During his lifetime, Milan Kundera was an internationally acclaimed Czech émigré writer who through his novels made use of experiments in form to examine basic existential issues by exploring the role of sex and politics in the lives of his characters.
Birth and Education
Milan Kundera was born on April 1st, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic) to Ludvik and Milada Janosikova Kundera. He grew up in the provincial capital of Brno before moving to Prague where he joined the Charles University and the Film Faculty of the Prague Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1947. Like the majority of his compatriots, he initially celebrated the Communists’ rise to power after the war as a victory of the future over the past. Like many of them, he was soon to be disenchanted. He did not agree with many ideas formulated by the party.
As a result, in 1950 he was expelled for “ideological differences” and left Prague to work as a labourer and jazz pianist in the provinces. He was reinstated in the party in 1956 and, two years later, he was appointed assistant professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies of the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.
Socialism with a Human Face
In 1963, he became a member of the central committee of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union. Between 1963 and 1968, Kundera emerged as “one of the most important literary figures in Prague”. His three collections of short stories partially translated as Laughable Loves (1974), became immensely popular and were awarded the Czechoslovak Writers’ Publishing House Prize. The English version of his first novel, The Joke, (1969, revised, 1982) which was finally published, unchanged, after a two-year battle with the censors, quickly went through three editions and received the Union of Czechoslovak Writers’ Prize. With other prominent writers such as Ludvik Vaculik and Ivan Klima, Kundera used his stature in the writers’ union to press for “socialism with a human face” and thereby helped to usher in the Prague Spring.
When the soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and crushed the reform movement in August 1968, Kundera and the two other writers were immediately regarded as enemies of the state. His books were removed from libraries and bookstores, his plays were banned, he was dismissed from his teaching post and denied the right to publish in his own country. Although he continued to write in Czech, as from 1970, the first editions of his books were all foreign translations. He was forbidden to work in Czechoslovakia and was not allowed to leave the country. To support himself at one point, he wrote thousands of horoscopes for Prague clients and published a monthly astrology column under a pseudonym.
At the time when Milan Kundera was denied publication in his own country, an international readership began to discover him. The Joke was quickly translated into a dozen languages. His second novel which bears the title La vie est ailleurs (1973; Life is Elsewhere, 1974), was awarded the French Prix Médicis. His third novel, La Valse aux adieux (1976; The Farewell Party, 1976), received the Italian Premio Mondello. Philip Roth enthusiastically introduced his works to American readers by publishing both Laughable Loves and The Farewell Party in the Writers’ from the Other Europe series.
Place in Contemporary World Literature
In 1975, the Czech authorities at last allowed Kundera and his wife to leave the country to enable him to accept a visiting professorship in comparative literature at the University of Rennes. He reached France, aged forty-five, with two suitcases, a few books and some records. Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli (1979; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980), established Kundera’s place in contemporary world literature and led to the revocation of his Czech citizenship. In 1980, he moved to Paris to become a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and in 1981, President François Mitterrand granted him French citizenship. Two novels L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être (1984; The unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984) and Immortality (1991), the play Jacques et son maître: Hommage à Denis Diderot (1970), a series of widely read and frequently quoted essays on the history and fate of Central Europe, and a collection of essays and interviews entitled L’Art du roman (1986; The Art of the Novel, 1988) followed. Ignorance was published in the year 2000 while The Festival of Insignificance, another novel, came out of press in 2014. He also often ventured into musical matters, analysing Czech folk music or placing musical excerpts into the text as in The Joke.
“I tried a lot of things” before turning to fiction, Kundera has said. “Cinema, painting, music, poetry, criticism, theory, aesthetics. But none of it was serious. I think of all that now as a kind of prehistory”. Intellectually and artistically, he has repeatedly emphasized, “I am attached to nothing apart from the European novel, that unrecognized inheritance that comes to us from Cervantes”. As Kundera saw it, that inheritance is a record of both an extraordinary sequence of discoveries and a series of roads not taken. With English novelist, Samuel Richardson, he argued, the novel discovered psychological realism, and, ever since, most novels have followed the early inviolable standards of that tradition.
The Idea of a Novel
In the second half of the twentieth century, Kundera noted that it has often been argued that the novel is dead. He disagreed insisting instead that, since Richardson, the novel has ignored many of its possibilities. One of the most important of these unexplored possibilities, in his opinion, is the one suggested by Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-1767) and Denis Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, 1797), to the effect that “the idea of a novel should be that of a game rather than a representation of reality”.
For Kundera, a novel is a long piece of synthetic prose based on play with invented characters. These are the only limits. ‘Synthetic’, for him, means “the novelist’s desire to grasp his subject from all sides and in the fullest possible completeness… The synthetic power of the novel is capable of combining everything into a unified whole like the voices of polyphonic music. The unity of the book needs not stem from the plot, but can be provided by the theme”.
A novel, in his view, should search and pose questions. The questions that Kundera’s own works pose are existential: Who am I? What is a self? To what extent do I define myself, and to what extent is it defined by others? Do my choices define me, or does chance? What does life, living, being human really mean? The fact that Kundera can explore such fundamental issues in novels that are also witty and entertaining is an essential aspect of his art and his appeal.
In each of his novels, his exploration of these existential issues is structured around a series of key words or themes that appear and reappear from book to book. He once said of the novel Immortality that it would have been titled The Unbearable Lightness of Being if he had not already used the title. All his novels, he told an interviewer, might have been called The Joke or Laughable loves. In fact, each is a book of laughter and forgetting.
Milan Kundera has often objected to political readings of his fiction. He emphasized that he was concerned about the existential dilemmas of his characters and complained that Western readers are drawn to the work of writers from “the other Europe” for the wrong reasons.
Kundera will be remembered for the power and accomplishments of his novels. His works amply demonstrate that the contemporary novel is anything but dead.
He breathed his last on July 11 2023 in Paris after a prolonged illness at the age of ninety-four. He considered himself as a French writer and insisted that his work should be studied as French literature.
Awards and Honours
He received the Commonwealth Award (1981), the Prix Europa (1982), the Jerusalem Prize for Literature on the Freedom of Man in Society (1985), the Australian State Prize for European Literature (1987), the International Herder Prize (2000). The Czech State Literature Prize (2007), The Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca (2009), The Ovid Prize (2011) and a Czech literary award, The Franz Kafka Prize (2020) were also bestowed on him.
Mithyl Banymandhub
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Rodgers Jr, Bernard F. Milan Kundera. New York: Magill’s survey of World Literature, 1993.
- Atlas, James. The Wounded Exile. Vanity Fair 3 (January, 1985).
- Boyers, Robert. Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel since 1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.