Czech-French novelist, essayist, dramatist and poet, one of the major writers of the late 20th century. Kundera's most famous work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), which was also made into a successful movie. Kundera has brought the novel toward philosophy and incorporated essayistic elements into his writing, creating his own concept of the novel as "a feast of many courses."
"Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant." (from The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) into a cultured family. His father, Ludvik Kundera, was a pianist and musicologist. Kundera was educated at Charles University and at the Film Faculty of the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Prague. Before becoming a professor of literature at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague, he worked as a manual laborer and as a jazz pianist.
Kundera joined the Communist Party for the first time in 1948, the year of the communist takeover. He was dispelled in 1950 after criticizing its totalitarian nature, but in the same year, according to a document found in 2008, he informed on Miroslav Dvoracek, a former pilot and purported Western spy, who was later imprisoned for 14 years. Kundera has rejected the charge. "Communism enthralled me in much the way Stravinsky, Picasso and Surrealism had," Kundera once said. In 1956, his membership was reinstated, continuing until 1970.
Until the age of 25, Kundera was more drawn to music than to literature.His first volume of poetry, Clovek zahrada širá, appeared in 1953. Posledni máj (1955) had a positive hero, the Communist militant and writer Julius Fucik, who was executed by the Nazis. These works were praised by the official cultural establishment. Although Kundera's plays were less known in the West, they were highly regarded in his homeland. The Keepers of the Keys (1962), set in a provincial town during the German occupation, has been called one of the most important plays of the post-Stalinist period. In the 1960s, Kundera grew increasingly uneasy with the policy concerning censorship. His three series of short stories, Laughable Loves (1963-69), which dealt with the themes of love, sex, and self-deception, focused on individual characteristics without attacking directly the system itself. In his review of the book Paul Theroux noted, that a "writer who keeps his sanity long enough to ridicule his oppressors, who has enough hope left to make this ridicule into satire, must be congratulated." (The New York Times, July 28, 1974)
Kundera was a member of the editorial board of Literární noviny (1956-59, 1963-68) and Literání listy (1968-69), a mouthpiece of the Prague Spring. At the age of 38, Kundera published his first novel, The Joke (1967), about how reality takes its revenge on those who play with it. The book was published on the eve of Prague Spring, when the grip of Stalinism weakened for a period. After the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kundera became one of the authors, whose books were removed from libraries and banned from legal publication. In 1969, Kundera was fired from his teaching post.
Since 1975, Kundera has lived in France with his wife, Vera Hrabánková. In 1981, two years after the Czech government deprived him of his citizenship, he became a French citizen. From 1975 to 1980 Kundera worked as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Rennes. In 1980 he was appointed professor at École des Hautes Études, Paris. Kundera's many awards include the Writers House prize (1961, 1969), Klement Lukes prize (1963), Czechoslovak Writers' Union prize (1968), Médicis Prize (1973), Mondello prize (1978), Commonwealth award (1984), Europa prize (1982), Los Angeles Times award (1984), Jerusalem prize (1984), Académie Française Critics prize (1987), Nelly Sachs prize (1987), Osterrichischeve state prize (1987), Independent award for foreign fiction (1991).
Kundera made his international breakthrough with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, set in 1968 Czechoslovakia, just prior to the Soviet occupation. The protagonist in the story of four relationships is a Prague surgeon Thomas, who is trapped between love and freedom, politics and eroticism. At the beginning of the novel Kundera refers to the myth of eternal return - a "life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance". But if everything recurs in the same manner ad indefinitum "the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make." Kundera asks, which one is more preferable of the opposing poles, weight or lightness? Life is Elsewhere (1973), Kundera's second novel which was immediately banned in Czechoslovakia, won the prestigious Médicis Prize. The original Czech text was published in 1979 by the émigré press run by Josef Škvorecký, Kundera's friend, who had settled in Canada in 1969. Again, the central theme is misunderstanding of reality. In the story a young Communist poet, Jaromir, who is dominated by his mother, becomes the elated servant of a Stalinist regime, and dies a meaningless death. Despite political readings of his work, Kundera has refused the label of "dissident writer" and emphasized the autonomy of art from all political ideologies. "If you cannot view the art that comes to you from Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw in any other way than by means of this wretched political code," Kundera once said, "you murder it, no less brutally that the worst of the Stalinist dogmatists."
Kundera has defined the novel as a "poetic meditation on existence." Like Robert Musil (1880-1942), Kundera uses the genre as a vehicle for reflections on the essence of the European culture. Kundera has considered Immortality (1990), which portrays such figures as Goethe and Hemingway, his most accomplished version of the "novel as a debate". Noteworthy, the architecture - or "polyphonic composition" in which the coherence of the work is achieved through thematic unity - of his early novels is mostly based on the number seven. Also Kundera's widely translated collection of essays, The Art of the Novel (1987), was divided into seven parts, as well as the essay novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979). Kundera's eighth novel, La Lenteur (1994), was written in French. In Ignorance (2000), about memory and forgetting, the homecoming of two Czech émigrés, Josef and Irena, parallels to the story of Odysseus, but with a melancholic aftertaste.