Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929 and showed literary talent in high school. He joined the Communist Party in 1948 but was later expelled and then rejoined for 14 years. He moved to France after persecution and became a French citizen in 1981. Kundera is a renowned writer, known for his philosophies on the human condition and relationships. His most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was made into a film. He lives in Paris with his wife and distrusts translators.
Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929 in Brno, Bohemia, which is now called Czechoslovakia. During his high school years, he initially showed literary inclinations by writing his first poems. In the aftermath of World War II, he worked as a jazz musician and then enrolled in college. At the Prague Academy of Performing Arts he studied cinema, literature and music. He later became a film professor at the same academy.
It was during this period that Milan Kundera joined the editorial board of literature magazines such as Listy and Literarni Novini. Like many other Czech intellectuals of the time, he too joined the Communist Party in 1948. Two years later he was expelled from the party for “individualistic tendencies”. He later joined the party for fourteen years between 1956 and 1970.
During the 1950s, Kundera worked as a translator and essayist. At the time he was also working as a playwright. By that time, Milan Kundera had published several volumes of poetry, but in 1953 he published his first prose book. Laughable Loves was a collection of short stories Kundera had written between 1958 and 1960 that focused on the human condition and the relationships between men and women. He expressed deep and expansive themes ranging from humor to philosophy.
Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, was published in 1967 and dealt with Stalinism. Shortly after the 1968 Soviet invasion, Milan Kundera, one of the leading figures in a failed radical movement called the Prague Spring, found himself in a position of persecution. He lost his teaching position, his books were banned from libraries, and in 1970 his books were banned from publication.
With little choice, Milan Kundera moved to France and became a visiting professor at the University of Rennes in Brittany. His second novel, Life is Elsewhere, was published in 1973 in Paris. In 1979, his Czechoslovak citizenship was stripped as a reaction to his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. His subsequent novels were all banned in the Czechoslovak Soviet Socialist Republic (CSSR), and he became a French citizen in 1981.
Milan Kundera wrote novels in French, which have been translated into German, Spanish and English and are now read all over the world. Kundera has often quarreled with translators, claiming that they translate his work inaccurately. In 1994 he wrote Testaments Trahis, an essay centered on his distrust of translators, interpreters and adulterators.
Milan Kundera is considered one of the great writers of the 20th century. His philosophies and ideas about the human condition, especially the relationships between men and women, made him a giant in the literary world. One of his most famous works, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was filmed with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis and is one of his favorite independent works of art by him. A very private man, Milan Kundera does not give many interviews and lives quietly in Paris with his wife.
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