About Milan Kundera

In the summer of 2023 came the news that Milan Kundera died. He was 94 years old. Th great writer was born in Brno, Czechia. Kundera. who as a young idealist Communist danced on the streets of Prague, was expelled from the Communist Party for subversive views, was also revoked his Czech citizrnship in 1979 and reinstated only 40 years later. In 1975 Kundera went to exile. Through a process of spiritual substantiation Kundera became a French writer and he lived in Paris. His 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was translated into dozens of languages. The book chronicles the uncertain mature of an individual's life. It advances the idea that a single lifetime is insignificant. We live in an infinite universe in which everything is cyclical, everything is due to repeat itself and return eventually in infinite episodes. Kundera's earlier volume, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, appeared in 1979. It is a collection of disconnected seven stories. featuring sex and life under Communism. In one of them poets are portrayed with names such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Lermontov, Voltaire and Goethe; angels hover above a student's bed; a certain bad mood is described as litost and laughter rises as an evil trait. Kundera was also a literary theorist. He argued that in its 400 years history, the novel accomplished a lot on describing the human condition but also left many themes unexplored, missed many possibilities, ignoring, forgetting countless paths. In his lifetime Kundera received many awards and was the subject of international recognition. Among these, in 1985 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize and in 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.