Jáchek and his master-- works by Milan Kundera

Author: Kundera
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-02-01
Features: I too have had the experience of freely adapting a past work. That was in the early 1970s, when I was still in Prague, and I wrote a new play based on Diderot's "Jacques the Fatalist." Diderot, for me, is the embodiment of the free spirit, the rational spirit, and the critical spirit. The current obsession with Diderot I am experiencing is a longing for the West (the occupation of my country by the Russian army, in my eyes, represented a forced implementation of anti-Westernization). However, things are always changing their meaning: today, I would say that Diderot is for me the embodiment of the novel as an art form, and my play is a praise of certain principles familiar to earlier novelists; at the same time, these principles are extremely precious to me: 1) a pleasant freedom in structure; 2) the constant adjacency of licentious stories and philosophical reflections; 3) the non-serious, satirical, comical, and shocking nature of these philosophical reflections. The rules are clear: what I wrote is not an adaptation of Diderot's work, but my own play, a transformation of Diderot, a tribute to him: I completely rewrote his novel; although the love stories still repeat his stories, the reflections in the dialogue are more mine. Every reader can immediately notice that there are some sentences that could never have been imagined in Diderot's writing; the 18th century was the century of optimism, but my century is no longer, nor am I an optimist. In my play, the master and Jacques speak wildly of the gloomy absurdities that could never have been imagined in the Enlightenment era.