Milan Kundera

A French Czechoslovakian

Origins and formation• Born in Brno (Moravia’s capital) April 1st, 1929.

• From a family which considers art and culture very importantly (his father, Ludvík Kundera is a famous musician).

• Milan learned to play the piano from his father; he later studied musicology and musical composition.

• Musicological influences and references can be found throughout his work; he has even gone so far as to include musical notation in the text to make a point.

• He is a cousin of Czech writer and translator Ludvík Kundera.

Biography

• He belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had had little or no experience of the pre-war democratic Czechoslovak Republic (their ideology was greatly influenced by the experiences of World War II and the German occupation).

• Still in his teens, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which seized power in 1948.

• He completed his secondary school studies in Brno in 1948. He studied literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, and 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 interferences.

• He and writer Jan Trefulka were expelled from the party for "anti-party activities".

• In 1956, he was readmitted into the Party. He was expelled for the second time in 1970 because he was involved in the 1968 Prague Spring.

• He moved to France in 1975, and taught for a few years in the University of Rennes. He was stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979; he has been a French citizen since 1981.

Bibliography• His early poetic works are staunchly pro-communist.

• His novels escape ideological classification (he has repeatedly insisted on being considered a novelist, rather than a political or dissident writer): political commentary has all but disappeared from his novels.

• He takes his inspiration from different authors, including some from the Renaissance (Giovanni Boccaccio, Rabelais, Denis Diderot).

• Originally, he wrote in Czech, but from 1993 onwards, he has written his novels in French.

• Between 1985 and 1987 he undertook the revision of the French translations of his earlier works.

• His books have been translated into many languages.

Bibliography

The Joke (1967)

Life is Elsewhere (1973)

The Book of Laughter

and Forgetting (1979)

The Unbearable Lightness

of Being (1984)

Immortality (1990)

Sources

• TIME (http://www.time.com)

• Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org)

• http://www.kundera.de