Immortality As A Sociocultural Contribution: Milan Kundera’s Novel And Russian Philosophical Thought

Abstract

This paper focuses on a study of Milan Kundera's vision of immortality as the possibility of overcoming death through one's creative activity and social work during a lifetime. Having analyzed Kundera's Immortality (1991), we argue that the novel is strongly aligned with the philosophical hypothesis that considers immortality as the everlasting influence of people's life and creative work upon the minds and actions of succeeding generations. Touching on the eternal questions about the essence of life and death, Kundera thus arrives at a conciliatory solution to the temporality of human nature: an individual's sociocultural contribution to the spiritual consciousness of humanity, according to which immortal personalities are divided into major and minor types-the artists or creators, and the statesmen or political figures. The scale of a contribution has a wide range and is not equal for different contributors. In the same way, immortality can be of a greater or smaller caliber. The aim of this article is to study what is immortality from the philosophical perspective of Milan Kundera, as it is reflected in his novel Immortality. Referring to philosophical, psychoneurological, psychological and physical concepts, classical literary works and personalities in the course of the interdisciplinary research, we argue that Milan Kundera's views on immortality could originate from Russian philosophical thought of the second half of the 19 th -the beginning of the 20 th century, particularly represented by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. We also argue that Milan Kundera's novel Immortality could artistically illustrate a philosophical theory of one of the most prominent but unfairly forgotten pioneers in the subject, the Russian psychiatrist and neurologist Vladimir Bekhterev. Bekhterev founded the St. Petersburg Psychoneurological Research Institute in 1907 and presented his hypothesis of immortality in 1916 in a speech titled "Immortality from the Scientific Point of View" (1) .