The Farewell Party by Milan Kundera

First published:La Valse aux adieux, 1976 (English translation, 1976)

Type of work: Farce

Time of work: c.the 1960’s

Locale: Communist Czechoslovakia: Prague and a health spa in a small town

Principal Characters:

• Klima, a popular jazz trumpeter
• Kamila, his beautiful but jealous wife
• Ruzena, a pregnant nurse at a health spa
• Franta, her jealous boyfriend
• Dr. Skreta, the physician who runs the spa
• Jakub, his friend, a former political prisoner
• Olga, Jakub’s ward, a patient at the spa
• Bartleff, a rich American patient at the spa

The Novel

The Farewell Party is divided into five sections corresponding to the five consecutive days during which the action takes place. “First Day” begins with a phone call from Ruzena, a nurse at a health spa, to Klima, a popular jazz trumpeter in Prague, telling him that she is pregnant and that he is the father. (They spent an intimate two hours together some months before, when his band gave a concert at the spa.) The members of Klima’s all-male band offer various sympathetic theories on how to deal with the situation. For example, the young guitarist volunteers to run her over with his car:

“Why dillydally? She’s a bitch!”“No. You’re an awfully decent fellow. Thanks. But it won’t work,” said Klima.

Finally Klima decides to curry favor with Ruzena by pretending that he loves her, after which he can persuade her to have an abortion. Meanwhile, bringing flowers, he lies to his suspicious wife, Kamila, about having to attend a conference at the spa the next day—her birthday.

“Second Day” begins with Klima arriving at the spa and consulting his friend Bartleff, a rich American. Bartleff advises him to try to understand Ruzena and be kind, but he agrees to support Klima’s abortion plan by enlisting the aid of Dr. Skreta, the physician who runs the spa. The chummy Skreta cooperates, but for a price: Klima and Ruzena must appear before the local abortion commission to seek official approval, and Klima must agree to perform in concert the night before with Skreta and the pharmacist, amateur drummer and pianist, respectively. Now only Ruzena’s agreement is lacking.

Klima wines and dines Ruzena, but she says that she will never have an abortion. Then Klima takes her for a drive in his expensive car and dangles before her the prospect of divorce (his), remarriage (to her), and a long honeymoon in Italy. Ruzena changes her mind about the abortion, and everything seems set. A slight complication, however, appears on the scene: an angry motorcyclist (actually Franta, Ruzena’s jealous boyfriend) who confronts them and seems strangely familiar with Ruzena. Ruzena says the young motorcyclist is only a “maniac” who has been following her, so they ignore him.

“Third Day” provides an interlude in the main action, as other forces gather at the spa. The former political prisoner Jakub, finally given permission to leave the country, stops along the way to say good-bye to his friend Skreta and his ward Olga. He also wants to return the pale-blue suicide pill that Skreta gave him fifteen years before. Most of this section concerns political/philosophical/religious discussions among Jakub, Skreta, Olga, and Bartleff and the discovery of Skreta’s schemes: He wants Bartleff to adopt him and thus give him the legal right to an American passport, and for several years he has been secretly inseminating married women in the region and at the spa (which is primarily a fertility clinic) with vials of his own sperm in order to bring about Czechoslovakian brotherhood. Jakub also has a run-in with Ruzena, Olga’s obnoxious apartment neighbor, over a bulldog that he saves from a group of vigilante dogcatchers (including Ruzena’s father) who remind him of his former political persecutors.

In “Fourth Day,” Klima returns to the spa, ostensibly to attend the evening concert but also to check on Ruzena’s resolve. Klima’s return to the spa is a good idea, because Ruzena, influenced by her skeptical women friends, has changed her mind again—no abortion. As she makes her announcement to Klima in a restaurant, Jakub observes them from a nearby table, as does Franta, from a park across the street. The watching eyes, especially Franta’s, make Ruzena so nervous that she has to take a pale-blue pill, apparently a tranquilizer. When she and Klima depart, Ruzena accidentally leaves her container of pills on the table, and Jakub, examining them, drops his suicide pill inside the container for comparison. At this point Ruzena returns and huffily demands her pills, and Jakub somewhat compulsively lets her take them. Soon feeling guilty, Jakub goes in search of Ruzena to retrieve his pill. Meanwhile, the jealous Franta is trailing Klima. Franta, however, is not the only one: Kamila shows up as a surprise, and after the concert Klima has to sleep with her (which is literally all he can manage) instead of with Ruzena as he planned. Comforted by Bartleff, Ruzena spends a blissful night with him; innocent Olga seduces Jakub; and puzzled Franta paces the street all night long.

In “Fifth Day,” however, Franta’s vigil is rewarded. Now in love with Bartleff, Ruzena again agrees to the abortion and appears with Klima before the abortion commission, which Skreta manipulates to a favorable decision. Yet while Klima stays behind to give the requisite blood, Franta realizes what is happening and confronts Ruzena in the women’s ward, where he screams out his paternity and protests the planned abortion. Her nerves shattered by the scene, Ruzena takes one of her pills and dies instantly. Franta is frantic, blaming himself, but her death is ruled a suicide. Now Klima and Kamila (whose insight into her weak husband has destroyed her love) can return home. Jakub, who leaves without knowing of Ruzena’s death, crosses the border believing that the suicide pill was a placebo, but newly enlightened about himself.

The Characters

Some reviewers of The Farewell Party, seeing the novel as just another conventional farce, complained about the shallowness of the characters. Critic Saul Maloff, writing in The New York Times Book Review, was more perceptive: “The Farewell Party is the kind of ‘political novel’ a cunning, resourceful, gifted writer writes when it is no longer possible to write political novels.” In other words, the conditions of political oppression under which Milan Kundera wrote The Farewell Party, at a time when he was out of favor with the Czech Communist regime, must be considered. If they are, then Maloff’s interpretation seems to be not only consistent with the nature of Kundera’s other novels but also enlightening, offering the best understanding of the characters in The Farewell Party.

The farcical characters do not merely provide conventional entertainment; their shallowness also represents a judgment on the political system that produced them. Rejecting the traditional moorings of Christian humanism, the Communists anchor their morality in the ideals of economic justice, brotherhood, and loyalty to the state. The difficulty of realizing these ideals without the traditional moorings, without the deeper sense of personal responsibility and integrity which is espoused by Christian humanism, is apparent in characters such as Klima, Ruzena, and Skreta. With their selfish, self-centered natures, they are no better than petty capitalists. Indeed, Klima enjoys the economic and social benefits of celebrity, Ruzena is attracted to them, and Skreta is a wheeler-dealer entrepreneur within the Communist state. The characters’ preoccupation with sex is a measure of their limited freedom, their restricted horizons. Skreta’s hilarious notion of brotherhood—reminiscent of various Communist experiments in social engineering—is populating the country with nearsighted, big-nosed kids. The characters use their offices, their influence, and one another scandalously. Few, except for Franta, are even bothered by Ruzena’s death. All in all, they are walking parodies who represent the farcical side of Communism.

There are hints in The Farewell Party of a sinister side of Communism, which arises from the same shallow morality. Skreta’s breeding program vaguely recalls similar Nazi efforts; the characters’ easy acceptance of Ruzena’s death is reminiscent of the Stalinist persecutions and judicial killings. The main reminder of the political persecutions is the character Jakub, who, on his way out of the country, no longer needs the suicide pill. Ruzena’s taking of his pill symbolically binds the two sides of the Communist character and suggests the hidden moral confusion. Ruzena, who might win a contest for Miss Communist Czechoslovakia, is implicated in her own death, but so is almost every other character, particularly Jakub. He is appalled that he could give Ruzena the deadly pill, even if she does remind him of his former persecutors: The persecuted can turn persecutor, just as the persecutor (like Olga’s father, who sent Jakub to prison and a few months later was himself executed) can become the persecuted.

Another possible interpretation, however, is represented by Bartleff. He forgives the woman whom he loved but who turned him over to the Gestapo during World War II, and he offers to be legally charged for Ruzena’s death. Klima seeks him for advice, Ruzena for solace, and Skreta for adoption. Bartleff is the moral center of the novel—a new role in world literature for rich Americans, but an obvious clue to the novel’s political stance. Nor does Kundera leave any doubt whence comes the moral authority: Bartleff talks about saints, paints pictures of saints (with pale-blue halos—a symbolic color), and at one point is even said to glow with a certain mysterious blue aura himself.

Critical Context

Viewed in the context of Kundera’s career, The Farewell Party could be termed his personal farewell to his native country. After the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kundera was stripped of his university teaching position and his books were banned. He and his wife were allowed to leave Czechoslovakia for France in 1975. Apparently The Farewell Party was substantially completed when he emigrated, though there might have been time for revision before the novel was translated into French and published in 1976. Jakub’s leave-taking in the novel might reflect Kundera’s experience.

In any event, The Farewell Party introduced the theme of exile that has been so prominent in Kundera’s later novels, Kniha smichu a zapomneni (1978; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980) and Nesnesitelna lehkost byti (1984; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984), both masterpieces. The Farewell Party also introduced the metaphor of “lightness” to describe lack of moral responsibility. In The Farewell Party the theme of lightness is developed through farce and applies to personal behavior. In his later work Kundera has been able to write about the theme more openly and apply it also to a political setting; still, at the same time, much of the comic tone and sexual intrigue of The Farewell Party manages to carry over to the later works, despite their heavy themes.

Bibliography

Donahue, Bruce. “Laughter and Ironic Humor in the Fiction of Milan Kundera,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. XXV (Winter, 1984), pp. 67-76.

Harkins, William E., and Paul I. Trensky, eds. Czech Literature Since 1956: A Symposium, 1980.

Maloff, Saul. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXI (September 5, 1976), p. 4.

“Milan Kundera,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism. XXXII, 1985. Edited by Jean Stine.

Pochoda, Elizabeth. Introduction to The Farewell Party, 1977.