Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Born April 1, 1929 (1929-04-01) (age 80)
Brno, Czechoslovakia
Occupation Novelist[1]
Nationality Czech
Citizenship French

Milan Kundera (IPA: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra]) (born April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech and French writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke.

Kundera has written in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations but original works. Due to censorship by the Communist government of Czechoslovakia, his books were banned from his native country, and that remained the case until the downfall of this government in the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Contents

[edit] Life

Kundera was born in 1929 into a middle class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891-1971), once a pupil of the composer Leoš Janáček, was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961. Milan learned to play the piano from his father, later going on to study musicology and musical composition. Musicological influences and references can be found throughout his work; he has even gone so far as including notes in the text to make a point.

Kundera 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, Kundera joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which seized power in 1948.

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

In 1950, he and another writer, Jan Trefulka, were expelled from the party for "anti-party activities". Trefulka described the incident in his novella Pršelo jim štěstí (Happiness Rained On Them, 1962). Kundera also used the incident as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel Žert (The Joke, 1967).

After graduating in 1952, the Film Faculty appointed him a lecturer in world literature. In 1956 Milan Kundera was readmitted into the Party. He was expelled for the second time in 1970. Kundera, along with other reform communist writers such as Pavel Kohout, were partly involved in the 1968 Prague Spring. This brief period of reformist activities was crushed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

Kundera remained committed to reforming Czech communism, and argued vehemently in print with Havel, saying, essentially, that everyone should remain calm and that "nobody is being locked up for his opinions yet", and "the significance of the Prague Autumn may ultimately be greater than that of the Prague Spring". Finally, however, Kundera relinquished his reformist dreams and moved to France in 1975. He has been a French citizen since 1981.[2]

[edit] Career

Although his early poetic works are staunchly pro-communist, his novels escape ideological classification. Kundera has repeatedly insisted on being considered a novelist, rather than a political or dissident writer. Political commentary has all but disappeared from his novels (starting specifically afterThe Unbearable Lightness of Being) except in relation to broader philosophical themes. Kundera's style of fiction, interlaced with philosophical digression, greatly inspired by the novels of Robert Musil and the philosophy of Nietzsche,[3] is also used by authors Alain de Botton and Adam Thirlwell. Kundera takes his inspiration, as he notes often enough, not only from the Renaissance authors Giovanni Boccaccio and Rabelais, but also from Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Denis Diderot, Robert Musil, Witold Gombrowicz, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, and perhaps most importantly, Miguel de Cervantes, to whose legacy he considers himself most committed.

Originally, he wrote in Czech. 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. As a result, all of his books exist in French with the authority of the original. His books have been translated into many languages.

[edit] The Joke

In his first novel, The Joke, he gave a satirical account of the nature of totalitarianism in the Communist era. Kundera had been quick to criticize the Soviet invasion in 1968. This led to his blacklisting in Czechoslavakia and his works being banned there.

[edit] Book of Laughter and Forgetting

In 1975, Kundera moved to France. There he published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) which told of Czech citizens opposing the communist regime in various ways. An unusual mixture of novel, short story collection and author's musings, the book set the tone for his works in exile. Critics have noted the irony that the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslovakia in the book, "is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there" which is The "kind of disappearance and reappearance" Kundera explores in the book.[3]

[edit] Unbearable Lightness of Being

In 1984, he published The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his most famous work. The book chronicled the fragile nature of the fate of the individual and how a life lived once may as well have never been lived at all, as there is no possibility for repetition, experiment, and trial and error. In 1988, American director Philip Kaufman released a film version of the novel.

Although the film was considered moderately successful, Kundera was upset about it. He has since forbidden any adaptations of his novels.[citation needed]

[edit] Immortality

In 1990, Kundera published Immortality. The novel, his last in Czech, was more cosmopolitan than its predecessors. Its content was more explicitly philosophical, as well as less political. It would set the tone for his later novels.

[edit] Writing style and philosophy

Kundera's characters are often explicitly identified as figments of his own imagination, commenting in the first-person on the characters in entirely third-person stories. Kundera is more concerned with the words that shape or mould his characters than with the characters' physical appearance. In his non-fiction work, The Art of the Novel, he says that the reader's imagination automatically completes the writer's vision. He, as the writer, wishes to focus on the essential. For him the essential does not include the physical appearance or even the interior world (the psychological world) of his characters.

François Ricard suggested that Kundera conceives with regard to an overall oeuvre, rather than limiting his ideas to the scope of just one novel at a time. His themes and meta-themes exist across the entire oeuvre. Each new book manifests the latest stage of his personal philosophy. Some of these meta-themes are exile, identity, life beyond the border (beyond love, beyond art, beyond seriousness), history as continual return, and the pleasure of a less "important" life. (François Ricard, 2003)

Many of Kundera's characters are intended as expositions of one of these themes at the expense of their fully developed humanity. Specifics in regard to the characters tend to be rather vague. Often, more than one main character is used in a novel, even to the extent of completely discontinuing a character and resuming the plot with a brand new character.

As he told Philip Roth in an interview in The Village Voice: "Intimate life [is] understood as one's personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one's originality.[4]

Kundera's early novels explore the dual tragic and comic aspects of totalitarianism. He does not view his works, however, as political commentary. "The condemnation of totalitarianism doesn't deserve a novel," says Kundera.

According to the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, "What he finds interesting is the similarity between totalitarianism and "the immemorial and fascinating dream of a harmonious society where private life and public life form but one unity and all are united around one will and one faith..." In exploring the dark humor of this topic, Kundera seems deeply influenced by Franz Kafka, another novelist from Czechoslovakia.

According to Kundera, he is a writer without a message. For example, in the Art of the Novel, his first book of essays, he recounts a story in which a Scandinavian publisher wavered over going ahead with The Farewell Party because they didn't like his apparent anti-abortion message. He explains that not only was the publisher wrong about the existence of such a message in the work, but, "...I was delighted with the misunderstanding. I had succeeded as a novelist. I succeeded in maintaining the moral ambiguity of the situation. I had kept faith with the essence of the novel as an art: irony. And irony doesn't give a damn about messages!"

He also digresses into musical matters, analyzing Czech folk music, quoting from Leoš Janáček and Bartók. Further in this vein, he interpolates musical excerpts into the text (for example, in The Joke), or discusses Schoenberg and atonality.

[edit] Controversy

On October 13, 2008, the Czech weekly Respekt prominently publicised an investigation carried out by the Czech Institute for Studies of Totalitarian Regimes,[5] which alleged Kundera denounced to the police a young Czech pilot, Miroslav Dvořáček.[6] The accusation was based on a police station report from 1950 which gave "Milan Kundera, student, born 1.4.1929" as the informant. The target of the subsequent arrest, Miroslav Dvořáček, had fled Czechoslovakia after being ordered to join the infantry in the wake of a purge of the flight academy and returned to Czechoslovakia as a Western spy.[6] Dvořáček returned secretly to the student dormitory of a friend's former sweetheart, Iva Militká. Militká was dating (and later married) a fellow student Ivan Dlask, and Dlask knew Kundera.[6] The police report states that Militká told Dlask who told Kundera who told the police of Dvořáček's presence in town.[6] Although the communist prosecutor sought the death penalty, Dvořáček was sentenced to 22 years (as well as being charged 10,000 crowns, forfeiting property, and being stripped of civic rights[6]) and ended up serving 14 years in communist labor camp, with some of that time spent in a uranium mine, before being released.[7]

After Respekt's report (which itself makes the point that Kundera did not know Dvořáček), Kundera denied turning Dvořáček in to the police,[7] stating he did not know him at all, and could not even recollect "Militská". This denial was broadcast in Czech, but is available in English transcript only in abbreviated paraphrase.[8] On October 14, 2008, the Czech Security Forces Archive ruled out the possibility that the document could be a fake, but refused to make any interpretation about it.[9] (Vojtech Ripka for the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes said, "There are two pieces of circumstantial evidence [the police report and its sub-file], but we, of course, cannot be one hundred percent sure. Unless we find all survivors, which is unfortunately impossible, it will not be complete", adding both that the signature on the police report matches the name of a man who worked in the corresponding National Security Corps section and, on the other hand, that a police protocol is missing.[9])

Dvořáček has recently had a stroke and still believes he was betrayed by Iva Militká; his wife said she doubted the "so-called evidence" against Kundera.[10] Dlask, who according to the police report told Kundera of Dvořáček's presence, died in the 1990s. He had told his wife Militká that he had mentioned Dvořáček's arrival to Kundera.[11] Two days after the incident became widely publicised, a counterclaim was made by literary historian Zdeněk Pešat. He said that Dlask was the informant in the case, and Dlask had told him that he had "informed the police."[12] Pešat, then a member of a branch of Czechoslovak Communist Party, said he believed that Dlask informed on Dvořáček to protect his girlfriend from sanctions for being in contact with a agent-provocateur.[12] As Kundera's name still appears as the informer on the police report, this still leaves open the possibility that Kundera informed on Dvořáček to the police (and not the Communist Party branch) separately from Dlask, or had been set up by Dlask to do the deed itself.

Among the first reactions the Czech writer Ivan Klima wrote in an article in the daily Lidové noviny: "From a reader’s perspective it may well be true that if we are disappointed in someone we believed in and admired, our feelings are hurt and our trust is shaken. However, none of this should be used to excuse or exculpate our own misdeeds."[13] Václav Havel did not believe the story.[14]

German newspaper Die Welt has compared Kundera to Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize winner, who in 2006 was revealed to have served in the Waffen-SS in the Second World War.[15]

On 3 November 2008, eleven internationally well-known writers came with announcement to the defence of Milan Kundera. Among novelists, who supported Kundera, were Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Jorge Semprún and Nadine Gordimer. Among signatories were four Nobel Prize laureates.[16]

[edit] Awards

In 1985, Kundera received the Jerusalem Prize. His acceptance address is printed in his essay collection The Art of the Novel. It has also been rumored that he was considered for the Nobel Prize for literature[17][18]. He won the The Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987. In 2000, he was awarded the international Herder Prize. In 2007, he was awarded the Czech State Literature Prize.[19]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Poetry

  • Man: A Wide Garden (Člověk zahrada širá) (1953)
  • The Last May (Poslední máj) (1961) – celebration of Julius Fučík
  • Monologues (Monology) (1965)

[edit] Essays

  • About the Disputes of Inheritance (1955)
  • The Art of the Novel: Vladislav Vancura's Path to the Great Epic (Umění románu: Cesta Vladislava Vančury za velkou epikou) (1960)
  • The Czech Deal (Český úděl) (1968)
  • Radicalism and Exhibitionism (Radikalismus a exhibicionismus) (1969)
  • The Stolen West or The Tragedy of Central Europe (Únos západu aneb Tragédie střední Evropy) (1983)
  • The Art of the Novel (L'art du Roman) (1986)
  • Testaments Betrayed (Les testaments trahis) (1992)
  • D'en bas tu humeras des roses (rare book in French, illustrated by Ernest Breleur) (1993)
  • The Curtain (Le Rideau) (2005)
  • Kastrující stín svatého Garty (Czech translation of part of Les testaments trahis) (2006)

[edit] Drama

[edit] Fiction

[edit] References

  1. ^ Oppenheim, Lois (1989). "An Interview with Milan Kundera". http://web.archive.org/web/20071014230001/centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_kundera.html. Retrieved on 2008-11-10.  "Until I was thirty I wrote many things: music, above all, but also poetry and even a play. I was working in many different directions—looking for my voice, my style and myself… I became a prose writer, a novelist, and I am nothing else. Since then, my aesthetic has known no transformations; it evolves, to use your word, linearly."
  2. ^ Bio at kundera.de .
  3. ^ Good reads Book Description http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/240976.The_Book_of_Laughter_and_Forgetting?utm_medium=api&utm_source=grid_widget
  4. ^ Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2007[citation needed]
  5. ^ [1]
  6. ^ a b c d e Milan Kundera's denunciation Petr Třešňák, Adam Hradilek. Respekt. Accessed October 18, 2008.
  7. ^ a b Milan Kundera denies spy tip-off claims Bojan Pancevski in Vienna for The Times Online UK October 14, 2008
  8. ^ audio of Kundera denial, in Czech
  9. ^ a b Czech archive rules out Kundera document might be fake ČTK. Retrieved October 14, 2008.
  10. ^ Spy’s wife doubts claims against Kundera France 24. Accessed October 14, 2008.
  11. ^ Rozhovor: Že v tom měl Kundera prsty, vím už 15 let (Czech). Centrum.cz internet portal. Accessed October 15, 2008.
  12. ^ a b Another Czech allegedly informed on agent in Kundera 1950 affair ČTK. Accessed October 15, 2008.
  13. ^ translated into english
  14. ^ [2]
  15. ^ Kundera's case resembles Grass's - Die Welt ČTK. Retrieved October 14, 2008.
  16. ^ "Czech writer Kundera gets backing from top writers". Yahoo! News. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081103/en_afp/czechfranceliteraturecommunism. Retrieved on 2008-11-03. 
  17. ^ Sarah Crown. "Nobel prize goes to Pinter". Guardian. http://books.guardian.co.uk/nobelprize/story/0,14969,1591402,00.html. 
  18. ^ http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200404/27/eng20040427_141663.shtml
  19. ^ "Czechs "to honour Kundera", the writer they love to hate". eux.tv. http://www.eux.tv/article.aspx?articleId=16216. 

[edit] See also

  • For Kundera's opinion about graphomania and writing in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), see Graphomania.

[edit] External links

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