novel: Kundera considers him the “great precursor” who took the first initiative in the history of the European novel. He sees The Decameron as one of the “first efforts in modern Europe to create a large-scale composition in narrative prose” and thus a “source and forerunner” to the novel.
Action as Self-Portrait: Boccaccio’s tales demonstrate an early novelistic conviction: “It is through action that man…distinguishes himself from others and becomes an individual.”
Abstract Narration: His tales also exemplify the “abstraction that the past becomes upon being recounted,” being summaries of events rather than attempts to capture the concrete present.

Bertolt Brecht

Kundera views Brecht critically, particularly regarding his political engagement and his misunderstanding of Czech humor.

Misunderstanding of Schweik: He states that Brecht’s theatrical adaptation of The Good Soldier Schweik shows that he “didn’t understand a thing about Hašek’s comical sense.”
As a Target of the “Prosecutors”: He lists Brecht among the great artists of the century put on trial by history for their political sympathies, first as a refugee from Nazism and later as a supporter of Communism.
Brecht’s Body Odor: In a critique of biographical reductionism, he mockingly cites a Brecht biography that devotes a paragraph to the writer’s body odor, based on an interview with a lab technician thirty years after his death, lamenting, “Ah, Bertolt, what will be left of you?”

André Breton

Kundera has a complex relationship with Breton, admiring his poetic vision while rejecting his dogmatism and his dismissal of the novel.

On the Novel: He quotes Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism at length to summarize modern art’s reservations about the novel: its “vacuity,” its “piles of stock images,” its tiresome psychology, and its fatal “lack of poetry.”
On Dreams: He credits Breton with recognizing the power of dreams and calling for a “fusion of dream and reality,” but notes that Kafka had already achieved this in the novel, the very genre Breton disparaged.
The Glass House: He sees Breton’s desire to live in a “glass house” as an old Utopian idea that foreshadows one of the “most horrifying aspects of modern life”: the total surveillance and destruction of privacy.
Influence on Césaire: He describes the legendary encounter between Breton and the young Aimé Césaire in Martinique, noting how Breton’s ideas and even his syntactical style profoundly influenced the poets of Tropiques.

Hermann Broch

Broch is one of Kundera’s greatest heroes, a novelist who revolutionized the form by making it a tool of supreme intellectual synthesis.

The Novel as Knowledge: He frequently quotes and champions Broch’s statement: “The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”
On The Sleepwalkers: This is a central work for Kundera. He analyzes its three parts as revealing three fundamental possibilities for man facing the “disintegration of values”: Pasenow (romanticism/uniform), Esch (anarchy/fanaticism), and Huguenau (realism/amoralism). He admires Broch’s ability to see a character’s roots not in his childhood but in history (Esch as a modern Luther).
Polyphonic and Polyhistorical Novel: He praises Broch’s ambition to create a “polyhistorical” novel that marshals “all intellectual means and all poetic forms to illuminate…man’s being.” This involved integrating heterogeneous elements like narrative, essay, poetry, and reportage. However, Kundera also offers a critique: in The Sleepwalkers, these elements remain “more juxtaposed than blended,” the essay on values is too apodictic, and the structure lacks clarity. Broch’s “unachieved” work is thus an inspiration for Kundera’s own aesthetic project.
On Kitsch: He credits Broch with the most profound analysis of kitsch, not as mere bad taste but as an attitude—the “beautifying lie” and the “need to gaze into the mirror…and be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection.”

Max Brod

Kundera’s opinion of Brod is a mix of gratitude and severe condemnation. He acknowledges that Brod saved Kafka’s work from oblivion, but argues that he did so by creating a complete and damaging misinterpretation of it.

The “Kafkologized Kafka”: Brod is the “founding father” of Kafkology. He transformed Kafka from a novelist into a “religious thinker,” a “saint,” and his novels into allegories of a quest for divine grace. This interpretation, established in Brod’s prefaces, biographies, and his own novel The Enchanted Kingdom of Love (where Kafka appears as the saintly “Garta”), has cast a “castrating shadow” over Kafka’s work ever since.
Aesthetic Incompetence: Kundera states that Brod, a man of ideas with a conventional artistic taste, “understood nothing at all about modern art.” He points to Brod’s censorship of sexual themes in Kafka’s diaries and his inability to see the anti-romantic, erotic, and comic dimensions of his work.
Betrayal of Kafka’s Testament: He argues that Brod betrayed Kafka not by saving his work, but by publishing his private letters and diaries, violating his friend’s profound sense of shame and privacy. Brod then used the “testament” to construct the legend of Saint Kafka, who wanted to destroy his work not for aesthetic reasons but because it was merely a stepping-stone to faith. This, Kundera says, is “the greatest lie of the legend.”
On Janáček: Brod was also a great supporter of the composer Leos Janáček, but here too his help was misguided. By trying to prove Janáček was a worthy successor to the Czech national composer Smetana, he locked him into a provincial context and failed to see his place within European modern music.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Kundera admires Céline’s work for its antilyrical lucidity and its place in the Rabelaisian tradition.

A Life Without “Fuss”: He praises Céline’s novel From Castle to Castle, especially the passage on the death of his dog, which is contrasted with human death. Céline’s experience as one of the “condemned and the scorned” of history gave him a unique perspective, allowing him to see the vanity and “fuss” of human beings, who are “always on stage,” even in death.
Heir to Rabelais: He sees Céline as one of the few French writers to have understood and continued the legacy of Rabelais. He agrees with Céline’s diagnosis that France has gone “precious” and can no longer understand Rabelais, but criticizes Céline’s reductionist focus on “language, nothing but language.”
A Target of the Trial: He lists Céline among the writers condemned by the “tribunal” of history for his political errors, noting that people now judge his “erring ways” without realizing that those same errors allowed his novels to contain profound “existential knowledge.”

Miguel de Cervantes

For Kundera, Cervantes is the founder of the Modern Era and the art of the novel, the ultimate point of reference for all novelists.

Founder of the Modern Era: He argues that the Modern Era was founded not only by Descartes (the heroic thinking self) but also by Cervantes. Cervantes’s heroism lies in his courage to face a world of ambiguity, “a welter of contradictory truths,” and to have as his “only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty.”
The Spirit of the Novel: Don Quixote embodies the novel’s essential spirit. It is an “ironic art” that is incompatible with the dogmatic, apodictic discourse of religions and ideologies. It asks the reader to suspend moral judgment and to understand that “things are not as simple as you think.”
The Depreciated Legacy: Kundera’s personal artistic creed is an attachment to the “depreciated legacy of Cervantes.” He fears this legacy is being lost in a world of mass media that demands simple answers and has no patience for the novel’s spirit of complexity and continuity.
Early Freedom: He notes the freedom of the early novelists like Cervantes, who had not yet signed the “verisimilitude pact” of the 19th century and were free to use improbable coincidences, like the one in the tavern in Don Quixote.

Patrick Chamoiseau

Kundera sees Chamoiseau as a modern heir to Rabelais, a writer who revives the oral, playful, and fantastical traditions of the novel’s “first period.”

An Encounter Across Centuries: His novel Solibo Magnificent is an “encounter between oral literature in its last hours and written literature as it is being born,” much like Boccaccio’s Decameron. He is a “writer coming from the spoken word.”
Rabelaisian Imagination: He compares Chamoiseau’s use of the improbable (the corpse that becomes incredibly heavy) to Rabelais’s (the river of dog urine), noting it comes from the “raconteur’s offhand style” rather than the descriptive, filmic style of Kafka.
Linguistic Freedom: He admires Chamoiseau’s “Chamoisized” French, which takes liberties with grammar and vocabulary (creating neologisms) that a writer in France could not dare, a freedom born from the meeting of French and Creole.

René Char

He is mentioned as a great poet whose successors are now missing. “Where are the successors to Octavio Paz, to René Char? Where are the great poets now? Have they vanished, or have their voices only grown inaudible?”

Joseph Conrad

On Irony: He quotes a line from Under Western Eyes about how “women, children, and revolutionists hate irony,” using it to support his own definition of irony as something that “denies us our certainties by unmasking the world as an ambiguity.”
As an Émigré: He includes Conrad in his “emigration arithmetic,” noting that he lived the majority of his life in England and adopted English as his language, with only his “allergy to things Russian” preserving a trace of his Polishness.

René Depestre

Kundera admires Depestre’s unique and joyous eroticism, which he sees as a “mastery of the marvelous.”

Happy Eroticism: He praises Depestre’s ability to map the “nearly inaccessible borderlands of happy, naive eroticism, of unbridled and paradisal sexuality,” something Kundera admits he should not have liked but was won over by.
The Encounter with Communism: He marvels at the improbable encounter between Depestre, a poet of “crazy erotic fantasies,” and the puritanical, sterile world of Communism in the 1950s. This juxtaposition of “an umbrella in perpetual erection with a sewing machine for making uniforms and shrouds” makes the whole century seem like the “black fantasy of a black poet.”

Denis Diderot

Along with Sterne, Diderot represents for Kundera the playful, free, and digressive spirit of the novel’s “first half,” a spirit he seeks to revive.

On Jacques le Fataliste: Kundera considers this one of the “two greatest novelistic works of the eighteenth century.” He praises it as a “grand game” that reaches heights of “playfulness” and “lightness.” He sees Jacques’s journey as a “mere comic pretext, a box to hold an array of anecdotes, stories, reflections.” He also notes that it embodies a freedom of composition that ignores the rule of unity of action.
The Paradox of Action: He uses Jacques as an example of the novel’s discovery that action escapes its author. Jacques thinks he is starting a love adventure and ends up with a lifelong limp.
Playful Thinker: Diderot is the one philosopher who, upon entering the world of the novel, becomes a “playful thinker,” where “not one sentence…is serious, it’s all play.” This, Kundera claims, is why the novel is “shamefully undervalued in France,” a country that now prefers ideas to works.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Kundera’s relationship with Dostoyevsky is critical but respectful. He sees him as a great thinker within the novel, but one whose aesthetic is fundamentally different from Tolstoy’s or his own.

Ideology as Character: Dostoyevsky’s aesthetic is one where “characters are rooted in a very distinctive personal ideology, according to which they act with unbending logic.” Kirilov, for example, is an “idea become man.”
Polyphony: He analyzes The Possessed as a masterwork of novelistic polyphony, with three simultaneously evolving lines (the ironic, the romantic, the political) that are unified by a common theme.
On Crime and Punishment: He cites Breton’s dismissal of the description of Raskolnikov’s room as an example of the avant-garde’s critique of the 19th-century novel’s “realism.”
On The Idiot: He uses this novel to explore the “comical absence of the comical,” noting that the characters who laugh most are those with no sense of humor, and that their laughter is a social gesture or a sign of agitation, not a reaction to something amusing.
Rational Madness: Dostoyevsky “grasped the madness of reason stubbornly determined to carry its logic through to the end.” This is the opposite of Tolstoy, who explored the irrational and illogical.

Paul Éluard

On Anatole France: He is named as one of the Surrealist poets who attacked Anatole France for his “skepticism and irony.”
As a “Man of Conviction”: He is listed alongside Picasso and Aragon as an artist who sympathized with Communism, with Kundera referring to him as “that exterminating angel who used to decorate his signature with a drawing of crossed swords.” He also appears as a character in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “flying over Prague.”

William Faulkner

Kundera primarily admires Faulkner for his conception of the novelist’s role and his innovative composition.

The Author’s Disappearance: He quotes Faulkner’s wish “to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books.” This aligns with Kundera’s own belief that a novelist’s life should not be used to interpret his work.
On The Wild Palms: He praises the novel’s “unjustifiable” composition, which alternates between two completely unrelated stories. He compares this radical, personal, and inimitable structure to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Opus 111, seeing it as an example of composition that is itself an invention.

Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert is a master whom Kundera reveres as the discoverer of a new existential territory and a key figure in the novel’s evolution.

The Discovery of Stupidity: Kundera calls this Flaubert’s “greatest discovery,” more important than the ideas of Marx or Freud. Flaubert’s stupidity is not ignorance but “the nonthought of received ideas,” a force that “progresses right along with progress” and threatens to crush original thought.
The Discovery of the Quotidian: He credits Flaubert with exploring the “terra previously incognita of the everyday.” The monotony of the everyday in Madame Bovary is what replaces the lost infinity of the world with the “infinity of the soul.”
The Structure of the Present: Flaubert moved the novel away from theatricality by discovering the “perpetual coexistence of the banal and the dramatic that underlies our lives,” as in the scene at the agricultural fair in Madame Bovary.
The Anti-lyrical Poet: Along with Joyce and Kafka, Flaubert is one of the greatest “novelists become poets” who are at the same time “violently antilyrical.” He seeks to disappear behind his work.

Carlos Fuentes

Fuentes is a contemporary for whom Kundera feels a deep sense of “secret aesthetic kinship.”

On Terra Nostra: He calls this an “arch-novel” that realizes the dream of a great, modern novel. He praises its “oneiric distortion” of history, in which characters are reincarnated across centuries, as a radicalization of the principle found in Broch’s The Sleepwalkers. He sees Fuentes’s method in the idea that “It takes several lives to make one person.”
Looking into the “Well of the Past”: Fuentes, like Kundera, feels the need to bring different historical periods to coexist in a novel to grasp the essence of a place or a character.
The Novel of the South: He groups Fuentes with a “great new novelistic culture” from “below the thirty-fifth parallel” (along with Chamoiseau, Rushdie, Garcia Marquez) characterized by “an extraordinary sense of the real coupled with an untrammeled imagination.”

André Gide

As “Writer” vs. “Novelist”: Kundera classifies Gide as a “writer,” one who has “original ideas and an inimitable voice,” as opposed to a “novelist” who is primarily an explorer of form and existence.
Rejection of Rabelais: He notes with disapproval that Gide, in a 1913 survey, left Rabelais out of his pantheon of the novel.
On The Counterfeiters: Hermann Broch, in a letter, asked to be compared to Joyce and Gide, and Kundera specifies that it is “the Gide of The Counterfeiters” that Broch felt a kinship with, placing him in the international context of the modern novel.

Witold Gombrowicz

For Kundera, Gombrowicz is one of the great Central European modernists, a key figure in the novel’s “third period.”

On the Self: He cites Gombrowicz’s “comical as it is ingenious” idea that the weight of the self depends on the planet’s population, which makes the Proustian self “lighter and lighter.”
Anti-Romantic Modernism: He is part of the pleiad of Central European novelists (Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broch) whose modernism is anti-romantic, skeptical, and mistrustful of History.
On Ferdydurke: He calls this novel a “dazzling demythification of the archetype of the modern.” Published a year before Sartre’s Nausea, Ferdydurke deals with existential issues in a comic, non-serious way, tying into the old tradition of Rabelais and Cervantes. Kundera laments that Nausea “usurped Gombrowicz’s rightful place in the history of the novel.”
His “Testament”: Because he was so isolated and misunderstood, Gombrowicz used his Diary to establish his own aesthetic position, a testament that rejected political engagement, Polish romantic tradition, and Western academic modernism.

Maxim Gorky

He is presented as an example of a great writer whose work was undone by his status as a “great man.”

On Mother: He calls this Gorky’s “dullest book,” which ironically became the “sacred model of so-called socialist literature.”
The Statue and the Work: Kundera laments that “behind his person elevated into a statue, his novels (which are far freer and finer than anyone cares to believe) have disappeared.”

Juan Goytisolo

Kundera sees in Goytisolo’s work a profound exploration of memory and forgetting.

On The Curtain Falls: He praises the novel for exploring a new stage of life: that of a man who has lost his wife and finds the past has lost its coherence. The book reveals memory as an “incoherent succession of images” and shows the “scandal of repetition” in history being wiped away by the “scandal of forgetting.”

Jaroslav Hašek

Hašek is, along with Kafka, one of the two great novelists who captured the paradoxes of the modern world as a labyrinthine, bureaucratic institution.

On The Good Soldier Schweik: He considers this “perhaps the last great popular novel.” He notes the paradox of it being a comic war novel, where war has lost its comprehensible meaning (unlike in Homer or Tolstoy) and has become a manifestation of pure, irrational force. Schweik does not look for meaning but turns the world into “one enormous joke” through his “extravagant conformism.”
Schweik vs. K.: He contrasts Schweik with Kafka’s K. Schweik represents the “absolute of the non-serious,” while K. is the “absolute of the serious,” who tries to find meaning in his punishment. The two characters define the realm of totalitarian experience.

Ernest Hemingway

Kundera admires Hemingway’s stylistic rigor and his unique ability to capture the “prose of life.”

On “Hills Like White Elephants”: He provides a detailed analysis of this story, praising it as an attempt to capture the “structure of real conversation,” with its enigmatic and undramatic nature. He criticizes the moralizing interpretation of a biographer who turns the story into a flat lesson about the evils of abortion, thereby destroying its ambiguity and aesthetic originality.
On “One Reader Writes”: He sees this very short story as a unique instance where the “musical intention is primordial,” with its “entrancing melody” based entirely on the repetition of simple, unpolished language.
Vocabulary: He contrasts Hemingway’s “extremely narrow” vocabulary with the richness of Carlos Fuentes, noting that this is not a flaw but a deliberate and beautiful aesthetic choice.

Homer

On War: In Homer, war had a “perfectly comprehensible meaning: people fought for Helen.” This is contrasted with the meaningless war in Hašek’s Schweik.
On Humor: Kundera cites Octavio Paz’s idea that “There is no humor in Homer.”

Victor Hugo

As Precursor to Jaromil: In Life Is Elsewhere, the poet-protagonist Jaromil is the “grotesque fulfillment” of a line of poets that includes Victor Hugo and Rimbaud.
Kitsch: Kundera notes Nietzsche’s “disgust for kitsch avant la lettre” was a hatred for Hugo’s “‘pretty words’ and ‘ceremonial dress.’”

Edmund Husserl

Although a philosopher, Husserl is central to Kundera’s understanding of the Modern Era.

The Crisis of European Humanity: Kundera bases his entire first essay in The Art of the Novel on Husserl’s diagnosis of the European crisis: the reduction of the world to a mere object of technical investigation and the “forgetting of being.”
The “World of Life”: Husserl’s concept of die Lebenswelt (the world of life) is what the novel, since Cervantes, has been charged with exploring and protecting from being forgotten.

James Joyce

Joyce represents the apogee of the “second half” of the novel, the ultimate explorer of the interior life and the present moment.

Explorer of the Present Moment: Joyce’s “great microscope manages to stop, to seize, that fleeting instant and make us see it.” However, this quest ends in a paradox: “beneath the great Joycean lens that breaks the soul down into atoms, we are all alike.” Kafka is the one who provides a new, “post-Proustian” orientation.
Interior Monologue: Kundera acknowledges the enormous amount we have learned from Joyce’s use of interior monologue, but says, “myself, I cannot use that microphone.”
As Anti-lyrical Poet: Along with Flaubert and Kafka, Joyce is one of the great “novelists become poets” who is also “violently antilyrical.”
The Novel as a Whole: In a critique of the biographical approach, Kundera cites C.G. Jung’s analysis of Ulysses, where Joyce is called a “prophet of unfeelingness,” as a corrective to the “sentimentality hoax of gigantic proportions” that characterizes modern life.

Franz Kafka

Kafka is arguably the most important writer for Kundera, the one who represents the greatest aesthetic revolution of the 20th century and whose legacy Kundera feels a personal duty to defend.

A New Orientation for the Novel: Kafka provides a “post-Proustian” direction for the novel. He does not ask about the inner motivations of a character but about the “possibilities [that] remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight.”
Fusion of Dream and Reality: Kafka achieved what the Surrealists called for but never accomplished: the “seamless fusion of dream and reality.” This was an “enormous aesthetic revolution” that legitimized the implausible and opened a “breach in the wall of plausibility” through which many others followed.
The Kafkan: This is not a sociological or political concept but a fundamental human possibility. It describes a world where power is a deified, labyrinthine institution; where a man’s life is but a shadow of his bureaucratic file; where the punished seek their own offense (“autoculpabilization”); and where the comic is inseparable from horror.
The Poetry of the Nonpoetic: Kafka “transformed the profoundly antipoetical material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel.” His novels are not allegories but explorations of concrete human situations, illuminated by an immense poetic imagination.
His Style: Kundera analyzes Kafka’s prose in detail, noting its long “breath” (long, unarticulated paragraphs), its use of simple vocabulary and key-word repetition, and its creation of a unique melody. He defends this style against translators who “correct” it according to conventional rules of “good style.”
The Erotic and the Anti-romantic: Kundera argues against the hagiography that presents Kafka as an asexual saint. He sees Kafka’s novels as profoundly anti-romantic, exploring the comic, trivial, and grotesque aspects of sexuality with an unprecedented frankness (as in Amerika and The Castle).
His “Testament”: Kundera fiercely refutes the myth that Kafka wanted to destroy all his work. He shows that Kafka precisely designated which works he considered “valid.” The request to destroy his manuscripts concerned his private letters and diaries (out of a profound sense of “shame” and a desire for privacy) and his unfinished, failed works. It was Max Brod who distorted this into a legend to serve his hagiographic project.

Danilo Kiš

Heir to Rabelais: He is listed among the foreign writers who, unlike the French, truly understood and drew upon Rabelais.
A “Bastard Writer”: He describes Kiš as a “bastard writer out of the swallowed-up world of Central Europe,” a man who refused to be a dissident and whose novels were never sacrificed to politics. He remained faithful to Rabelais and the Surrealists.

Choderlos de Laclos

Master of the First Half: He is named alongside Sterne and Goethe as a great novelist of the eighteenth century, the “first half” of the novel’s history before the aesthetic changed in the nineteenth century.

Comte de Lautréamont

Surrealist Influence: His phrase about the “chance encounter on a dissection table of a sewing machine with an umbrella” is cited as a key inspiration for the Surrealists and for Kundera’s own understanding of “polyphonic confrontation” in the novel.

D.H. Lawrence

On Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Kundera sees Lawrence as a “bard of Eros” who tried to “rehabilitate sex by making it lyrical.” For Kundera, this is a failure: “lyrical sex is even more ridiculous than the lyrical sentimentality of the last century.”

Curzio Malaparte

Kundera devotes the final section of Encounter to Malaparte, whom he considers the creator of a unique and powerful novelistic form.

On Kaputt and The Skin: He argues that these books are not reportage but novels—or “arch-novels.” Malaparte invented a new form, one not reliant on a story or causal plot, but unified by a consistent atmosphere, recurring themes, and metaphorical refrains.
A New Modernity: He sees Malaparte’s work as embodying the new aesthetic of the 20th-century novel: the retreat from psychology (characters are not individualized by biography), and the use of the improbable and the fantastical (the “raving beauty” of a reality gone mad).
From Engaged to Disengaged: He contrasts Kaputt, the work of an “engaged writer” who knows where good and evil lie, with The Skin, the work of a disengaged “poet” who understands that in the postwar world, “good and evil have veiled their faces” and he can be certain of nothing.

Thomas Mann

Kundera’s view of Mann is one of immense respect, but also of critical distance. He sees Mann as a master of the “descriptive novel” of the 19th-century tradition, in contrast to the “thinking novel” of Musil or Broch.

On Joseph and His Brothers: He praises this tetralogy as a “humorous work” and an excellent example of the “profanation” of sacred texts, which cease to be sacred when recounted in Mann’s “smiling…tone.”
The “Well of the Past”: Mann’s great contribution to the novel’s investigation of the self is his idea that we are controlled by timeless archetypes that emanate from the “well of the past.” A person’s life is a “replay,” an “imitation and continuation” of mythical schemas.
On The Magic Mountain: He sees this as a magnificent “novel of ideas” and a “farewell party for the nineteenth century.” However, he also critiques its structure, noting that its intellectuality is confined mostly to dialogues set against a vast, “nonthematic background” of detailed description, and that its use of multidisciplinary knowledge sometimes diverts the novel from what “only a novel can say.”
The German Conscience: He contrasts the Russian inability to criticize “Russianness” with Thomas Mann’s “pitiless arraignment of the Germanic spirit.”

Gabriel García Márquez

On One Hundred Years of Solitude: Kundera sees this novel as a potential “farewell to the age of the novel” because it moves away from the European individual as its center. The focus is a “procession of individuals” who are all part of a larger family and history, suggesting that the “individual person…is an illusion.”
On Kafka: He recounts García Márquez telling him, “It was Kafka who showed me that it’s possible to write another way,” meaning breaking through the “plausibility barrier.”

Robert Musil

Along with Broch and Gombrowicz, Musil is for Kundera a key figure in the “third period” of the novel, one who created the “thinking novel.”

On The Man Without Qualities: He considers this one of the novels he loves most, but criticizes its “enormous unfinished size” for exceeding anthropological limits of memory. He praises it as the model of a “thinking novel” where everything becomes a thematic exploration of existence. He sees its “structural revolution” in its “abolition of the background,” where, unlike in Mann, there are no descriptive passages but only a constant analysis of human situations. The novel examines the “human situations of the time to come.”
A Thinker, Not a Philosopher: Like Kafka or Chekhov, Musil is a “great thinker only as a novelist.” His ideas are “intellectual exercises, paradox games, improvisations, rather than statements of thought.” Kundera notes that Musil’s essays are heavy and charmless, proving his thought needs the concrete world of the novel to come alive.

Vladimir Nabokov

On Cervantes: He cites Nabokov’s “provocatively negative opinion of Don Quixote,” which he attributes to Nabokov judging a novel of the “first half” by the realist standards of the “second half.”
On Repetition: He quotes Nabokov’s observation that Tolstoy deliberately repeated the word “house” eight times in the first six sentences of Anna Karenina, and that translators ruin this effect with synonyms.
On the Author’s Life: He cites Nabokov’s wish that “no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life,” as an example of a novelist resisting the reduction of his work to his biography.

V.S. Naipaul

He quotes a passage from Naipaul on the two worlds of slaves in the Caribbean—the white world of the day and the African world of the night—to explain the “night pictures” of the Martinican painter Ernest Breleur.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A philosopher, but one whose aphoristic, anti-systematic, and “experimental” thinking is, for Kundera, a model for novelistic thought.

Experimental Thought: Nietzsche refused to “falsify the things and the ideas he arrived at by another route” with a “false arrangement of deduction and dialectic.” He broke up systems to venture into the unknown. This is akin to the novel, which explores all lines of thought without trying to persuade.
Composition: His books are built on a “compositional archetype” of short, numbered, single-paragraph chapters, which allows for a text with “no need for filler, for transitions…and where the tension never slackens.”
Broadening of Theme: By rejecting the barriers between philosophical disciplines, Nietzsche made “everything human” the object of his thought, bringing philosophy closer to the novel.

George Orwell

Kundera is deeply critical of Orwell’s work, seeing it as the antithesis of the art of the novel.

On 1984: He calls it “political thought disguised as a novel.” The disguise makes the thinking “imprecise and vague” while offering nothing in return, as the “situations and characters are as flat as a poster.” He argues that the book’s “pernicious influence” lies in its “implacable reduction of a reality to its political dimension alone,” which is the very spirit of totalitarianism. He sees people who describe the Communist era in Czechoslovakia as “forty horrible years” as “Orwellizing” their own past.
An Anti-Novelist: What Orwell says “could have been said just as well (or even much better) in an essay or pamphlet.” This is the opposite of a true novelist, who discovers “what only the novel can discover.”

Marcel Proust

Proust represents the apogee of the psychological novel and the great defender of the autonomy of art.

Explorer of Lost Time: Kundera credits him, alongside the other masters of the “second half,” with discovering a new segment of existence: “the elusive past.”
The Novelist’s Other Self: He cites Proust’s polemic against Sainte-Beuve as being of “fundamental importance.” Proust rightly understood that a writer’s “true self is manifested in his books alone” and is the product of an “other self than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life.” This is the core of Kundera’s own defense of the novel against biographical reductionism.
The End of an Era: He notes that the “Proustian infinity”—the weight of a self’s interior life—has become lighter and lighter in the modern world. Proust represents an “enormous beauty” that has moved “out of our reach.”

François Rabelais

Rabelais is the great fountainhead, the “founding father” of the novel’s non-serious, playful, and formally free spirit.

The Echo of God’s Laughter: Kundera imagines that the art of the novel was born when Rabelais “heard God’s laughter.” This humor reveals “the intoxicating relativity of human things” and a world where no one possesses the truth.
The Non-Serious: Rabelais’s work establishes a contract with the reader that the story is “not serious,” even when it deals with dreadful things. The scene of the drowning sheep merchants is a “realm where moral judgment is suspended,” which is the novel’s essential morality.
Formal Freedom: Kundera expresses “envious nostalgia” for the “superbly heterogeneous universe” of early novelists like Rabelais, whose work contains everything from the plausible to the fantastic, from satire to pure verbal virtuosity. This freedom was later lost but can be rediscovered.
A Neglected Legacy: He laments that Rabelais has had little influence in France (except on Diderot and Céline) and is often reduced to a “humanist thinker” by “misomusists” who are indifferent to his art.

Samuel Richardson

Explorer of the Inner World: Kundera credits Richardson with discovering the epistolary form, which set the novel on its path toward “the exploration of man’s interior life.” His discovery marks the moment when the novel, in its quest for the self, turned away from the visible world of action.
A Forgotten Master: He notes that the works of this “most famous novelist” of the 18th century are now practically forgotten and unavailable in bookstores.

Arthur Rimbaud

A Modernist Master: Gombrowicz cited Rimbaud alongside Baudelaire and Rabelais as one of his masters, creating a “Rabelais-Rimbaud” program that represents a “transvaluation of values” for modernism.
Being Modern: He quotes Rimbaud’s command, “it is necessary to be absolutely modern,” as the “archetype” of an irrational imperative that drives much of modern history.

Philip Roth

Kundera sees Roth as a major contemporary novelist and the great historian of modern eroticism.

On the Comedy in Kafka: He praises Roth for being the first to see the comic side of Kafka, imagining a film of The Castle starring the Marx Brothers.
On The Professor of Desire: He analyzes this novel as a portrait of love in an age of “accelerating history.” The novel’s nostalgia is not for the characters’ own past but for the “old-fashioned love” of their parents’ generation, a time before the sexual revolution. The characters’ intellectualism (their references to Chekhov, James, Kafka) is a way of keeping “the ancestors’ voices” audible.

Salman Rushdie

Kundera champions Rushdie and The Satanic Verses as a great modern work in the Rabelaisian tradition, and sees the controversy around it as a clash between theocratic certainty and the novel’s spirit of ambiguity.

On The Satanic Verses: He compares the novel’s opening scene to Rabelais, establishing a contract of the “not-serious.” The book is an “arch-novel” and its construction is a “rondo” that alternates between present-day India/London and the “well of the past.” He argues vehemently that the book is not an attack on Islam but an exploration of the “satanic ambiguity” that turns “every certainty into enigma.” The novel is a “carnival of relativity” where “no one is right and no one entirely wrong.”
The Scandal: The condemnation of Rushdie was a profound conflict between “theocracy” and the “Modern Era,” which targeted “its most representative creation: the novel.” He laments Europe’s “incapacity to defend and explain…that most European of the arts.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

Kundera has a deeply ambivalent view of Sartre, admiring him as an intellectual figure but rejecting his aesthetic and political positions.

“Writer” vs. “Novelist”: Sartre is the quintessential “writer,” one who has original ideas and a voice, as opposed to a “novelist” who explores existence through form. Kundera notes that in his essays, Sartre avoids the word “novel” and speaks only of “prose,” which he defines as utilitarian.
On Nausea: He sees this book as “existential philosophy in a novel’s clothing,” which has unfairly “usurped” the place of Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke in literary history.
On the Trial Against Europe: He cites Sartre’s declaration that “there is a colonist in each of us” and that European values are “blood-stained” as an example of the absolute, ahistorical judgment of the “spirit of the trial.”

Walter Scott

He is mentioned alongside Balzac as one of the initiators of the novel’s “second half,” when novels became precisely dated and historically situated.

Laurence Sterne

Sterne is, with Diderot, one of Kundera’s greatest loves, representing the playful, free, and digressive spirit of the novel at its best.

On Tristram Shandy: He calls this one of the “two greatest novelistic works of the eighteenth century,” a “grand game” that reaches heights of “playfulness” and “lightness” never scaled since. The novel’s form, with its constant digressions, is an affirmation that the “poetry of existence” lies not in action, but in the interruption of action, in the “incalculable,” on the other side of causality.
A Lost Path: The novel abandoned the possibilities opened up by Sterne and Diderot, and Kundera imagines “a whole other history of the European novel” that could have followed their lead.

Adalbert Stifter

On Der Nachsommer: He is cited as the creator of a “polyhistorical novel” in the literal sense. Kundera finds the book “barely readable” because it is a “gigantic instructive encyclopedia” of geology, botany, etc., where “man and human situations stand way off at the margins.” He uses it as a contrast to Broch’s very different conception of the “polyhistorical.”

Josef Škvorecký

Kundera expresses a deep affection and admiration for his fellow Czech émigré.

On The Cowards: He sees this first novel as a “great literary turning point” that marked the beginning of the move toward the Prague Spring. Its spirit was “free; light; impolitely nonideological,” and its humor was that of “people who are far from power…and see history as a blind old witch.”
On Miracle in Bohemia: This book, which tells the story of the Prague Spring, was disliked not only by the regime but also by the opposition because of the “inconvenient freedom of its irony,” which it applied to the protesters as well as the powerful.
As Publisher: He praises the Škvoreckýs for their work in Toronto publishing banned Czech writers, saying, “for me the heart of my native land was in Toronto.”

Leo Tolstoy

For Kundera, Tolstoy is a master of a different kind of novelistic knowledge than Dostoyevsky, one that reveals the irrational, the incalculable, and the foggy path of human existence.

The Wisdom of the Novel: In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy was “listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction,” what Kundera calls the “wisdom of the novel.” This is why great novels are “always a little more intelligent than their authors.”
The Irrational: In contrast to Dostoyevsky, who explores the “madness of reason,” Tolstoy uncovers the “intrusions of illogic, of the irrational” in human decisions. Anna Karenina’s suicide is not the result of a clear causal chain, but of an “unexpected impulse.”
Man as an Itinerary: Tolstoy’s characters like Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky show that a man is not a stable ideology but a “winding road,” whose successive phases are often contradictory. This explores the great novelistic mystery: “Over what period of time can we consider a man identical to himself?”
The Conspiracy of Details: The metamorphoses of Tolstoy’s characters are not caused by grand reasons but by a “conspiracy of details”—a look at the sky, an overheard conversation, an unexpected memory. This reveals the “secret, illogical work going on within” a person.
History as Fog: Tolstoy saw history as an “unconscious, general herd-life of mankind,” whose laws are obscure. Man “proceeds through…life as one proceeds in the fog.” This is a fundamental insight for Kundera, who argues that when we judge people of the past, we wrongly see their path as clear, forgetting the “fog that enveloped” them.

Ivan Turgenev

He is mentioned as one of the advisers who reproached Tolstoy for the essayistic passages in War and Peace, which Tolstoy then temporarily removed.

Vladislav Vančura

He is named as the “greatest Czech modernist of the novel” and a “passionate Rabelaisian.” Kundera also cites his youthful declaration: “New, new, new is the star of Communism, and there is no modernity outside it,” as an example of the avant-garde’s desire to be modern.

Voltaire

On Candide: He is mentioned alongside Diderot as a master of the 18th-century novel whose lightness of style is admirable.
Rationalism and the Gulag: Kundera notes the cliché that blames “the atheist rationalism of the Enlightenment” for the gulag, and says that while he is not qualified to debate those who blame Voltaire, he insists that the 18th century was also the century of the novel (Fielding, Sterne, Laclos), whose wisdom is different from that of philosophy.

Émile Zola

He is mentioned only as a point of contrast to Kafka.

Sociological vs. Existential: He notes that Kafka’s characters are functionaries not in the “sociological type (as in Zola)” but as a “human possibility, as one of the elementary ways of being.”
Realism vs. Fantasy: He contrasts Zola’s world, where a cruel act is a “document of a social reality,” with Cervantes’s, which is a world of fantasy and exaggeration.