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Introduction

Milan Kundera

One of Europe’s greatest contemporary writers, Milan Kundera, a Czechoslovakian, had a love-hate relationship with communism. He joined the Communist Party in 1948 but was expelled in 1950 for anti-party activities. He wrote about the experience in his novel Zert (translated into English as The Joke). He was readmitted in 1956 and expelled again in 1970. He was in good company that time, joining other Czech writers such as Vaclav Havel. Despite his political involvement, Kundera wants to be thought of as a literary novelist, not a political novelist. Starting in 1979, he stopped writing political commentary in his works and focused more on philosophical ideas.

Essential Facts

1. Milan Kundera loves films...just not film adaptations of his books. His most famous work, 1984’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was adapted by American director Philip Kaufman. Kundera was very unhappy with the movie and has not allowed any of his other novels to be filmed.
2. Kundera originally wrote in Czech, but in 1933, he began writing his novels in French. From 1985 to 1987, he translated all of his existing work into French.
3. Kundera has won many awards—the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Herder Prize in 2000, and the Czech National Literature Prize in 2007. He is rumored to be a contender for the Novel Prize for Literature as well.
4. In an interview with The Village Voice, Kundera said, “Intimate life [is] understood as one’s personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one’s identity.”
5. Kundera’s characters are often described as figments of his own imagination. He writes very little about their appearance, choosing instead to let the reader complete his vision.