Volume 31, Number 18 · November 22, 1984
Kitsch and the Novel
By John Bayley
Wild Berries
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Antonina W. Bouis
Morrow, 296 pp., $15.95
The Compromise
by Sergei Dovlatov, translated by Anne Frydman
Knopf, 148 pp., $11.95
It's Me, Eddie: A Fictional Memoir
by Edward Limonov, translated by S.L. Campbell
Random House, 264 pp., $13.95
The Island of Crimea
by Vassily Aksyonov, translated by Michael Henry Heim
Random House, 396 pp., $16.95
The Burn
by Vassily Aksyonov, translated by Michael Glenny
Random House/Houghton Mifflin, 528 pp., $18.95
In his latest novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera engages in a lively and instructive analysis of the concept of kitsch, and its influence today in literature and in social and political conditioning. He concludes that 'the Brotherhood of Man is only possible on a basis of kitsch.' Robespierre and Lenin would have dismissed this with impatience and incomprehension, and indeed it is true that kitsch only becomes an insidious force in the public consciousness through the medium of propaganda or advertising, which by definition works with secondhand materials. The first call, the authentic sentiment, whether in art or in revolution, has nothing to do with kitsch, however much it may later be exploited by it.
Review, 5514 words
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