Why Milan Kundera Is Wrong About Dostoyevsky

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2024-11-23 04:00:03

ilan Kundera's recent essay in The Book Review (''An Introduction to a Variation,'' Jan. 6) contained several points which demand a reply. Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff. Still, the preferences put forth by Mr. Kundera appear to be based not so much on his esthetics as on his sense of history.

Now, with history, one is on more solid, if not entirely firm, ground. It's solid enough to sustain an argument of its being a malevolent agent in the fate of an artist. It's sufficiently solid, perhaps, for us to imagine it determining such an artist's ethical posture. Yet it slips from under one's feet if one accords it the responsibility for one's esthetics. By doing so, one subordinates art to the strictures of a creed, a philosophical system, the interests of a group - ultimately, an ideology. Art is more ancient and more inevitable than any of these.

It may lend a hand by embellishing a cathedral, rhyming a thesis, providing a tyranny with a suitable anthem or mausoleum. Yet art is never owned - neither by its patrons nor even by the artists themselves. It has its own self-generating dynamics, its own logic, its own pedigree and its own future. An individual's esthetics stem from the instinct for all these things, not from patronage. And it's his esthetics that give rise to his ethics and his sense of history - not the other way around.