In Memory of Milan Kundera

In the spring of 1993, I was working at the Slavonic Library in Prague with the remains of the rich collections of the former RZIA (Russian Historical Archive Abroad), which the Soviet liberators had pillaged back in 1945. Every day I would take a long lunch break and wander around the old city, stopping now at a wine bar, now at a secondhand bookstore. Once, in the middle of May, I came upon a copy of Milan Kundera’s 1961 poetry collection, Poslední máj (The Last May). The title of Kundera’s collection was a doleful homage to the long romantic (and to some, Byronic) poem “Máj” by Karel Hynek Mácha, an icon of Czech national culture then bursting through the Habsburg seams. But Kundera’s title could also be read as a gesture of melancholy—mourning the Prague Spring and the parting with the poet’s homeland—well in advance of 1968 and the Soviet tanks rolling through the streets of the city of Golem.