Jacques and His Master: A Three-Act Play Addressed to Diderot

Author: Kundera
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-02-01
Features: I too have had the experience of freely adapting a work for a new version. That was in the early 1970s, when I was still in Prague, and I took up my pen to write a new play based on Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist. Diderot was, for me, the embodiment of the free spirit, the rational spirit, and the critical spirit. The obsession I was experiencing with Diderot at that time was a longing for the West (the occupation of our country by Russian troops represented, in my eyes, 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. Every reader can immediately notice that there are some sentences in it that are inconceivable 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 with abandon about the gloomy absurdities that were unimaginable in the Enlightenment era.