Milan Kundera was born 96 years ago in the Czech Republic. Kundera himself often joked that he was born on April Fools’ Day.
It seemed ironic to him because he was a novelist. But he loved music so much… He also loved the French language, so much so that after moving to France he insisted that all his work be categorized as French literature. His profession was in a way to tell lies, to tell beautiful stories, to seduce and deceive people. That made him laugh. Lies. Kundera has written many books of essays (Betrayed Testaments, An Encounter), many novels (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Joke), but he has never approached poetry.
Journalism and politics yes. Some of his best books open with political anecdotes (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) or he has written seriously about politics (A Raptured West. Kundera is a novelist who is sparing in words, but proud to be so in the tradition of the great novel. Orhan Pamuk has said of Kundera that it is not the strength or brilliance of his views that matters as much as his anger, or, rather, the way in which he expresses them through anger. Kundera puts himself on the same level as Cervantes and Kafka. And he is right. “Lightness” is a masterpiece of world literature, but no more than “Immortality” or “Slowness”.
The history of literature gained a new figure in its pantheon, in the pantheon of extraordinary artists. He wrote in both Czech and French. He always corrected the translations of his books into French himself, which is why they are not considered translations, but original works. Due to communist censorship in his homeland, his books were banned. He became very well known with books such as: “Shakaja”, “Përjetësia”, “Identiteti”, “Mosdija”, “Lehtësia e paduurshemse e benies etc.” Most of his books have been translated by Saverina Pasho, Mirela Kumbaro and Balil Gjini and published by “Dituria”.
Kundera finished high school in Brno in 1948. He then continued his higher education in literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. After two years of study, he transferred to the Film Faculty of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he focused on directing and scenography. In 1950, Kundera was forced to interrupt his studies for political reasons. After graduating in 1952, he was appointed professor of world literature at the Film Academy. Kundera belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had not experienced the pre-war Czechoslovak Democratic Republic. The growth of this generation was characterized by the experience gained from World War II and the German occupation.
The experience of German totalitarianism created a black and white image of the world for this generation (communism and fascism) and, consequently, pushed a large part of them to become active in Marxist circles and join the Communist Party. Milan Kundera joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which was in power in 1948, when he was still a teenager. In 1950, together with another Czech writer, Jan Trefulka, Kundera was expelled from the party for “anti-party activities”. Trefulka describes the incident in his novella Pršelo jim štìstí (Happiness Fell on Them) while Kundera was inspired by this event to write his first novella Žert (The Joke, 1967).
Milan Kundera was readmitted to the Communist Party in 1956. In 1970 he was expelled from the party for the second time. Kundera, along with other artists and writers such as Václav Havel, was involved in the Prague Spring of 1968. During this period, reformism and the little optimism were crushed by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. This cut him off from Czech culture and life, and prevented the translation of his books written in French into Czech (the publication or re-publication of his older books in the Czech Republic was only allowed after 1989). He died on 11 July 2023 in Paris.
