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Milan Kundera (1929-2023) |
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Czech-French novelist, essayist, dramatist and poet, one of the major writers of the late 20th century. Milan Kundera's most famous work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984); its title has become a catchphrase of our times. Kundera brought the novel toward philosophy and incorporated essayistic elements into his writing, creating his own concept of the novel as "a feast of many courses." "Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant." (The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim, Harper Perennial, 1991, p. 5; translated from Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, 1984) Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech
Republic) into a cultured family. His father, Ludvik Kundera, was a
pianist and musicologist. Kundera was educated at Charles University
and at the Film Faculty of the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in
Prague. Before becoming ďn 1958 an assistant professor of literature at
the Institute for
Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague, he worked as a manual
laborer and as a jazz pianist. His students included Milos Forman and
other creators of the Czech New Wave film movement. Kundera joined the Communist Party for the first time in 1948, the year of the communist takeover. He was dispelled in 1950 following a joke he made about governmental official, but in the same year, according to a document found in 2008, he informed on Miroslav Dvořáček, a former pilot and purported Western spy, who was later imprisoned for 14 years. Kundera rejected the charge; there was also a person involved in the case who said that it was another man. "Communism enthralled me in much the way Stravinsky, Picasso and Surrealism had," Kundera recalled. ('The making of a writer; 'All I cared about was women and art'' by Milan Kundera, The New York Times, October 24, 1982) In 1956, his membership was reinstated, continuing until 1970. Kundera's expulsion gave him material for his first novel Žert (1967, The Joke). Until the age of 25, Kundera was more drawn to music than to
literature. His first volume of poetry, Člověk zahrada širá,
came out in 1953. Posledni máj (1955) had a positive hero, the
Communist militant and writer Julius Fucik, who was executed by the
Nazis. These works were praised by the official cultural establishment.
Although Kundera's plays were less known in the West, they were highly
regarded in his homeland. The Keepers of the Keys (1962), set
in a provincial town during the German occupation, has been called one
of the most important plays of the post-Stalinist period. In the 1960s, Kundera grew increasingly uneasy with the policy concerning censorship. His three series of short stories, Laughable Loves (1963-69), which dealt with the themes of love, sex, and self-deception, focused on individual characteristics without attacking directly the system itself. In his review of the book Paul Theroux noted, that a "writer who keeps his sanity long enough to ridicule his oppressors, who has enough hope left to make this ridicule into satire, must be congratulated." ('Small Novel, Large Stories,' The New York Times, July 28, 1974) Kundera was a member of the editorial board of Literární noviny (1956-59, 1963-68) and Literání listy (1968-69), a mouthpiece of the Prague Spring. The Joke (1967) was about how reality takes its revenge on those who play with it. Published on the eve of Prague Spring, when the grip of Stalinism weakened for a period, the novel was his first and most overtly political. From onwards, Kundera's fiction became more experimental; politics was a subject he didn't want to touch any more. In his speech delivered at the 4th Czechoslovak Writers' Congress in June 1967 Kundera demanded greater freedom of expression and an end to censorship: "Any interference with freedom of thought and words, no matter how discreet the technique or name given to such censorship, is a scandal in the twentieth century and a shackle on our emerging literature." (The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader, compiled and edited by Jaromír Navrátil, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006, p. 8) After the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, he was one of the authors, whose books were removed from libraries and banned from legal publication. It was no accident that interest in Kundera's work arose in the West in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion. In 1969, Kundera was fired from his teaching post. Fully
aware that he had lost
his native-language readership, he still continued writing in Czech,
but in the mid 1980s he began to use French language as his medium of
literary expression. Valčík na rozloučenou
was first
circulated in a samizdat edition in 1970 under the title Epilog. With some changes it was
first published in France as La
valse aux adieux.
A Czech edition, published by Sixty-Eight Publishers, came out in 1979
with further changes. The publishing house, based in Canada, was owned
by fellow Czech writer and émigre Josef Škvorecký. The novel was first
translated into English by Peter Kussi as Farewell Party and retranslated in
1998 from French by Aaron Asher as Farewell Waltz. "It
occurred to her that she was no longer able to remember what her
husband's genitals looked like—in other words, the memory of revulsion
was stronger than the memory of tenderness (God yes, the memory of
revulsion is stronger than the memory of tenderness!)—and that soon all
she'd have left in her miserable head was this boy with bad breath. And
she vomited, writhed and shook, and vomited." (The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting,
translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1981, p. 114; originally published in France under the title Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli by Éditions Gallimard, 1979) Kundera's first post-exile novel
was The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting
(1979), written in Czech between 1976-78. It has no linear narrative;
its
structure resembles variations upon a musical theme. Kundera juxtaposes
the laughter of angels with the laughter of the devil; the angels
express their joy of being, whereas the laughter of the devil is
destructive, it proclaimes meaningless. In the afterword Kundera argued that the "evil is already present in the
beautiful, hell is
already contained in the dream of paradise and if we wish to understand
the essence of hell we must examine the essence of the paradise from
which it originated." ('Afterword: A Talk with the Author' by Philip Roth, p. 234) Since 1975, Kundera lived in France with his wife, Vera Hrabánková, a musician and composer. In 1981, two years after the Czech government deprived him of his citizenship, Kundera became a French citizen. From 1975 to 1980 Kundera worked as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Rennes. In 1980 he was appointed professor at École des Hautes Études, Paris. Kundera's many awards include the Writers House prize (1961, 1969), Klement Lukes prize (1963), Czechoslovak Writers' Union prize (1968), Médicis Prize (1973), Mondello prize (1978), Commonwealth award (1984), Europa prize (1982), Los Angeles Times award (1984), Jerusalem prize (1984), Académie Française Critics prize (1987), Nelly Sachs prize (1987), Osterrichischeve state prize (1987), Independent award for foreign fiction (1991). The
Unbearable Lightness of Being,
with which Kundera made his international breakthrough, is set in 1968
Czechoslovakia, just
prior to the Soviet occupation. The protagonist in the story of four
relationships is a Prague surgeon Thomas, who is trapped between love
and freedom, politics and eroticism. Kundera's unidentified narrator
makes the reader aware that Thomas is a literary character and the
choices of Tomas, Tereza, Sabina, and Franz can be changed. At the beginning Kundera refers to the myth of eternal return -a
"life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is
like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was
horrible, beautiful, or sublime, mits horror, sublimityn and beauty
mean nothing." (Ibid., p. 3) But if everything
recurs in the same manner ad indefinitum "the weight of unbearable
responsibility lies heavy on every move we make." (Ibid., p. 5) Kundera asks, which
one is more preferable of the opposing poles, weight or lightness? Milan Jungmann stated in his essay Kunderian
Paradoxes
(1988) that the work was written with the intention of becoming a
Western bestseller novel because of the erotic content and the
simplification of Czech history. Feminist critics have noted that
Kundera's female characters are either Madonnas or whores, though the
character of the licentious woman is pervasive. Philip Kaufman's three-hour long screen adaptation of The
Unbearable Lightness of Being has a lot of nudity. Roger Ebert called it the most erotic serious film since Last Tango in Paris.
Lena Olin played the beautiful Sabina. Daniel Day-Lewis, cast in the
role of Thomas, said that his first impression of the novel was that it
was an unfilmable work. ('The Unbearable Lightness of Being' by S.C.C. [Stephen C. Cahir], in The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film,
edited by John C. Tibbets and James M. Welsh, foreword by Robert Wise,
New York: Checkmark Books, second edition 2005, p. 476) Life
is Elsewhere (1973), Kundera's second novel which was immediately
banned in Czechoslovakia, won the prestigious Médicis Prize. The
original Czech text was published in 1979 by the émigré press run by
Josef Škvorecký, Kundera's friend, who had settled in Canada in 1969.
Again, the central theme is misunderstanding of reality. In the story a
young Communist poet, Jaromir, who is dominated by his mother, becomes
the elated servant of a Stalinist regime, and dies a meaningless death. Despite political readings of his fiction, Kundera refused the label
of "dissident writer" and emphasized the autonomy of art from all
political ideologies. "If you cannot view the art that comes to you
from Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw in any other way than by means of this
wretched political code," Kundera said, "you murder it, no less
brutally that the worst of the Stalinist dogmatists And you are quite unable to hear its true voice." (quoted in The Czechoslovak New Wave by Peter Hames, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, p. 142) Kundera's conception of the novel has been defined by Christian Salmon as a "poetic meditation on
existence." ('Dialogue on the Art of the Novel,' in The Art of the Novel
by Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher, London:
Faber and Faber, 2005, p. 35; first published in French as L'Art du roman, 1986) Like Robert Musil (1880-1942), Kundera uses the form as a
vehicle for reflections on the essence of the European culture, but
there are plenty of subjective elements that invite the reader in a
dialogue with the text. Immortality (1990), which portrays such figures
as Goethe and Hemingway, Kundera considered his most accomplished version of the "novel as
a debate." Noteworthy, the architecture -
or "polyphonic composition" - of his
early novels is mostly based on the number
seven. Also Kundera's widely translated collection of essays, L'Art du roman, was divided into seven parts, as well as
the essay novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. L'Art du roman was
his first book
written entirely in French. Kundera's technique of essayistic writing
resembles Hegelian dialectics, in that there is often an opening
thesis, then an anti-thesis, next a thematic synthesis between these
two, which is subsequently balanced with a countertheme. "Translation
is my nightmare," Kundera once said in an interview. "I am apparently
one of the rare writers who reads and rereads, checks over and corrects
his translations—in my case in French, English, German, even Italian. I
know, therefore, better than most of my colleagues, what translation
means. I've lived horrors
because of it." ('Conversations With Milan Kundera' by Jordan Elgrably, Salmagundi, No. 73, Winter 1987, pp. 17-18; https://www.jstor.org/stable/40547912. Accessed July 1, 2025) Between 1985 and 1987 Kundera revised the French editions of all his Czech novels and declared them to be the authentic version of his boy of work. Moreover, he argued that there are no real originals for his work. In the wake of this work, Kundera rewrote parts of the novels, omitting and adding material. As a result, Kundera was criticized for deliberately differentiating the Czech and French versions. Much of his revisions have been quite systematic. In order to preserve an important element of his authorial voice, he changed all the punctuation to the Czech style. Moreover, to keep up consistency, he removed synonyms of certain key words, which occur throughout his fiction. Ignorance, about
memory and forgetting, was first published in Spanish in 2000. The
homecoming of two Czech émigrés, Josef and Irena, parallels to the
story of Odysseus, but with a melancholic aftertaste. La fęte de l'insignifiance
(2014, The Festival of Insignificance) broke Kundera's long silence as
a novelist. Because of Kundera's withdrawal from media contact and his use of
the metafictional technique of presenting himself as a character in his
own books, Kundera remained a rather enigmatic figure in the
European literary world. He was given back his Czech citizenship in
2019. When the Czech's Republic's ambassador to France visited the
author to give him citizeship certificate, Kundera took it and
just said "thank you." ('Milan Kundera's Czech citizensip
restored after 40 years' by Sian Cain, The Guardian, 3 Dec 2019) Milan Kundera died on July 11, 2023, in his Paris apartment. For further reading: Milan Kundera: A Voice from Central Europe by Robert Porter (1981); Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera by Maria Nencová Banerjee (1991); Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs by Fred Misurella (1993); Milan Kundera and Feminism: Dangerous Intersections by John O'Brien (1995); Critical Essays on Milan Kundera, ed. by Peter Petro (1999); The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov & Milan Kundera by Hana Pichova (2001); Milan Kundera, edited by Harold Bloom (2003); Translating Milan Kundera by Michelle Woods (2006); The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard by Trevor Cribben Merrill (2013); 'Milan Kundera, the Novel, and the Problem of History' by Liani Lochner, in European Eriters in Exile, edited by Robert C. Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein (2018); Milan Kundera's Fiction: a Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals by Karen von Kunes (2019); Milan Kundera: une vie d'écrivain by Jean-Dominique Brierre (2019); Kundera: český život a doba by Jan Novák (2020); 'The Trap of Totalitarianism: Milan Kundera,' in The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction by Ivan Stacy (2021); Transformative Fictions: World Literature and Personal Change by Daniel Just (2022); Milan Kundera: "Écrire, quelle drôle d'idée!" by Florence Noiville (2023); Milan Kundera Known and Unknown: Multidimensional Analysis of Selected Works, edited by Karen von Kunes (2025); Modern Czech Literature: Writing in Times of Political Trauma, edited by Andrew M. Drozd (2025) Selected works:
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