The Bakhrakh-M Publishing House has published a book by Evgeny Stefansky, Doctor of Philology, Director of the Pre-University Training Centre, “Unravelling the message of the ancestors. Milan Kundera and the ancient matrices of Slavic culture”. This monograph is the result of the scientist’s many-year research aimed at finding the ancient origins of the Czech writer’s work.

“Outstanding philologists of the 20th century (M.M. Bakhtin, V.V. Ivanov, V.N. Toporov)”, says the author, “came to the conclusion that some features of great writers’ creativity can be considered as unconscious appeal to the oldest cultural matrices (rite, myth, folklore) and sometimes lost meanings of linguistic forms, that a literary work is not completely born in the era of its creation, but is prepared for centuries before its appearance by the people’s culture. Based on these provisions, I tried to show to which ancient semiotic complexes the rite “Ride of the Kings” described in M. Kundera’s works, numerous binary oppositions (for example, the lightness-heaviness opposition dominating in his novel “Unbearable Lightness of Being”), as well as a number of cultural key concepts of Czech mentality, to which the author dedicates linguistic and cultural studies in his works, go back”.

The cover of the book contains images of fragments of the rite “Ride of the Kings”, described in M. Kundera’s novel “The Joke”, as well as a quote from this work, in which the writer is very skeptical about the probability of unravelling the message to be encrypted by ancestors in rituals and myths. Nevertheless, from chapter to chapter, the author of the monograph consistently deciphers this message, based on studies in the field of ethnography and ethnolinguistics.

The monograph was reviewed by famous Russian philologists. So, V.I. Karasik, Professor of Pushkin State Institute of the Russian Language, a specialist in the field of language theory, notes that the monograph “shows the culturogenic essence of a whole series of concepts specific to Czech culture and only approximately translatable into other languages (“LÍTOST”, “ZÁŠŤ”, “SOUCIT”, etc.). These semantic formations are explained in the book, with reliance on their etymological basis and common Slavic mythology. The author’s arguments are carefully thought over, the text illustrations are convincing, and their interpretation is not objectionable”.

One of the most authoritative experts in the field of Czech philology, Professor V.M. Mokienko from St. Petersburg State University, believes that, referring to M. Kundera’s linguistic and cultural essays, the author of the monograph develops as a professional linguist, the writer’s lexicological findings: in his interpretations, “there are many etymological excursions that turn into semiotic reconstructions”.
“I couldn’t help but ask to read the manuscript of the monograph the person for whom the Czech language and Czech culture are native”, says Evgeny Stefansky. “One of the reviewers of the book was an ethnic Czech woman, Associate Professor of the Volgograd Socio-Pedagogical University Petra Chesnokova.
Her assessment of my work, expressed beyond the official review, in a private letter, is especially important to me:
“It was nice to read your monograph. To be honest, there was a desire to re-read Kundera. When I read it (it was at the age of 16), I didn't like him... There is a time for everything... Now I will read it in a different way”.