Zneuznávané dědictví Cervantesovo

After the successful volume My Janáček, two essays by Kundera devoted to the art of the novel are published under the title Zneuznávané dediščictví Cervantes: Cervantes's Unrecognized Heritage and The Jerusalem Speech: The Novel and Europe (from L'art du roman, Editions Gallimard 1986). The bookmark reads: It is forgotten that Descartes was not the only founder of the Modern Age. It was also Cervantes. The art of the novel affected the new face of a world in which "the one divine Truth has broken up into a hundred relative truths". The novel, "the heritage of Cervantes", accompanied Europe for several centuries until the "terminal paradoxes of the Modern Age" - paradoxes beautifully revealed by the great central European novels of the first half of the twentieth century. The novel today can hardly live "at peace with the spirit of our time: if it still wants to discover what has not been discovered, if it still wants to 'advance' further as a novel, it can only do so in spite of and against the progress of the world".

Czech edition