Milan Kundera (IPA: ['mɪlan 'kundɛra]) (born April 1, 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic) is a Czech-born writer who has written books in both Czech and French. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke.

Life

He was born into a highly cultured, middle class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891-1971), once a pupil of the composer Leoš Janáček was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961. Milan learned to play the piano from his father and later went on to study musicology and musical composition. Musicological influences and references can be found throughout his work; he even goes so far as putting notes in the text to make a point.

The author completed his secondary school studies in Brno in 1948. He studied literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University but, after two terms, he transferred to the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he first attended lectures in film direction and script writing. In 1950, his studies were briefly interrupted by political interference. After graduating in 1952, the Film Faculty appointed him a lecturer in world literature. Kundera belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had had little or no experience of the prewar democratic Czechoslovak Republic. Their ideology was greatly influenced by the experiences of World War II and the German occupation; so, in 1948 Kundera, still in his teens, joined the ruling Czechoslovak Communist Party. 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 readmitted into the Communist Party in 1956, eventually to be expelled for the second time in 1970. 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 the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 1968. Kundera remained committed to reforming Czech communism, and argued vehemently in print with Havel, saying, essentially, that everyone should remain calm and that "nobody is being locked up for his opinions yet," and "the significance of the Prague Autumn may ultimately be greater than that of the Prague Spring." Finally, however, Kundera relinquished his reformist dreams and moved to France in 1975. He has been a French citizen since 1981 ^[1].

Work

In his first novel, The Joke, he gave a satirical account of the nature of totalitarianism in the Communist era. Kundera had been quick to criticize the Soviet invasion, and this led to the banning of his works and to his blacklisting. 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. An unusual mixture of novel, short story collection, and author's musings, the book set the tone for his works in exile.

In 1984, he published The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his most famous work. The book chronicled the fragile nature of the fate of the individual and how a life lived once may as well have never been lived at all, as there is no possibility for repetition, experiment, and trial and error. In 1988, American director Philip Kaufman released a moderately successful film version of the novel. Kundera was upset about the film and has since forbidden any adaptations of his novels. In 1990, Kundera published Immortality. The novel, his last in Czech, was more cosmopolitan than its predecessors. Its content was more explicitly philosophical, as well as less political. It would set the tone for his later novels.

Kundera has repeatedly insisted on being 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 notes often enough, not only from the Renaissance authors Boccaccio and Rabelais, but also from Sterne, Fielding, Diderot, Musil, Gombrowicz, Broch, Kafka and Heidegger.

He also digresses into musical matters, analyzing Czech folk music, quoting from Bartok and Janacek. Further in this vein, he interpolates musical excerpts into the text (for example, in The Joke), or discusses Schoenberg and atonality.

Originally, he wrote in Czech. From 1993 on, he has written his novels in French. Between 1985 and 1987 he undertook the revision of the French translations of his earlier works. As a result, all of his books exist in French with the authority of the original.

His books have been translated into many languages.

Writing style and philosophy

Kundera's characters are often explicitly identified as figments of his own imagination. Kundera is more concerned with the words that shape or mould his characters than their physical appearance. In his non-fiction work, The Art of the Novel, he says that the reader's imagination automatically completes the writer's vision. He as the writer wishes to focus on the essential, and for him the essential does not include the physical appearance or even the interior world (the psychological world) of his characters.

It has also been suggested (François Ricard, 2003) that Kundera conceives with regard to 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, and each new book manifests the latest stage of his personal philosophy. Some of these meta-themes 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 his characters are intended as expositions of one of these themes at the expense of their fully-developed humanity. Specifics in regard to the characters tend to be rather vague. Often, more than one main character is used in a novel, even to the extent of completely discontinuing a character and resuming the plot with a brand new character.

Awards

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^[2]. In 2000 he was awarded the Herder Prize. In 2007 he will be awarded the Czech national literature prize.^[3]

Influence On Later Culture

Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is referenced in the 2000 film, High Fidelity, starring John Cusack. Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything Is Illuminated is named for a line in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being.

Bibliography

Poetry

• L'Homme, ce vaste jardin (Člověk zahrada širá) (1953)
• Le dernier mai (Poslední máj) (1955)

Essays

• Monologues (Monology) (1957)
• Umění románu: Cesta Vladislava Vančury za velkou epikou (The Art of the Novel: Vladislav Vancura's path to the great epic) (1960)
• The Art of the Novel (L'art du Roman), 1985
• Testaments Betrayed (Les testaments trahis), 1992
• D'en bas tu humeras des roses (rare book in French, illustrated by Ernest BRELEUR), 1993
• The Curtain (Le Rideau), 2005
• ''Kastrující stín svatého Garty 2006 Czech translation of part of Les testaments trahis

Drama

• Majitelé klíčů (1962)
• Jacques and His Master (Jakub a jeho pán: Pocta Denisu Diderotovi) (1975)

Novels and Stories

• The Joke (Žert) (1967)
• Laughable Loves (Směšné lásky) (1968)
• Life Is Elsewhere (Život je jinde) (1969)
• The Farewell Waltz (Valčík na rozloučenou), 1976 (Original translation title: The Farewell Party)
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kniha smíchu a zapomnění) (1979)
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) (1984).
• Immortality (Nesmrtelnost), 1990
• Slowness (La Lenteur), 1993
• Identity (L'Identité), 1998
• Ignorance (L'Ignorance), 2000

Notes

See also

Litost

External links

• www.kundera.de is a useful starting point for information about Kundera
• Polish Kundera page
• Milan Kundera profile
• Milan Kundera and the Czech Republic
• Review of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
• Review Of Slowness
• Comparison of Kundera with Alan Lightman
• Online interview with Kundera
• French essay on Kundera's attitude towards kitsch as reflected in his novels
• Music minus memory: popular music, classical music and memory in Milan Kundera. An American essay/paper written by Tekla Babyak of Cornell.
• An essay on swimming pools in Milan Kundera's novels
• Critical bibliography (Auteurs.contemporain.info)
• An essay about how Kundera depicted artists and socialism written by Giuseppe Raudino
• LiveJournal community devoted to Milan Kundera (Russian/Ukrainian)
• Milan Kundera on ecstasy: a quote from Milan Kundera's book "Testaments Betrayed"

Works by Milan Kundera
Novels: The Joke | Laughable Loves | Life Is Elsewhere | The Farewell Waltz | The Book of Laughter and Forgetting | The Unbearable Lightness of Being | Immortality | Slowness | Identity | Ignorance
Non-fiction: The Art of the Novel | Testaments Betrayed | The Curtain
Plays: Jacques and His Master