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Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera (IPA: ['milɑn 'kundɛra]) (born April 1, 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech-born writer who writes 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 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. Kundera learned to play the piano with his father. Later, he also studied musicology. 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, he was temporarily forced to interrupt his studies for political reasons. After graduating 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 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 re-admitted into the Communist Party in 1956. In 1970, he was expelled from the Party a 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. Kundera remained committed to reforming Czech communism, and argued vehemently in print with Vaclav 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 reforminst dreams and moved to France in 1975. He has been a French citizen since 1981. He just died

Work

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 blacklisted 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 novel, short story collection, and 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 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. However, Kundera was quite upset with the film and has since forbidden any adaptations of his novels.[citation needed] In 1990, Kundera released Immortality. The novel, which was his last to be written in Czech, 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.

He also digresses in musical matters, talking about Czech folk music, and quoting Bartok and Janacek, as well as inserting musical notes (The Joke) in the text, or talking about Schoenberg and atonality, as well of course about political extensions (Ignorance).

His later 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, Greek, Italian and Chinese.

Writing style and philosophy

Kundera's characters are often explicitly depicted as figments of his own imagination, as opposed real human beings described in narrative. Kundera is more concerned in the words that shape or mold his characters than their physical appearances. In his non-fiction work The Art of a Novel he says that the reader's imagination automatically completes the writer's vision. But he really does this to focus only on the essential. Generally physical appearances and even the character's interior world(the psychological world) are irrelevant. His means of grasping the characters lies rooted elsewhere... Rooted in their existential themes.

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, 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 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 based on one of these themes at the expense of a 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[1]. In 2000 he was awarded the Herder Prize.

Bibliography

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