Goodbye to Kundera, the Moravian writer who couldn't stand the cliché of the dissident

"As soon as you say freedom, there are those who get irritated, I know," he said in Prague, shortly before the famous Spring. Fired and persecuted as an irritant, he emigrated to France in 1975. The intellectual was an epicurean in a rather Horatian sense and therefore a hedonist

As soon as you say freedom there are those who get irritated, I know”. I discovered this phrase by Milan Kundera, publicly pronounced in Prague shortly before the famous Primavera, in a book, Adelphi like all his books, entitled A Prisoner of the West. Since the pandemic segregation was still hovering, I felt the old Czech writer very close: mon semblable, mon frère... However the phrase always works, freedom perennially irritates, the freedom of speech which in that Czechoslovakia was opposed by the communists in this Italy is opposed by the feminists ( the Facci and Sgarbi cases), by homosexualists (the Abodi case), by climate activists (they want it to be a crime to doubt the anthropic cause of global warming and sooner or later a case will emerge, sooner or later a Ruotolo will say that only fanatical environmentalists have the right to work in Rai)… But I'll go right back to twentieth-century tyranny. Kundera, fired and persecuted as an irritant, emigrated to France in 1975. Believing they were offending him, the miserable collectivists took away his Czechoslovakian citizenship and he tied it to his finger: until 2006, he did not allow the proverbial bestseller, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to be published in his home country. It took him 17 years after the Velvet Revolution to forgive, evidently he didn't believe in the fairy tale of a communism held up only by tanks. Dictatorships are based on vast complicities, authoritarianisms survive thanks to those who get irritated when they hear the word freedom.