Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Born April 1, 1929 (1929-04-01) (age 79)
Brno, Czechoslovakia
Occupation Novelist[1]
Nationality Czech
Influences

Milan Kundera (IPA: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra]) (born April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech-born writer who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a 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.

Kundera has written in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations but original works. Until the mid-1990s, his work was not published in his native country.

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[edit] 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 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 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 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.[2].

[edit] 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 blacklisting. In 1975, Kundera moved to France. There he published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (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, 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.[citation needed] In 1990, Kundera published 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, 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.[3]

[edit] 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[4]. 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.[5]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Poetry

  • Man: A Wide Garden (Člověk zahrada širá) (1953)
  • The Last May (Poslední máj) (1961) – celebration of Julius Fučík
  • Monologues (Monology) (1965)

[edit] 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 (Le Rideau) (2005)
  • Kastrující stín svatého Garty (Czech translation of part of Les testaments trahis) (2006)

[edit] 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)

[edit] Fiction

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Oppenheim, Lois (1989). An Interview with Milan Kundera. Retrieved on 2008-02-23. "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."
  2. ^ Bio at kundera.de .
  3. ^ Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2007[citation needed]
  4. ^ Sarah Crown. "Nobel prize goes to Pinter", Guardian. 
  5. ^ "Czechs "to honour Kundera", the writer they love to hate", eux.tv. 

[edit] See also

  • For Kundera's opinion about graphomania and writing in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), see Graphomania.

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
v • d • e
Works by Milan Kundera
Novels
Non-fiction

The Art of the Novel · Testaments Betrayed · The Curtain
Plays

Jacques and His Master