Milan Kundera: How Novels Defy Tyranny

On the role of art in defending all that we value.

Welcome to “Words of Wisdom”, a series that zooms in on a passage of writing — an essay, a chapter, a speech — from a great thinker on a specific topic.

Today, Milan Kundera: a Czech-French novelist whose profound sense of humour took seriously the absurdities and contradictions of life. His last book before his death in 2023 was The Festival of Insignificance, a short and deeply ironic novella that confuses and inspires me in equal measure. Here, we’ll look at an essay from The Art of the Novel.

“The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”
~ Christopher Hitchens¹

New Atheism was very good — or at least always entertaining — on the absurdities of religious certitude, but it struggled with the kind of faith that struggled with itself. It’s not as easy, nor as entertaining, to mock the sincerity of people who confess, “I believe, but I don’t know for sure.”

While the closed-minded of both sides argue with each other, …