Zita took pride in joining the European Union two decades ago, seeing it as a symbol of Slovakia’s new freedom. But now she is frightened. “I want a better future for the next generation. But I fear we will go back to the old ways. I fear that democracy, everything is in danger.” She knew what it was like to grow up under communism, remembers the infamous Soviet invasion in 1968 and describes how entering the European Union was a symbol of overturning that regime. Now, Slovakia faces a similar crossroads, split over the Ukraine war, and forced to choose between supporting the EU-Nato alliance or Putin’s invasion.

It is a decision that has split Zita’s family. She tells me, through tears, how her family is split like the country by issues at core of this vote. She has fallen out with her sister who backed Moscow in the war with neighbouring Ukraine, while she assists a refugee from Bakhmut. Her distress as we talked in Topoľčany, a small town best known for its brewery, personifies the tensions ahead of an election in this small country.

A Nato member, little Slovakia is, at present, among Kyiv’s staunchest supporters, rushing to supply air-defence missiles and fighter jets at the beginning of the invasion. But as the war has progressed, the country has become a test-bed for Kremlin disinformation. The polls remain tight, with the progressives taking a narrow lead yesterday, but many still anticipate the election of a pro-Russian populist. And whichever way the result falls, this contest represents a major challenge to the European consensus on the Ukraine war — and a further inroad for the continent’s rampant radical-Right.

Robert Fico, leader of the Slovakian Social Democracy (Smer) party, is the moving force behind all this, and a politician who stretches pragmatism to its limit. He was born in Topoľčany, trained as a lawyer and joined the Communists. But, after leaving their successor party, Fico posed as a “Third Way” progressive centrist in the vein of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair at a time when Slovakia, led by an autocrat with connections to organised crime, was seen as Europe’s democratic laggard. This ushered him into power as prime minister and he ran the country for a decade. Then his second government collapsed in 2018, after mass protests following the murder of Ján Kuciak — a journalist investigating state corruption and government ties to the Italian mafia — and his fiancé Martina Kušnírová shook the capital.

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Five years on, Fico has shrugged off attempts to tie him to the contract killing and stands on the threshold of power, having reinvented himself as an ultra-populist. After blaming George Soros for his downfall, he then exploited the struggles of his successors to cope with the pandemic, inflation and soaring energy prices. Today, he rails against green measures and migrants, rants about the threat of LGBT “ideology” and regurgitates Putin’s propaganda. “The war in Ukraine didn’t start yesterday or last year. It began in 2014 when the Ukrainian Nazis and fascists started to murder Russian citizens in Donbas and Luhansk,” he told a cheering crowd in Topoľčany last month.

Fico’s platform opposes EU sanctions on Moscow, seeks to end Slovakia’s military aid for Ukraine and stop Kyiv from joining Nato, and pushes for a peace deal that would let Putin keep occupied land. One former defence minister calls him a “Trojan horse” for the Kremlin. Others suggest he is being aided by Viktor Orbán in neighbouring Hungary, and Fico has been heavily promoted on state media there, which is watched by Slovakia’s sizeable Hungarian minority. Many Slovaks are concerned the Smer leader might follow the same path as the pugnacious Hungarian populist. And he certainly admires Orbán, according to Aneta Vilagi, a political scientist at Comenius University. “They are good political friends who understand they can help each other out,” she told me. “It would be useful for Orbán to have a similar voice with the same policies in the EU and Nato, while for Fico this shows you can be a member of the EU without being a cheerleader for the West.”

She sees Fico — a former academic at her university — as a threat to democracy. Grigorij Meseznikov, president of the Institute for Public Affairs, a think tank in Bratislava, believes that he wants to reduce space for political competition. “His number two has said freedom and peace come from the east, war comes from the west. But his main motivation is to protect himself after being officially named in three criminal investigations. He wants to gain power to change the law enforcement procedures.”

The day after I arrived in Bratislava there was a vivid demonstration of the passions aroused in this election. Igor Matovič, another former prime minister, drove up to a Smer campaign event in a pick-up truck emblazoned with the slogan “we will not hand you over to the mafia”. His protest was aimed at Fico’s ally Robert Kalinak, a central figure in the 2018 scandal. Matovič, an anti-graft campaigner who won the subsequent election but proved ill-suited to government, shouted that the ex-interior minister was a mafioso as the pair traded punches and kicks. “They’ve dragged Slovak politics to a new low,” despaired one prominent liberal politician.

This unruly confrontation was the perfect illustration of the intense feelings Fico stirs up. “I have never voted for Fico and never will vote for him — he robbed the state,” said Lucas, 39, a travel agent I met in Bratislava’s Old Town. “I’m even thinking of moving out of Slovakia because the politics is terrible, the corruption is terrible, the government is terrible.” Another woman told me she did not want to have children under his leadership. “I feel very sad he is coming back,” said Katerina, 35, a former flight attendant. “Everything he says is a lie or just populism, picking on topics of no importance for our people. I worry about democracy and freedom. I think it is going to go worse than Hungary.”

It is common to hear cynicism about politicians and see divisions in democratic societies. In this post-Communist country, these have been compounded by the turnover of four prime ministers in four years, with one poll indicating fewer than half the population now view liberal democracy as good for the nation. “I don’t know who to vote for because I don’t think anyone in the election deserves to represent our country,” said one resident in Topoľčany. Another voter there put it more bluntly: “They’re all dickheads who don’t think about the country at all.”

But some voters regard Fico as the solution. A few grudgingly told me they would back him because he was more competent than his successors, despite the corruption. “I will not support him directly but will back another party that will be in coalition since there has been so much going wrong over the last few years,” said Peter, a driver, before adding ruefully that there seemed to be “a lot of sudden animosity among our people”. The only person I spoke to who sounded enthusiastic was Lubonir, 60, a member of Fico’s party. “I see problems everywhere. We need to build it back up.” When pressed, the warehouse worker echoed Fico, claiming that the war was not a European conflict since it was really being fought between Russia and the United States. “I support helping Ukraine but not with weapons,” he added.

It might seem strange to find this approach in a country that was invaded by Moscow within living memory (even if Putin did say helpfully earlier this month that “it was a mistake” to send tanks into Czechoslovakia). Lurking in the background, however, is the dark shadow of Russian disinformation, which began targeting Slovakia after the 2014 theft of Crimea and assault on Donbas. “We saw the aim: to manipulate public opinion,” said Dominika Hajdu, policy director at the Centre for Democracy and Resilience at Globsec, a Bratislava-based research group. “It started with Ukraine but developed to divide society over democracy, the West, Nato or the migration crisis. Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has again become the central and polarising issue.”

Hajdu said they had seen an eruption of online sites recycling Kremlin propaganda. Entrepreneurial locals saw an opportunity, whether paid directly by Moscow or from advertising revenues, which were thought to be worth up to €71,500 a month for the most popular sites. One contributor to a prominent channel was caught on camera being paid by a Russian defence attaché, who said: “I told Moscow you are a good guy, that you have many friends, the Slovak mafia.” Another contributor to the site who wrote under a Slovakian name was found to be Russian. In Crimea, a prominent Russian news outlet set up a Slovak-language site.

And beyond the Soviet Union, there is a lingering sentimental attachment to Moscow dating back to a 19^th-century pan-Slavic movement. One Globsec study in 2018 found that Slovaks were more likely than Czechs, Hungarians or Poles to look back favourably at the Soviet Union. Another revealed that half of them see the US as a security risk, a figure that has risen sharply in recent years. A poll taken across Eastern and Central Europe this year found only 40% of Slovaks blame Putin for the war, with one in four of them retaining a positive view of Russia’s despot, while half think either Ukraine or the West are “primarily responsible”.

“Slovakia is a big success for Russian propaganda with the Slovak audience very susceptible to its disinformation,” said Tomáš Strážay, director of the Slovak Foreign Policy Association. “They see Slovakia as a weak spot in Nato and Europe. Even in Hungary there is stronger support for Nato. Russia is using this opportunity.” Yet Strazay also blames domestic politicians for failing to promote liberal European values in a nation still building its statehood, saying that they simply see Brussels as “a cash machine” providing eight in every 10 euros of their public spending.

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The toxicity of debate has already led Slovakia’s first female president to opt out of re-election next year. Zuzana Čaputová, an environmental activist, strong supporter of Ukraine and the most trusted politician in the country, won the post in wake of the 2018 post-assassination protests. It is largely ceremonial but appoints top judges, oversees the armed forces and can veto laws passed by parliament. Three months ago, Čaputová said she would not run again after receiving death threats and worrying about her family. Last week she declared that she was suing Fico over his false claims that she is an “American agent” and Soros stooge. “Making someone a target with hateful lies has cost people’s lives already in Slovakia,” she said.

The schism over Ukraine is deep, but there are widely shared concerns over issues such as education, globalisation, governance and inequality that Fico exploits with skill. He is part of a continent-wide tide of anti-establishment populism on Left and Right that last year attracted almost one-in-three voters participating in elections. Yet he has provoked intense speculation among Western diplomats over his real aims. One predicted he would be “a thorn in the side for Nato”, joining “the awkward squad with Orbán”. This envoy added that there had been a belief in the West that Eastern and Central Europe were “safe and democratic” although the rule of law was still taking root in some nations. “Russia has seen this and knows they are in play.”

Much depends on the the number of parties reaching the 5% threshold needed to win seats, since this will determine the shape of any governing coalition. And if he wins, Fico might re-adopt his previous strategy of strong rhetoric against Brussels and Washington at home while soothing allies abroad. But one thing is for sure: the world has greatly changed from when he was last in office in 2018.

Before leaving Bratislava, I meet Meseznikov, the Russian-born and Jewish analyst who runs the Institute for Public Affairs. “Just look around us here in this square and you see a Western nation,” he said with a sweep of his arm. “We are in the happiest time in our history in our region. We live in free societies, the borders are open, we can travel, there is freedom, we are members of Nato and the EU. There is a stable life in an area that has seen so many battles, ethnic cleansing, really bad social conditions. Sure, there are problems, some groups of people do not enjoy such good lives, voters have seen chaotic government — but these are the best of times. Sadly, now we face Putin with his crazy and destructive ideas — and the ugly politics of Fico.” But the question to be answered on Saturday is: does Slovakia agree?

The reasons for the Nobel Committee’s snub, which occurred at the height of the award’s geopolitical if not literary significance, are not hard to fathom. Most obviously, Kundera was never particularly interested in or engaged by politics. Instead, his work was a passionate defence of the right to pursue one’s own individual desires and lusts against bureaucratic maniacs of whatever stripe who wished to colonise individual experience on behalf of the state. To his critics on both the Right and the Left, Kundera’s stance was borderline immoral, not to mention hopelessly bourgeois. While the Left preferred Che and the Right preferred Solzhenitsyn, Kundera insisted on the human right to be left alone.

As alienating as Cold War ideologues found Kundera’s bourgeois anti-politics, there were also plenty of writers and critics who objected to the qualities of his prose. The intense musicality of his sentences could seem like an artefact of a romantic moment that had passed. His world-class talent for aphorisms could seem similarly dated, a parlour trick that impressed college students on their junior year abroad: “there is no perfection only life” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being); “to laugh is to live profoundly” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). He objectified women, in a way that grew increasingly detached from dominant Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. Surely the world had better things to do with its time than to vicariously wallow in the lusts of yet another ageing male writer.

Kundera never saw himself as a political man, as a moralist, a liberal, a conservative, or as an author of texts whose highest destiny was to become movie scripts. He was, quite simply, a novelist. For him, the novel was the highest form of aesthetic endeavour, a kind of anti-scripture representing the sensibility of the individual, containing “an outlook, a wisdom, a position; a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group”. The faith he placed in the novel as a compass that can be used to negotiate life’s big questions can seem hopelessly antiquated. Yet if you don’t believe that, why bother to write one?

In choosing to write his later books in French, Kundera pulled off the near-miraculous feat of being expressive in a second or third language at a world-class level, putting him in the company of Vladimir Nabokov. The French returned the favour, honouring Kundera, protecting his privacy, and appreciating his uncompromising defence of the individual aesthetic at a point in history when other Western literary cultures had ceased to take novels quite so seriously. “We already had novels with a thesis,” wrote his friend and admirer, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. “We had so-called ‘committed’ novels in which at least one character served as spokesman for the convictions of the author. Kundera’s response was that a conviction is not novelistic, that it cannot shed the awkwardness (or worse, the vulgarity) of concepts rendered in images unless it is immediately relativized, broken, put on hold.”

It is both fitting and also a bit frightening that Kundera’s breakthrough novel, The Joke, published in 1967 in Czech, may be his most accessible — and might have a hard time getting published today in London or New York. The novel tells the story of a Prague university student named Ludvik, whose life is destroyed by a single, ill-timed joke poking fun at the progressive politics of a pretty female classmate who ignored him. When Ludvik returns to school after vacation, he is summoned before the school’s humourless ideological commissars who insist that his words were offensive. When none of his fellow students dares to speak up on his behalf, he is expelled from school.

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Sound familiar? Of course it does. And with decades of communist cancel culture under his belt, Kundera can tell us what happens next. Injured and embittered, Ludvik is exiled from the class of successful young urbanites and spends the subsequent decades of his life nursing a furious grudge against those who wronged him, and plotting his revenge.

Harbouring a special contempt for a state official named Zemanek, who actively pushed for Ludvik’s expulsion from university, he returns to Prague and strikes up an affair with Zemanek’s wife. But their tryst fails to yield the compensation that Ludvik hoped for. Instead, it ends with an affable encounter with Zemanek, who appears to have no recollection of their shared history. Ludvik concludes that holding on to bitterness towards the past is futile, and that he must reconcile himself to the idea that he will never right the wrongs he has suffered.

The idea that the act of forgetting binds together both perpetrators and victims in the common pursuit of survival is at once deeply humanistic and at the same time deeply unsatisfying to moralists who prefer heroes who win out and villains who receive a timely come-uppance. But such endings made little sense to people in places such as Czechoslovakia, for whom learning to live with injustice and defeat was a geographical requirement. Kundera followed The Joke with Life is Elsewhere, a brilliant though largely overlooked satirical novel that posited a different type of forgetting through the story of a poet named Jaromil, who escapes his surroundings by devoting himself to poetry.

The twinned necessities and dangers of memory and forgetting would occupy Kundera for the rest of his life. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in 1977, was a recognisable masterwork of dissident literature, addressing the forced forgetting of the communist state through seven interlocking stories that brought together historical-political and personal narratives of forgetting in a modernist style with touches of magical realism. What made the book really sing, however, was the combination of these hallmarks of serious world lit with hot, entirely un-Soviet sex scenes, including a long-term ménage à trois and a concluding orgy, which announced the primacy of individual desire over politics in a way that shocked Puritans of both the Right and the Left.

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Kundera deepened his exploration of forgetting to Tolstoyan depths in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Published in 1984 in French and set during the 1968 Prague Spring, a philandering surgeon named Tomas is stuck in a love triangle with his wife, Tereza, a dissident photojournalist, and his favourite mistress, a painter named Sabina. Tereza is heavy; Sabina is light, finding release in sex and in the act of betrayal. Sickened by the tightening political noose, the dangers facing Tereza, and the meaningless of his existence, Tomas escapes with her and their dog Karenin to Zurich. When the homesick Tereza leaves Tomas and returns to Prague with Karenin, Tomas is heartbroken, and follows them back home, where they are blacklisted. Moving to the countryside, Tomas abandons both his work and his womanising, and finds love with Tereza. In a touching scene that prefigures the novel’s end, Karenin develops cancer and dies on the operating table, while smiling at her owners’ attempts to save her life.

What was perhaps most shocking to sophisticated readers after the postmodernist playfulness of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was Kundera’s determination in The Unbearable Lightness of Being to tell a Tolstoyan-existentialist love story without reference to either God or politics. In fact, our lives do have meaning, Kundera insisted, if we choose to make it so. For some, Kundera’s erotic philosophy was compelling. For others, it was a retrograde abandonment of both art and life. Clearly, Kundera himself was compelled by both Tereza and Sabina, which is what gave the novel its force.

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There are readers and critics who acclaimed Kundera’s Nineties novels, beginning with Immortality, ostensibly the conclusion of a trilogy composed of his prior two novels, and Slowness, as masterworks. I am not among them. I find them bloated, pompous and self-indulgent. In some sense, I understand Kundera’s genius to have itself become a victim of history. Once the Eastern Bloc crumbled, the author unavoidably lost touch with the driving necessity of making human sense out of the cruel illogic of totalitarian systems of control, which had been replaced by an everlasting peace made out of bourgeois liberal individualism and oodles of Nutella.

Alas. The paradise that staunched Kundera’s art has proved to be as illusory as the acts of remembering and forgetting can be in his fiction. Luckily, we have Kundera’s masterworks as guides to the new-old world in which the people of the West increasingly find themselves embracing the unfreedoms of the East, in what is surely one of history’s greatest jokes — a joke that Kundera the novelist would have greeted with liberating irony.

It was the great novel of the end of European Communism: a novel of ideas and eroticism, the surreal and the naturalistic. In tone intimate and ironic, it seemed to take its readers into its confidence, assuming a high level of curiosity and scepticism, large-mindedness and mirth, but also anxiety, lest waking from one nightmare was no guarantee that we wouldn’t fall headlong into the next.

We didn’t read it as we read polemic — the characters were too vivid to allow us to forget we were reading fiction — but it was conjecturally high-risk in a way that other novels weren’t. Laughter and Forgetting: the very concatenation of those words promised an original ride. So we hung on, rubbing our eyes as though waking from a long sleep, curious to read whatever Kundera had written earlier and impatient to read whatever he would write next. Today, the laughter has fallen silent and, except among a few aficionados and readers without an axe to grind, Kundera himself is all but forgotten.

The forgetting of Kundera’s title is the state-sponsored forgetting essential to totalitarianism, allowing that totalitarianism insinuates its way into the most private corners of our lives. The novel’s opening reads like a fairy tale told by a historian. “In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace…” Next to Gottwald on the balcony is the Foreign Minister, Vladimir Clementis. It is cold and, noting that Gottwald is bareheaded, Clementis takes the fur hat off his head and puts it on his leader’s. Four years later Clementis is hanged for treason and “immediately airbrushed out of history”, which means being airbrushed out of this and all other photographs as well. Inspect the photograph today and the only evidence that Clementis was ever on that balcony is the fur hat on Gottwald’s head. So tellingly comic is the image that one wants to push it further into surrealism and remove Gottwald too, leaving only the hat to hover Magritte-like in the snow.

We have our own vocabulary to describe what the Czech Communist party did to Clementis 70 years ago. We say it “cancelled” him. It is, I think, instructive to trace cancel culture’s political origins in the mindset of totalitarianism.

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The cruel irony is that Kundera’s novel has itself become the object of the very cancelling it describes. Little by little, whether by malevolent design (which is hard to prove) or by subtle changes in the literary/political zeitgeist (also hard to chart) Kundera and his novels fell out of favour.

He had left Czechoslovakia for France in 1975 and never returned when it was safe to do so. Why was that, some wondered. A willing exile is not the same as a forced one: did he remain in France in order to keep his distance from people who could reveal a secret? Rumours of his having earlier sold out a colleague to the Communist authorities began to circulate. Vehemently denied and never proved though this accusation was, a whiff of deception, not to say betrayal, remained. Not impossibly, some people wanted it to remain in order better to sell or explain a disaffection that had other causes. A Kundera who forged his own biography was a Kundera whose books might also lie to us.

The world was changing; subtle re-evaluations of the contributions of Soviet Communism among those very intellectuals who would once have been Kundera’s admirers, compelled them to think again about him or, as was more convenient, to forget about him altogether. Ideological enemies of the Left were no longer automatically embraced. New sorts of crime, more insidious but not necessarily any less terrible than those which Kundera had made his reputation excoriating, required new and no less vigilant policing. Universities began to take on the aspect of commissariats. You might say that Kundera’s ironic tone, once so bracing, now sounded stale, tactlessly assertive and masculinist. No one was going to ask this question in so many words, but did irony even have a place in literature any longer?

In a marvellous flight of inspirational fancy in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Kundera describes two kinds of laughter: the Devil’s, which denies “all rational meaning to God’s world”, and which by its very maliciousness permits “a greater latitude in living”; and the Angel’s, which is no laughter at all, but a horrible fabrication of it, declaring the beauty and goodness of everything on earth.

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Once a longing for unitary meaning turns into a cult or ideology of that meaning — as Soviet Communism was — any dissenter from that cult becomes its enemy. To cancel, in our culture, is to deny such dissent the space to breath in.

“I too danced in a ring,” Kundera writes. “It was the spring of 1948.” That has the wistful tone of a confession — an allowance that the yearning to join such a dance is inescapable if you are young — albeit the confession of someone who dances in a ring no longer. 1948 was the year of the Communist coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia. A time of victorious celebration if you were of the Angel’s party, and for that short time, who wasn’t?

You held hands, your hearts overflowing with joy, and danced in a ring of perfect unanimity. It might remind us of the rapturous welcome Jeremy Corbyn was given in Glastonbury by thousands upon thousands of popular music orgiasts, already gathered to dance in a giant ring, and for whom adding Corbyn to their objects of unquestioning worship was a small step. Kundera’s dancers, “fleeing rest and sleep, outstripping time”, finally grow wings and soar above the earthly Prague. The fantasy that buoys them is the same fantasy that briefly enabled Corbyn’s supporters to believe they were flying.

Discussing the surprising omission of Kundera and his long-time admirer Philip Roth from the list of Nobel Prize winners, the French Philosopher Alain Finkielkraut speculates that the charge of misogyny levelled at both writers has something to do with it. “The Stockholm jury was ‘woke’ before the word appeared,” he says. I wish to stay out of using ‘woke’. Words when they come with poisoned tips promote hostility, not accommodation. We all have our sore spots.

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Myself, I bridle at expressions of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, I don’t think even the clearest evidence of it in this or that novelist’s work disqualifies them as novelists. A ferocious, convicted anti-Semite the French writer Céline might have been, but he wrote a couple of fine novels. He made us see the world as we previously had not. Sometimes, in the discomfort we feel reading or looking, is to be found art’s true purpose.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia weakened itself when it airbrushed out Valdimir Clementis but kept his hat. To cancel is to forget, and to forget diminishes not only the forgotten but the forgetter. It is also, as Kundera’s great novel demonstrates, to forgo the liberation there is in laughter — laughter not as the Angels understood it but as the all-disparaging Devil did — the power to question and criticise and scorn, to leave the dance of shared conviction and refuse the ecstatic fantasy of flight.