Milan Kundera
From Philosopedia
Kundera, Milan (1 April 1929 - )
A Czech novelist, Kundera 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 learned to play the piano with his father. Later, he also studied musicology. Musicological influences can be found throughout Milan Kundera's work.
After studying at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, he left in 1968 for Paris when the Russians invaded.
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). 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 uses a technique, psychological realism, in describing his characters, concentrating more upon their thought processes than upon their physical apperance.
Works
- 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, 1975
- 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 work is a semi-autobiographical view of post-war Europe; it evokes cultural, political, and sexual lives of the "two or three new fiction characters baptized on Earth each scond."
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Nesnesitelná lehkost - Kundera says he is an atheist in the work, which was made into a film
- The Art of the Novel, 1985
- Immortality (book) (Nesmrtelnost), 1990
- Testaments Betrayed, 1992 - he goes on record as being a non-theist
- Slowness (book) (La Lenteur), 1994
- Identity (L'Identité), 1998
- Ignorance (L'Ignorance), 2000
- The Curtain (Le Rideau), 2005
