Milan Kundera was a writer of caustic irony and mordant wit

IN MILAN KUNDERA’S most famous novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, a dissident Czech artist feted in Germany finds herself lauded as a “saint or martyr”. Sabina protests, however, that her “enemy is kitsch, not Communism!” Mr Kundera, who died on July 11th aged 94, moved from a fervent youthful socialism to global renown as an exiled author who dissected and derided the follies and cruelties of the Soviet satellite regime that ruled his homeland until 1989. He insisted always, though, on the supremacy of art over any ideology, and championed the novelist’s vocation in an era “befogged with ideas and indifferent to works”.

For Mr Kundera, the deadly foe of truthful art was kitsch: the narcissistic sentimentality that, under any social system, effaces realities and encourages people to “gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie”. With caustic irony, mordant wit and acrobatic literary skill, he mocked the beautifying lie wherever he found it—in politics, in culture or in personal relationships. Before and after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Mr Kundera became one of the world’s best-known critics of the abstract idealism that can lead to tyranny. In agile, fragmentary, essay-like fictions, he took aim at the belief in history as a progressive “Grand March” towards “brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness”.