Milan Kundera
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{{Infobox Writer <!-- for more information see [[:Template:Infobox Writer/doc]] -->
|image = Milan Kundera.jpg
| name = Milan Kundera
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| birthdate = {{birth date and age|1929|4|01}}
| birthplace = [[Brno]], [[Czechoslovakia]]
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| occupation = Novelist<ref>{{cite web|title = An Interview with Milan Kundera|url = http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_kundera.html |accessdate = 2008-02-23|last = Oppenheim|first = Lois|year = 1989}} "Until I was thirty I wrote many things: music, above all, but also poetry and even a play. I was working in many different directions--looking for my voice, my style and myself. . . . I became a prose writer, a novelist, and I am nothing else. Since then, my aesthetic has known no transformations; it evolves, to use your word, linearly."</ref>
| nationality = {{flagicon|France}} [[France|French]][[Czech|Czech]]
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| debut_works = ''[[The Joke]] (Žert)'' (1967)
| influences = [[Giovanni Boccaccio]], [[Rabelais]], [[Laurence Sterne]], [[Henry Fielding|Fielding]], [[Denis Diderot]], [[Robert Musil]], [[Witold Gombrowicz]], [[Hermann Broch]], [[Franz Kafka]], [[Martin Heidegger]], [[Ludwig van Beethoven]], [[Johann Sebastian Bach]]
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'''Milan Kundera''' ({{IPA2|ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra}}) (born [[April 1]], [[1929]], in [[Brno]], [[Czechoslovakia]]) is a [[France|French]] [[writer]] of [[Czech Republic|Czech]] origin who has lived in exile in [[France]] since [[1975]], where he became a [[Naturalization|naturalized citizen]] in [[1981]]. He is best known as the author of ''[[The Unbearable Lightness of Being]]'', ''[[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting]]'', and ''[[The Joke (novel)|The Joke]]''.
Kundera has written in both [[Czech language|Czech]] and [[French language|French]]. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations but original works. Due to censorship by the [[communism|Communist]] government of Czechoslovakia, his books were banned from his native country, and that remained the case until the mid-1990s.
==Life==
Kundera was born in 1929 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 Academy of Music and Performing Arts|Janáček Music Academy]] in Brno from 1948 to 1961. Milan learned to play the piano from his father, later going on to study musicology and musical composition. Musicological influences and references can be found throughout his work; he has even gone so far as including notes in the text to make a point.
Kundera completed his secondary school studies in [[Brno]] in 1948. He studied literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at [[Charles University]] in Prague. 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. Still in his teens, Kundera joined the [[Communist Party of Czechoslovakia]] which seized power in 1948. In 1950, he and another 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 also used the incident as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel ''Žert'' (''[[The Joke]]'', [[1967 in literature|1967]]). In 1956 Milan Kundera was readmitted into the Party. He was 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]]. This brief period of reformist activities was crushed by the [[Soviet Union|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.<ref> [http://www.kundera.de/english/Biography/biography.html Bio] at kundera.de .</ref>.
==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. This led to his works being banned and to his [[blacklist]]ing. In 1975, Kundera moved to France. There he published ''[[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting]]'' ([[1979 in literature|1979]]) which told of Czech citizens opposing the communist 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 in literature|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 film version of the novel.
Although the film was considered moderately successful, Kundera was upset about it. He has since forbidden any adaptations of his novels.{{Fact|date=June 2007}} In 1990, Kundera published ''[[Immortality (novel)|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 [[Robert 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 [[Giovanni Boccaccio]] and [[Rabelais]], but also from [[Laurence Sterne]], [[Henry Fielding|Fielding]], [[Denis Diderot]], [[Robert Musil]], [[Witold Gombrowicz]], [[Hermann Broch]], [[Franz Kafka]] and [[Martin Heidegger]].
He also digresses into musical matters, analyzing Czech folk music, quoting from [[Bartok]] and [[Leoš Janáček]]. 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 with the characters' 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. For him the essential does not include the physical appearance or even the interior world (the psychological world) of his characters.
[[François Ricard]] suggested that Kundera conceives with regard to an overall [[oeuvre]], rather than limiting his ideas to the scope of just one novel at a time. His themes and meta-themes exist across the entire oeuvre. 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. (Francois Ricard, 2003)
Many of Kundera's 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.
===Views on intimate life===
As he told [[Philip Roth]] in an interview in ''[[The Village Voice]]'': "Intimate life [is] understood as one's personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one's originality.<ref>Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2007{{Fact|date=November 2007}}<!-- The issue and pages of The Village Voice would be preferred --></ref>
==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]]<ref>{{cite news|url= http://books.guardian.co.uk/nobelprize/story/0,14969,1591402,00.html |title=Nobel prize goes to Pinter|author=Sarah Crown|publisher=Guardian}}</ref>. He won the [[The Austrian State Prize for European Literature]] in 1987. In 2000, he was awarded the international [[Herder Prize]]. In 2007, he was awarded the Czech State Literature Prize.<ref>{{cite news|url= http://www.eux.tv/article.aspx?articleId=16216|title=Czechs "to honour Kundera", the writer they love to hate|publisher=eux.tv}}</ref>
==Bibliography==
===Poetry===
* ''Man: A Wide Garden'' (''Člověk zahrada širá'') (1953)
* ''The Last May'' (''Poslední máj'') (1961) – celebration of [[Julius Fučík]]
* ''Monologues'' (''Monology'') (1965)
===Essays===
* ''[[About the Disputes of Inheritance]]'' (1955)
* ''[[The Art of the Novel: Vladislav Vancura's Path to the Great Epic]] (Umění románu: Cesta Vladislava Vančury za velkou epikou)'' (1960)
* ''[[The Czech Deal]] (Český úděl)'' (1968)
* ''[[Radicalism and Exhibitionism]] (Radikalismus a exhibicionismus)'' (1969)
* ''[[The Stolen West or The Tragedy of Central Europe]] (Únos západu aneb Tragédie střední Evropy)'' (1983)
* ''[[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 (Milan Kundera)|The Curtain]] (Le Rideau)'' (2005)
* ''[[Kastrující stín svatého Garty]] (Czech translation of part of Les testaments trahis)'' (2006)
===Drama===
* ''[[The Owner of the Keys]] (Majitelé klíčů)'' (1962)
* ''[[Two Ears, Two Weddings]] (Dvě uši, dvě svatby)'' (1968)
* ''[[The Blunder]] (Ptákovina)'' (1969)
* ''[[Jacques and His Master]] (Jakub a jeho pán: Pocta Denisu Diderotovi)'' (1971)
===Fiction===
* ''[[The Joke]] (Žert)'' (1967)
* ''[[Laughable Loves]] (Směšné lásky)'' (1969)
* ''[[The Farewell Waltz]] (Valčík na rozloučenou)'' (Original translation title: ''The Farewell Party'') (1972)
* ''[[Life Is Elsewhere]] (Život je jinde)'' (1973)
* ''[[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting]] (Kniha smíchu a zapomnění)'' (1978)
* ''[[The Unbearable Lightness of Being]] (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí)'' (1984)
* ''[[Immortality (novel)|Immortality]] (Nesmrtelnost)'' (1990)
* ''[[Slowness (novel)|Slowness]] (La Lenteur)'' (1993)
* ''[[Identity (novel)|Identity]] (L'Identité)'' (1998)
* ''[[Ignorance (Milan Kundera)|Ignorance]] (L'Ignorance)'' (2000)
== Notes ==
{{reflist}}
== See also ==
* For Kundera's opinion about graphomania and writing in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), see [[Graphomania]].
==External links==
{{wikiquote}}
* [http://www.milankundera.webpark.pl Polish fans websites]
* [http://www.kundera.de/english/ www.kundera.de] is a useful starting point for information about Kundera
* [http://www.czech.cz/en/czech-republic/history/famous-czechs-of-the-past-century/milan-kundera/ Milan Kundera profile]
* [http://www.prague-life.com/prague/milan-kundera Milan Kundera and the Czech Republic]
* [http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/kundera-unbearable.html Review of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being]
* [http://www.bookpage.com/9605bp/fiction/slowness.html Review Of Slowness]
* [http://www.hackwriters.com/lightman.htm Comparison of Kundera with Alan Lightman]
* [http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_kundera.html Interview with Kundera] by Lois Oppenheim, ''The Review of Contemporary Fiction'', Summer 1989, 9.2
* {{imdb name}}
* [http://www.arts.cornell.edu/English/mode/documents/babyak.doc Music minus memory: popular music, classical music and memory in Milan Kundera]. An essay/paper written by Tekla Babyak of [[Cornell]].
* [http://teksterogtaler.blogspot.com/2007/03/swimming-pools-in-milan-kunderas-novels.html An essay on swimming pools in Milan Kundera's novels]
* [http://auteurs.contemporain.info/milan-kundera/ Critical bibliography (Auteurs.contemporain.info)]
* [http://raudino.webs.com Giuseppe Raudino]: [http://i292.photobucket.com/albums/mm33/skrivere/raudino_kundera.jpg Socialism and Arts: Portrait of an Artist Outlined by Milan Kundera 25 Years Ago], ''Art Times'' July/August 2007
* [[Jan Čulík]] : [http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/3806/01/Milan_Kundera.pdf ''Man, a Wide Garden'': Milan Kundera as a young Stalinist], ''Blok, miedzynarodowe pismo poswiecone kulturze stalinowskiej i poststalinowskiej'', ISSN 1644-4302, [[Kazimierz Wielki University]] 2008; [[University of Glasgow]] preprint server
* [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/kundera.html Milan Kundera on ecstasy]: a quote from ''Testaments Betrayed''
* {{fr}} [http://www.ethesis.net/kundera/kundera_inhoud.htm# Kundera face au kitsch] French essay on Kundera's attitude towards kitsch
{{Kundera}}
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[[Category:1929 births]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Czech atheists]]
[[Category:Czech writers]]
[[Category:French novelists]]
[[Category:Czech expatriates]]
[[Category:People from Brno]]
[[Category:Charles University alumni]]
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