Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (/'mɪlan 'kundɛra/ Brno, April 1, 1929) is a Czech novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist and poet. Since 1975 he has lived with his wife in France, whose citizenship he acquired in 1987.

Biography

Milan Kundera was born in Moravia in 1929, the son of musicologist and pianist Ludvik Kundera (1891-1971), who was a disciple of Leoš Janáček and served as director of the Brno Academy of Music until 1961. The young Kundera studied musicology and musical composition, with numerous influences and references to music throughout his literary work.

After high school, he began studying literature and aesthetics at the Charles University in Prague, but after two semesters he transferred to the Film Academy of the Prague Academy, where he finished his studies in 1952. He taught film history. cinema at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art from 1959 to 1969, and later at the Institute for Film Studies in Prague.

At the end of the Second World War, Milan Kundera had joined the Communist Party, but would later be expelled from it in 1950, together with his friend Jan Trefulka, for alleged activities against the party.

Jan Trefulka reflected the incident in his work Luck Rained On Them (Pršelo jim štěstí, 1962), and Kundera himself used this episode as inspiration in his novel The Joke (Žert, 1967).

In 1967 he married Vera Hrabankova and a year later, as a result of the Soviet invasion of his country, his works were banned in Czechoslovakia and he became unemployed. He had to earn a living with various occupations, particularly as a jazz pianist, an instrument that his father had taught him to play at a very early age.

Readmitted to the Communist Party in 1956, he was definitively expelled in 1970, having been involved —along with other Czechoslovak writers, such as Pavel Kohout— in the events of the Prague Spring.

In 1975, Kundera emigrated to France and, between that year and 1980, taught comparative literature at the University of Rennes and, later, at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. Since 1993 she has written her works in French.

Work

Milan Kundera's first novel, The Joke (Žert), a satire of Stalinist communism, has been translated into twenty-one languages and won the 1968 Prize for the Union of Czechoslovak Writers. Cataloged by Louis Aragón as "one of the greatest novels of our century", it is, according to the author himself, a love novel; the work is about a joke —a futile and misunderstood joke— in a world that has lost its sense of humor, private comedy being framed in the great spectacle of politics.

Life is elsewhere (Život je jinde, 1969) was awarded the Médicis Prize for the best foreign novel published in France during the year it appeared (1973). In this novel, each chapter is narrated in a different way: some as a "continuous" narration -with a causal link between the chapters-, others as a dream narration and others as a "polyphonic" narration -where the evolution of the protagonist is intertwined with paradigmatic episodes of the life of poets like Rimbaud or Lermontov.

His next novel, The Farewell (Valčík na rozloučenou, 1973), won the Mondello Prize for the best book published in Italy.

In 1981, Kundera's body of work won the Commonwealth Award in the United States, a prize awarded simultaneously to Tennessee Williams' body of drama. That same year, the publication of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kniha smíchu a zapomnění) led to the revocation of his Czechoslovak citizenship. Said work constitutes an unusual mixture between a novel, a collection of stories and reflections of the author, where the vicissitudes of several Czechoslovak citizens who oppose the communist regime in various ways are recounted. In The book of laughter and forgetfulness, the writer defines for the first time the concept of lítost, a word of Czech origin that translates into Spanish as 'self-pity'. He describes the litost as “a state of suffering produced by the vision of our own misery suddenly revealed when we compare ourselves with another”.

In 1982, Kundera received the European Prize for Literature. She published in 1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being ( Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí ), considered her masterpiece. The book narrates the fragility of a person's destiny, highlighting how the life of a single individual is unimportant within the concept of Nietzsche's eternal return, since, in an infinite universe, everything is repeated over and over again. On the other hand, the novel is considered a benchmark when trying to understand the dissidence experienced in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The play was made into a film by American director Philip Kaufman in 1988.

In 1985 he won the Jerusalem Prize, an award given to writers whose work has stood out in the struggle for freedom within today's society. His last novel in the Czech language, Immortality (Nesmrtelnost , 1990), is more cosmopolitan than his previous works. It has a more explicitly philosophical and less political content, and sets the tone for later novels. These include Slowness (La Lenteur, 1994), Identity (L'Identité, 1998) and La ignorancia (L'Ignorance, 2000).

In 2006 The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published for the first time in your country, twenty-two years after it was published in Paris; and, the following year, he received the Czech National Prize for Literature, at the delivery of which he was not present citing health problems. In 2010 he was named Duke of Amarcord by King Xavier I (Javier Marías), thus becoming the first Czech writer in obtaining noble title in the fictitious Kingdom of Redonda.

His latest work, The Feast of Insignificance (La fête de l'insignifiance, 2014), although it is a novel, has also been considered as a work of essay, introspection and theology. In it, the author associates humor with insignificance, understanding that this insignificance does not imply mediocrity, but, on the contrary, supposes a lucid look that invites the world to reconcile with its imperfection.

He has been mentioned frequently for years as a Nobel Prize nominee for Literature.

On September 21, 2020, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in recognition of his literary career. The jury clarified: "His work represents not only an extraordinary contribution to Czech culture [...] but it has had an echo in European and world culture, having been poured into more than 40 languages." returned his Czech citizenship.

Literary style

Although Milan Kundera's early poetic works can be described as pro-communist, his novels are considered to escape ideological classification. Kundera himself prefers to be classified simply as a novelist, and not as a political writer and dissident. His narrative style is inspired by the novels of Robert Musil and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, although the influence of authors such as Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Denis Diderot, Witold Gombrowicz, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger and in special Miguel de Cervantes.

Kundera's early novels deal with the tragic and comic aspects of totalitarianism. The black humor present in her texts suggests a strong influence from Kafka. However, Kundera has never considered his work as political commentary; According to the author's own words: "The condemnation of totalitarianism does not deserve a novel." In fact, he considers himself a writer without a message.

In all of Kundera's work, the words that make up or model his characters are more important than their physical appearance. In his essay The art of the novel (1986), the author comments that the reader's imagination automatically completes the writer's vision. As a writer, he prefers to focus on the essential, since, for him, the physical aspects are not essential for the understanding of the characters; the physical aspect and even the inner or psychological world do not constitute the essence of its protagonists.

The essayist François Ricard has observed that Milan Kundera's texts must be considered as a whole. Themes and metathemes exist throughout the entirety of his work, and each new book manifests the latest stage of his personal philosophy. His metathemes include exile, identity, life beyond borders —beyond love, art or seriousness—, the concept of eternal return, as well as the pleasure of leading a life "less important". For Ricard: "Kundera has contributed to the resurgence of the novel, saving the novel from trivialization."

Many of Kundera's characters are posed in order to expound on earlier themes. Thus, the specifics in regards to the characters tend to be quite vague. At the end of the fifth part of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he wrote the following:

As I said, the characters are not born as the human beings of their mother's body, but of a situation, a phrase, a metaphor in which it is deposited, as within a nut, a fundamental human possibility that the author believes that no one has yet discovered or about which no one has yet said anything essential. Is it not true that the author cannot speak more than of himself [...] all these situations I have experienced them myself, yet none of them a character like me came up, with me curriculum vitae. The characters of my novel are my own possibilities that were not realized.

Frequently there are several protagonists that appear in a novel, even to the point of completely discarding one of them, resuming the plot with a new character.

Works

The original title of the works appears in parentheses.

Novel

• The joke (Žert- 1967.
• Life is elsewhere (Život je jinde- 1972.
• The farewell. (Valčík na rozloučenou- 1973.
• The book of laughter and forgetfulness (Kniha smíchu a zapomnění- 1979.
• The unbearable mildness of being (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí- 1984.
• Immortality (Nesmrtelnost- 1988.
• Slowness (The Lenteur) - 1995.
• Identity (L'Identité) - 1998.
• Ignorance (L'Ignorance) - 2000.
• The feast of insignificance (The fête de l'insignifiance) - 2014.

Reports

• The book of ridiculous loves (Směšné lásky- 1968.

Poetry

• Man is my garden (Člověk zahrada šá- 1953.
• Monologists (Monology- 1957-1965.

Theatre

• Jacques and his master: Tribute to Denis Diderot in three acts (Jakub a jeho pán: Pocta Denisu Diderotovi- 1981.

Tests

• The art of the novel (L'Art du roman- 1986, seven trials.
• The wills betrayed (Les Testaments trahis- 1992.
• The curtain (Le Rideau) - 2005, literary essay around the novel.
• A meeting (Une Rencontre) - 2009, several essays on art and literature.