Milan Kundera

Born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera was the son of Ludvík Kundera, a prominent musicologist and pianist who served as head of the Janáček Music Academy. He studied literature and aesthetics at Charles University in Prague before transferring to the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts, where he later taught. He joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1948, was expelled in 1950 for “individualist tendencies,” readmitted, and expelled again after the Soviet invasion of 1968. His first novel, The Joke (1967), a dark comedy about a man destroyed by a political wisecrack, became a symbol of the Prague Spring and was banned after the Soviet tanks arrived. He emigrated to France in 1975, settling in Paris, where he would live for the rest of his life. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979; he became a French citizen in 1981 and eventually insisted on being considered a French author. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), a philosophical novel set against the Prague Spring and its aftermath, made him one of the most widely read European novelists of the late twentieth century. His other major works include The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), The Art of the Novel (1986), and Immortality (1990). Kundera’s fiction is distinguished by its essayistic digressions, its polyphonic structure, and its persistent interrogation of kitsch, memory, and the weight , or weightlessness , of human existence. He lived reclusively, refusing interviews and public appearances, and was a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on July 11, 2023, in Paris, at the age of ninety-four.

After Communism fell, Kundera could finally return home, so he visited only in secret: checking into hotels under false names, telling no one but a few friends sworn not to talk to the press. The country that once banned his books wanted him back in public, and he refused.