Milan Kundera

[Stewart]

Kundera was born in 1929 into a highly cultured, middle class family. His father, Ludv?k Kundera (1891-1971), once a pupil of the composer Leoš Jan?ček, was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Jan?ček 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 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. After graduating in 1952, the Film Faculty appointed him a lecturer in world literature. Kundera belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had had little or no experience of the prewar 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. 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 štěst? (Happiness Rained On Them, 1962). Kundera also used the incident as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel Žert (The Joke, 1967). In 1956 Milan Kundera was readmitted into the Party. He was expelled for the second time in 1970. Kundera, along with other Czech artists and writers such as V?clav Havel, was involved in the 1968 Prague Spring. This brief period of reformist activities was crushed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 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.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Žert (1967) [Eng: The Joke]
• Směšn? l?sky (1969) [Eng: Laughable Loves]
• Valč?k na rozloučenou (1972) [Eng: The Farewell Waltz]
• Život je jinde (1973) [Eng: Life Is Elsewhere]
• Kniha sm?chu a zapomněn? (1978) [Eng: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting]
• Nesnesiteln? lehkost byt? (1984) [Eng: The Unbearable Lightness of Being]
• Nesmrtelnost (1990) [Eng: Immortality]
• La Lenteur (1993) [Eng: Slowness]
• L'Identit? (1998) [Eng: Identity]
• L'Ignorance (2000) [Eng: Ignorance]

RELATED THREADS

• The Joke
• The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting
• Ignorance

RELATED LINKS

• Milan Kundera on Wikipedia
• Philip Roth interviews Kundera (1980)

(All text in this post is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.)

[Morten]

I quite like Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, surely, is one of the most original contemporary (1984?) novels. I think people often misunderstand it because they take it too literally, or take it to be real philosophy. Which it isn't (at least not quite). It's a funny book (dark) with many interesting philosophical ponderings, many interesting perspectives on life and love and sex, etc.

Incidentally, his essays are quite good. The Curtain, which I read recently, was very good. Easily read, fast-paced essays on European history and literature, with many compelling observations.

[Heteronym]

I've read Identity, which I remember having a rather lovely prose, but I can't remember much else about it. As soon as I finish my current novel I plan to start The Book of Laughter and Forgetfulness, which I hear is one of his best novels.

Morten, which novels does Kundera discuss in The Curtain? Have you also read The Art of the Novel? I've always preferred to read the books instead of the books about the books, but I also believe that writers write great literary criticism (Forster, James, Borges, Eco, Calvino), so I'm very curious about this aspect of Kundera's career.

[Stewart]

First it was Grass and his shady past, now it's Kundera, in this article about how he supposedly denounced someone he didn't know way back in the 1950s.

The Literary Saloon has plenty of information, and will no doubt continue to aggregate reactions as they appear.

[Heteronym]

It's a disgrace, it is! Dirty rotten snitch!

I think I'm going to return the novels by him I just bought, The Farewell Waltz and Life is Elsewhere, and get me some wholesome, edifying literature by Paulo Coelho.

[Eric]

I wrote, on another thread:

Kundera is an equivocal figure. While people like Havel (of whom you may have heard...) stayed put and was imprisoned, Kundera spent decades in France, conjuring up slightly sexy stories that brush against the realities of what it was like to live in the Czechoslovakia he was safely out of.

But as any of you that have experienced the secret police of the former Russian (aka Soviet) bloc, there were all sorts of complex strings attached, betrayals, tit-for-tat moments, and so on.

It would be unfair to accuse Kundera of things he hadn't done. But I think those who have never lived in a Communist country should get real and understand the sheer complexity of living under that system of informers, blackmail and threat of imprisonment.

I hope those of you that have lived in the former GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, etc., and have experienced the subtle pressure of the secret police, will comment on the pluses and minuses of getting out of the system and commenting from abroad (the West), versus staying put and writing from within.

Let's forget Grass, who lived all his post-WWII life in the West. He could keep his mouth shut. But anyone living under such a devious r?gime as that of any Eastern Bloc country could have, at any moment, been subject to blackmail, compromise or the necessity of dealing with the authorities to obtain privileges. These privileges were things we in the West regard as taken for granted, such as travel abroad, a decent house, a good job, consumer goods such as whisky, shampoo and cameras, etc.

Those very, very na?ve people that have never experience the Eastern (aka Russian) Bloc during the 1970s and 1980s should learn and judge very cautiously when it comes to writers, always in the limelight in the Communist bloc, that had to do dodgy deals to survive. It's easy to pontificate from the cosy armchairs of the West.

When reading Kundera, I would like to always use as a touchstone a few authors that continued to live in the Soviet Bloc, and never had the chance to run away to the West. The comparison would be fruitful.

[Eric]

About a year ago I wrote about the slight dodginess of Kundera. Now I saw that The Daily Telegraph was running the same story yesterday:

Milan Kundera 'was an informant to Czech secret police' - Telegraph

How did it take them a year (!) to find the story which even I nicked from elsewhere? Literary journos are a bit slow on the uptake, if you ask me.

[JTolle]

I've been reading Kundera's criticism for a little bit now (finishing The Curtain and waiting for Testaments Betrayed to come) and it's just amazing the wealth of knowledge and theory that he delivers in such a limited space (The Art of the Novel and the The Curtain are both only 176 p), he breaks down everything so simply (amazingly without generalizing and degrading the texts he mentions), so succinctly, and so damn eloquently.

The only reservation I have is with Kundera's voice. His voice flows so silently into the text that you can easily forget how much of his criticism is the (albeit, incredibly intelligent, well-read) opinion of Kundera. A great deal of criticism is opinion-based and personal-theory driven, I have no objection to that, it's the fact that his voice integrates itself so easily with fact. I'm seduced by that voice over and over again, everything he says appears to be without contradiction when I read it, although even after I've analyzed most of what he says I find out that I still agree. Just try to stay objective if you find yourself totally seduced.

Another thing--accessing the simplicity of his criticism has a lot to do with knowing the works he loves and commonly references. The novels of Kafka; Don Quixote; Gargantua and Pantagruel; The Novels of Flaubert; The Sleepwalkers; The philosophy of Hegel; The Good Soldier Svejk; Anna Karenina; Tristram Shandy. Having read, or knowing a good deal about these works and authors opens up floodgates of accessibility because Kundera bases the majority of his theory on the processes and implications of these books and writers.


...he deserves the Nobel...

[altai]

I don't think he deserves a Noble. But he is a decent writer. I liked his 'Joke' very much. I like his portrayal of central characters as people living complex lives in a certain repressive environment and trying to make the best out of it. it's like the environment doesn't determine people but rather people being complex individuals with different characters and desires adapt to the environment in different ways. What I didn't like is that he has a way of defining his characters in a straight rigid manner that doesn't leave much space for the reader to actually work his/her way into the character. In many parts, especially in the "Unbereable Lightness of Being", Kundera would just state that this or that character has this feature, thinks like that and is defined by such and such desire and period. We should just take it the description. I'd prefer to work out those messages through action of the characters and dialogues.

As for his political stance, I find his philosophizing about the fates of countries like Czechoslovakia, which he called 'The stolen West', a bit over the top, but interesting nonetheless.

[JTolle]

What I didn't like is that he has a way of defining his characters in a straight rigid manner that doesn't leave much space for the reader to actually work his/her way into the character. In many parts, especially in the "Unbereable Lightness of Being", Kundera would just state that this or that character has this feature, thinks like that and is defined by such and such desire and period. We should just take it the description. I'd prefer to work out those messages through action of the characters and dialogues.

Kundera's theory of literature maintains that the Novel has grown by, continues to grow by, definable stages:

He identifies the worldly wandering and comic-adventurous initial propulsion found in--most importantly--Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, Cervantes' Don Quixote, and Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. From there come more focused novels, confining their worldly scope to countries and more character driven works like Fielding's Tom Jones. With each successive stage of the novel he identifies major proponents and what those paths meant: Balzac's "milieu/societal" works, Flaubert's "deep focus" and "textual mastery", Dostoyevsky's "intense psychology".

Kundera considers himself a writer of the Novel's newest (and he fears, last) stage, a direct descendant of the work of Kafka, Broch, and Gombrowicz. He considers it the "Existential" branch of the Novel. While we've been accustomed to the "Psychological" phase of the novel, which drops hints about, revisits, and reminisces on the past and/or reveals characteristic actions and attitudes to give fuller, more "complete" dimensions to each character. The "Existential" style he writes in requires no background, but each character is defined rather by his/her own existential state, down to their names or lack thereof. There's more to it, but I just mentioned what seemed applicable to your statement.

This is at least the impression Kundera gives off in his criticism, though he's careful to mention that in his early work he had no inkling of what he was doing, and that only after many years has he come to fully understand the style of his writing in relation to the Novel's artform and evolution. That's why he states fact and doesn't let the reader gather his own understanding of the characters by common devices (i.e. "dialogue", "action", etc.)