A talented and prolific writer, master of the novel, short story, and drama, Milan Kundera (koon-DEHR-uh) is considered one of the major innovators in twentieth century European literature. He was the son of Ludvík and Milada (Janosikova) Kundera; his father, a student of the Czech composer Leo Janáek, was a talented pianist. Intending to become a musician, Kundera studied piano with his father, but he put aside music in 1948 to study scriptwriting and directing at the Film Faculty of the Prague Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, where he later taught. In reaction against Nazism he joined the Communist Party in 1947 but was purged twice for his outspoken views. In a speech before the Congress of Czechoslovak Writers in 1967 Kundera called for writers to lead the campaign for artistic and cultural freedom that became the Prague Spring of 1968. After the Soviet suppression of Alexander Dubek’s reforms, Kundera was not permitted to publish his works; in 1975 he and his wife were allowed to immigrate to Paris, and he became a French citizen in 1981. He spent much of 1990 in Martinique and Haiti.

Kundera began his literary career as a poet in the 1950’s, publishing three collections of poems before turning to drama and, finally, to fiction, finding greater exactness and precision of expression in prose. In his three collections of short stories, condensed as Laughable Loves, Kundera uses sexual comedy as a way of poking fun at a world of grim ideological constraints and artistic repression. In a totalitarian state, Kundera has observed, one’s private life represents the last bastion of freedom against government control. Sexual expression becomes either a metaphor for or a sublimation of political expression. If the state promotes a rigid morality, then promiscuity becomes a form of rebellion, though a self-destructive one for many of Kundera’s characters.

His first novel, The Joke, shows Kundera to be a master of ironic sexual comedy with deeper cultural and political implications. The Joke, whose plot is built around a practical joke that backfires, reveals the dangers of a world lacking a sense of humor. Ludvík Jahn, a young student, sends a humorous postcard to his grim Stalinist girlfriend, Marketa, with three parodies of Marxist slogans: “Optimism is the opiate of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!” For this prank he is called before his local student committee, stripped of his party membership, expelled from college, and sent to prison. Years later, after being released from prison, Jahn tries to seduce the wife of the man who betrayed him, only to have his attempt at revenge fail as well. Interwoven in the novel are reflections on Czech history and folklore. Kundera views the novel as a means of preserving cultural memory in the face of ideological forces determined to obliterate the past. Kundera’s ironic, self-deprecating humor is reminiscent of Franz Kafka, as well as of Jaroslav Haek, whose novel The Good Soldier vejk (1921-1923) mocks the Czech temperament. Kundera has remarked that he could always tell whether a person was a Stalinist by his sense of humor.

Kundera’s second novel, Life Is Elsewhere , is a fictional biography of Jaromil, a Communist poet of mediocre talents, through whom Kundera analyzes the pretensions and self-deceptions of the lyric sensibility, particularly when it serves revolutionary movements. The novel takes its title from Arthur Rimbaud, who was quoted by André Breton in his Surrealist manifesto and later appropriated by Parisian students in 1968. Kundera commented that he wanted to write a novel that would be a critique of poetry yet...