[ad_1]
The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being has won accolades for his style of depicting subjects and characters floating between the mundane realities of everyday life and the lofty world of ideas. He rarely gave interviews and believed that writers should speak through their work.
His first novel, The Joke, published in 1967, presented a scathing portrait of the Czechoslovak communist regime.
Coming at a time when Czech reformers were seeking to establish “socialism with a human face”, the novel was a first step on Kundera’s path from party member to exiled dissident, a title he despised.
He told the French newspaper Le Monde in 1976 that calling his works politics is an exaggerated simplification, thus concealing their true importance.
A year earlier, Kundera had been blacklisted after criticizing the 1968 Soviet invasion and finally forced to emigrate with his wife, Vera, to France, where he eventually became a citizen.
His first novel as an immigrant was The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), a story written in seven parts that showed the power of totalitarian regimes to erase parts of history and create an alternative past.
Although not as well known as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published five years later, the book cemented Kundera’s reputation as a groundbreaking novelist with critics calling it a work of genius. It also cost him Czechoslovak citizenship. Cheeky recovered passport in 2019.
The New York Times wrote in a review: “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, though it is part fiction, part literary criticism, part political, part musicology, and part autobiography.”
“She can call herself whatever she wants, because everyone is a genius.”
Kundera was born in the Moravian capital Brno on April 1, 1929 to a musicologist who studied under composer Leos Janakzek. He began writing poems in high school and studied at Charles University in Prague after World War II.
Like many young men of his age, he joined the Communist Party but was later expelled. During the 1960s he taught at the Film Academy where among his students was Milos Forman, who was among the creators of Czech New Wave films.
During his exile, the author had an icy relationship with his former homeland, writing his new works in French and even preventing some of his novels from being translated into Czech. He once told an interviewer that he considered himself French, not an immigrant.
But Kundera never lost his connection to his homeland and many of his books are set in the nation of his birth. He rarely made public visits home after the 1989 Velvet Revolution toppled the communist regime, preferring instead to sneak quietly into the country to visit friends and family.
Kundera has lived mostly out of the public eye, but he made a public statement in 2008 denying a report that he turned a young airman for a spy in the 1950s, who landed in uranium mines and prisons for 14 years.
“It’s not true, the only mystery I can’t explain is how my name got there,” he said.
Kundera has been translated into more than 20 languages, and has won numerous literary awards, including the Prix Europa-Litterature for his body of work.
In 1973 his “Life Is Elsewhere” won France’s prestigious Prix Medicis for best foreign novel, and “The Farewell Party”, a contemporary sexual farce set in an Eastern European spa, won Italy’s Premio Mondello in 1978.
He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature but did not win it.
“I am happy to think that the art of the novel came into the world as an echo of God’s laughter,” said Kundera, upon accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 1985.
Kundera explained his drives as a writer and his disdain for self-reflection in an interview with The New York Times that same year.
In the interview, he said, “Only a literary work that reveals an unknown part of human existence has a reason for existence.” “To be a writer is not to preach the truth, but to discover the truth.”
[ad_2]
