Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera (
IPA: ) (born
April 1 1929 in
Brno,
Czechoslovakia) is a Franco-Czech
writer. He is best known as the author of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Kundera has lived in
France since 1975, and has been a French citizen since 1981. He was born into the highly cultured middle class family of Ludvík Kundera (1891-1971), a pupil of the composer
Leoš Janáček and an important Czech musicologist and pianist, the head of the Brno Musical Academy between 1948 and 1961. From early years on, Kundera learnt to play the piano with his father. Later, he also studied musicology. Musicological influences can be found throughout Milan Kundera's work.
The author completed his secondary school studies in
Brno in 1948. He then started studying literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, but after two terms he transferred to the Film Faculty of
Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he first attended lectures in film direction and then in script writing. In 1950, he was temporarily forced to interrupt his studies for political reasons. After graduation in 1952 he was appointed as lecturer in world literature at the Film Academy. Kundera belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had not properly experienced the pre-war democratic
Czechoslovak Republic. Their growing up was greatly influenced by the experiences of the Second World War and the German occupation. The experience of German totalitarianism instilled in these young people a somewhat black-and-white vision of reality. It propelled them towards Marxism and membership of the Communist Party. Milan Kundera joined the ruling Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1948, still in his teens. In 1950 he and another Czech writer,
Jan Trefulka, were expelled from the party for "anti-party activities". Trefulka described the incident in his novella Pršelo jim štěstí (Happiness rained on them, 1962), Kundera used the incident as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel
Žert (
The Joke, 1967). Milan Kundera was re-admitted into the
Communist Party in 1956. In 1970, he was expelled from the Party for the second time. Kundera, along with other Czech artists and writers such as
Václav Havel, was involved in the 1968
Prague Spring, the brief period of reformist optimism that was eventually crushed by a
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 1968.
He separates himself from
Czech culture and life, forbids translation of his
French books into Czech, and has approved to publish or re-publish only some of his older books in the
Czech Republic after 1989.
In his first novel,
The Joke, he gave a satirical account of the nature of totalitarianism in the
Communist era. Because of his criticism of the Soviets and their 1968 invasion of his homeland, Kundera was black-listed and his works were banned shortly after the Soviet invasion. In 1975, Kundera fled to France. There he wrote
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, (1979) which told of Czech citizens opposing the Soviet regime in various ways. A strange mixture of a novel, a short story collection and a group of the author's musings, the book set the tone for his post-exile works.
In 1984, he released
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is his most popular work. The book chronicled the life of a Czech couple's difficulties adjusting to life with each other and to the Soviet occupation. In 1988, American director
Philip Kaufman released a moderately successful film version of the novel. In 1990, Kundera released
Immortality. The novel was more cosmopolitan than his others with a more explicit philosophical (and less political) content and would set the tone for his later novels.
Kundera has repeatedly insisted that he be considered a novelist in general rather than a political or dissident writer; political commentary has all but disappeared from his novels (starting specifically from
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) except in relation to broader philosophical themes. Kundera's style of fiction, interlaced with philosophical digression, greatly inspired by
Musil's novels and
Nietzsche's prose, is also used by authors
Alain de Botton and
Adam Thirlwell. Kundera takes his inspiration, as he underlines often enough, not only from the
Renaissance of
Boccaccio and
Rabelais, but also from
Sterne,
Diderot,
Musil,
Gombrowicz,
Broch,
Kafka and
Heidegger.
His latter books are in French, while his first books were written in Czech; between 1985 and 1987 he undertook the revision of their French translations. As a result, all of his books exist in French with the authority of the original.
His books have known extensive translations aside the original Czech or French, including English, German, Spanish and Greek.
Kundera's characters are generally depicted specifically as figments of his imagination, not as real human beings merely depicted " as opposed to
created " by his writing. Kundera is more concerned in the words that shape or mold his characters than their physical appearances. He believes that the reader's imagination automatically completes the writer's vision.
It has also been suggested (François Ricard, 2003) that Kundera works within an overall
oeuvre rather than limiting his ideas to the scope of just one novel at a time. Rather, themes and meta-themes exist across the entire oeuvre as a whole and each new stage of his own thinking process reflected in the books serves to reflect upon these same ideas. Some of these meta-themes which operate across the oeuvre are exile, identity, life beyond the border (beyond love, beyond art, beyond seriousness), history as continual return and the pleasure of a less 'important' life.
Many of the characters are based built off one of these themes at the expense of a fully-developed, breathing humanity. Specifics in regard to the characters tend to be rather vague. Often more than one character within a given novel will be used, even to the extent of completely discontinuing a character and resuming the "plot" of the theme with a brand new character.
In 1985 Kundera received the
Jerusalem Prize. His acceptance address is printed in his essay collection
The Art of the Novel. It has also been rumored that he was considered for the
Nobel Prize for literature.
*
The Joke (Žert) (1967; Eng. trans., 1982)
*
Laughable Loves (Směšné lásky), a collection of short stories originally published in the 1960s (Eng. trans., 1974)
*
Life Is Elsewhere (Život je jinde) (1969; Eng. trans., 1974)
*
Jacques and His Master (Jakub a jeho pán: Pocta Denisu Diderotovi), 1975 (dramatization of
Diderot's
Jacques le fataliste et son maître)
*
The Farewell Waltz (Valčík na rozloučenou), 1976 (Previous title translation:
The Farewell Party)
*
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kniha smíchu a zapomnění) (1979; Eng. trans., 1980)
*
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) (1984; Eng. trans., 1984). (
film)
*
The Art of the Novel, 1985
*
Immortality (Nesmrtelnost), 1990
*
Testaments Betrayed, 1992
*
Slowness (La Lenteur), 1994
*
Identity (L'Identité), 1998
*
Ignorance (L'Ignorance), 2000
*
The Curtain (Le Rideau), 2005
*
www.kundera.de is a useful jumping-off point for information about Kundera
*
Polish Kundera page*
Review of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being*
Review Of Slowness*
Comparison of Kundera with Alan Lightman*
Online interview with Kundera
