Jacques and His Master

Milan Kundera

Jacques and His Master

“Where did we come from? And where are we going? Do you even know where you’re headed?” Skeptical comedy.

The uniqueness of our fates lies only in the repetition of the same. So—should we really cling to them? With this humorous play, Milan Kundera pays tribute to one of life’s greatest pleasures: the pleasure of storytelling. The wandering of the plebeian servant Jacques and his master, traveling on foot and without horses, brings audiences amorous escapades, intrigues, and the tale of a great friendship.

“I am a hedonist caught in the trap of an extremely politicized world,” Kundera once said. When the heavy weight of Russian irrationality pressed down on his homeland, the author felt an instinctive need to breathe deeply the spirit of the Western Enlightenment. And he sensed it most strongly in that carnival of intelligence, wit, and fantasy embodied in Denis Diderot’s novel Jacques the Fatalist.

Yet Jacques and His Master is not an adaptation of Diderot’s work but rather Kundera’s own variation on it. Conceived in admiration, it is a “tribute to Diderot”—a many-layered encounter: between two great writers, and between two centuries. But who really leads the way? The master guiding Jacques—or Jacques guiding his master?