Milan Kundera (UK: KU(U)N-dər-ə; Czech: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra] ; 1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.
Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the country's ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia banned his books. He led a low-profile life and rarely spoke to the media. He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was also a nominee for other awards.
Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, and the Herder Prize in 2000. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor.
Milan Kundera was born on 1 April 1929 at 6 Purkyňova Street in Královo Pole, a district of Brno, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic), to a middle-class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891–1971), was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961. His mother Milada Kunderová (born Janošíková) was an educator. His father died in 1971, and his mother in 1975.
Kundera learned to play the piano from his father and later studied musicology and musical composition. Musicological influences, references and notation can be found throughout his work. Kundera was a cousin of Czech writer and translator Ludvík Kundera. In his youth, having been supported by his father in his musical education, he was testing his abilities as a composer. One of his teachers at the time was Pavel Haas. His approach to music was eventually dampened due to his father not being able to launch a piano career for insisting on playing the music of modernist Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg.
At the age of eighteen, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1947. In 1984, he recalled that "Communism captivated me as much as Stravinsky, Picasso and Surrealism."
He attended lectures on music and composition at the Charles University in Prague but soon moved to the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) to study film. In 1950, he was expelled from the party. After graduating, the Film Faculty appointed Kundera a lecturer in world literature in 1952. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he lost his job at the Film Faculty.
In 1956, Kundera also married for the first time, the operetta singer Olga Haas. Her parents were his music teacher, composer Pavel Haas, and the doctor of Russian origin Sonia Jakobson, who was the first wife of Roman Jakobson.
Political activism and professional career
His expulsion from the Communist party was described by Jan Trefulka in his novella Pršelo jim štěstí (Luck Rained on Them, 1962). Kundera also used the expulsion as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel Žert (The Joke, 1967), in which he ridiculed the ruling Communist party. In 1956 Kundera was readmitted to the party but was expelled for a second time in 1970. He took part in the Fourth Congress of the Czech Writers union in June 1967, where he delivered an impressive speech. In the speech he focused on the Czech effort to maintain a certain cultural independence among its larger European neighbours. Along with other reformist Communist writers such as Pavel Kohout, he was peripherally involved in the 1968 Prague Spring. This brief period of reformist activities was crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.
Kundera remained committed to reforming Czechoslovak Communism, and argued vehemently in print with fellow Czech writer Václav 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." In 1968, the year his books were banned by the Czech Government, he made his first journey to Paris, where he befriended the publisher Claude Gallimard. After he returned to Prague, he was frequently visited by Gallimard who encouraged Kundera to emigrate to France and also smuggled the manuscript for Life Is Elsewhere out of Czechoslovakia. Finally, Kundera gave in and moved to France in 1975. In 1979, his Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked. He lectured for a few years at the University of Rennes. After three years, he moved to Paris.
Although his early poetic works are staunchly pro-communist, his novels escape ideological classification. Kundera repeatedly insisted that he was a novelist rather than a politically motivated writer. Political commentary all but disappeared from his novels after the publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being except in relation to broader philosophical themes. Kundera's style of fiction, interlaced with philosophical digression, was greatly inspired by the novels of Robert Musil and the philosophy of Nietzsche. In 1945 the journal Gong published his translation of some of the works from the Russian poet Vladimir Majakovsky. The next year the journal Mladé archy printed a poem of his, to which he was inspired by his cousin Ludvík Kundera, also a writer.
In the mid-1950s he was readmitted to the Communist party and he was able to publish Manː A Wide Garden in 1953, a long epic poem in 1955 called The Last May dedicated to Julius Fucik and the collection of lyrical poetry Monologue in 1957. Those, together with other fore and afterwords are deemed to be written in the fashion of uncontroversial propaganda which allowed him to benefit to a certain degree from the advantages that came with being an established writer in a Communist environment. In 1962 he wrote the play The Owners of the Keys, which became an international success and was translated into several languages. Kundera himself claimed inspiration from Renaissance authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Rabelais and, perhaps most importantly, Miguel de Cervantes, to whose legacy he considered himself most committed. Other influences include Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Denis Diderot, Robert Musil, Witold Gombrowicz, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger and Georges Bataille. Originally he wrote in the Czech language, but from 1985 onwards, he made a conscious transition from Czech towards the French which has since become the reference language for his translations. Between 1985 and 1987, he undertook the revision of the French translations of his earlier works himself. With Slowness his first work in French was published in 1995. His works were translated into more than eighty languages.
In his first novel, The Joke (1967), he satirized the totalitarianism of the Communist era. Following the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the book was banned. His criticism of the Soviet invasion in 1968 led to his blacklisting in Czechoslovakia and the banning of his books.
Kundera's second novel was first published in French as La vie est ailleurs in 1973 and in Czech as Život je jinde in 1979. Life Is Elsewhere is a satirical portrait of the fictional poet Jaromil, a young and very naïve idealist who becomes involved in political scandals. For the novel Kundera was awarded the Prix Médicis the same year.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
In 1975, Kundera moved to France where The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in 1979. An unusual mixture of novel, short story collection, and authorial musings which came to characterize his works in exile, the book dealt with how Czechs opposed the Communist regime in various ways. Critics noted that the Czechoslovakia Kundera portrays "is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there," which is the "kind of disappearance and reappearance" Kundera ironically explores in the book.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being