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I see only his figure and face
I have always been opposed to autobiographies, and with advancing age I have become more opposed. I see around me people with a greater wish to talk about themselves, but with fading memories, so that the more mixed up things are, the more authoritative is the claim. I never wrote a diary, and I have proclaimed this as a virtue. But perhaps I regret it this time, now that Samuel Abrahám has asked me to write my memories of Juraj Spitzer. With some shock, I have come to realize that my memory retains no specific situation about which I can write. I see only his figure and face. And I feel a wave of living sympathy, which I never stopped cultivating for him, from the moment I first saw him fifty years ago. Sympathy for his sense of fun, for his provocative sincerity; a feeling of joy from his friendship. I had especially frequent contact with him around the time of the 1967 Congress of Writers. He played a great part in preparing it, and he was mainly responsible for the effort to give the event a character of protest and polemic, which made it a forerunner of what is called the Prague Spring. It was thanks to his initiative and his insistence that I was entrusted with giving the opening speech at the congress. I have never pushed myself into public situations.
22 November 2009
Published 2010-06-21
Original in Czech
Translation by Martin Styan
First published in Kritika & Kontext 40 (2010) (Slovak version)
Contributed by Kritika & Kontext
© Milan Kundera / Kritika & Kontext
© Eurozine
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