Testaments Betrayed

Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality. Now, in a landmark essay, Kundera celebrates artistic creation, especially the art of the novel and its mysterious kinship with music. The betrayal of both the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator's wishes is the principal them of this landmark essay. Particularly intriguing is Kundera's impassioned attack on society's shifting moral judgements and persecutions of art and artists, from Celine to Mayakovsky to Salman Rushdie.