SOURCE: “Preface to the French Edition of Mirákl (The Miracle Game) (1978),” in The Achievement of Josef Škvorecký, edited by Sam Solecki, University of Toronto Press, 1987, pp. 25–35.

In the following essay, Kundera discusses the spring of 1968 in Prague and the antirevolutionary spirit of Škvorecký's novels.

When I arrived to spend a few days in the West in September 1968—my eyes still seeing Russian tanks parked on Prague's streets—an otherwise quite likeable young man asked me with unconcealed hostility: ‘So what is it you Czechs want exactly? Are you already weary of socialism? Would you have preferred our consumer society?’

Today the Western Left almost unanimously approves of the Prague Spring. But I'm not sure misunderstanding has been clarified entirely.

Western intellectuals, with their proverbial self-centredness, often take an interest in events not in order to know them but so as to incorporate them into...