Милан Кундера: Жизнь и творчество чешского и французского писателя

Czech and French novelist (1929–2023)

Milan Kundera (/UK/'/k//ʊ//n//d//ər//ə//, /'/k//ʌ//n// / KU(U)Ndərə, ; 1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019. Kundera's best known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the country's ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia banned his books. He led a low profile life and rarely spoke to the media. He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was also a nominee for other awards. Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, and the Herder Prize in 2000. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor.

Kundera was born in 1929 at Purkyňova 6 (6 Purkyně Street) in Královo Pole, a district of Brno, Czechoslovakia (present day Czech Republic), to a middle class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891–1971), was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961. was an educator. In his youth, having been supported by his father in his musical education, he was testing his abilities as a composer. His approach to music was eventually dampened due to his father not being able to launch a piano career for insisting on playing the unpopular modernist and Jew Arnold Schoenberg. In 1984, he recalled that "Communism captivated me as much as Stravinsky, Picasso and Surrealism." He attended lectures on music and composition at the Charles University in Prague, but soon moved to the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) to study film. In 1950, he was expelled from the party. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he lost his job at the Film Faculty. In 1956, Kundera also married for the first time, the operetta singer Olga Haas, the daughter of the composer and his teacher Pavel Haas and the doctor of Russian origin Sonia Jakobson, the first wife of Roman Jakobson.

His expulsion from the Communist party was described by Jan Trefulka in his novella Pršelo jim štěstí (Luck Rained on Them, 1962). He took part in the Fourth Congress of the Czech Writers union in June 1967, where he delivered an impressive speech. In the speech he focused on the Czech effort to maintain a certain cultural independence among its larger European neighbors. his novels escape ideological classification. Kundera repeatedly insisted that he was a novelist rather than a politically motivated writer. Political commentary all but disappeared from his novels after the publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being except in relation to broader philosophical themes. Kundera's style of fiction, interlaced with philosophical digression, was greatly inspired by the novels of Robert Musil and the philosophy of Nietzsche. In 1945 the journal Gong published his translation of some of the works from the Russian poet Vladimir Majakovsky. Originally he wrote in the Czech language, but from 1985 onwards, he made a conscious transition from Czech towards the French which has since become the reference language for his translations. His works were translated into more than eighty languages. Following the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the book was banned. of his books.

Kundera's second novel was first published in French as La vie est ailleurs in 1973 and in Czech as Život je jinde in 1979. Life Is Elsewhere is a satirical portrait of the fictional poet Jaromil, a young and very naïve idealist who becomes involved in political scandals. For the novel Kundera was awarded the Prix Médicis the same year.

In 1975, Kundera moved to France where The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in 1979.

Kundera's most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was published in 1984. The book chronicles the fragile nature of an individual's fate, theorizing that a single lifetime is insignificant in the scope of Nietzsche's concept of eternal return. In an infinite universe, everything is guaranteed to recur infinitely. In 1988, American director Philip Kaufman released a film adaptation, which Kundera disliked. Linda Asher translated the original French version of the novel to English in 2002.

The 2014 novel focuses on the musings of four male friends living in Paris who discuss their relationships with women and the existential predicament confronting individuals in the world, among other things. The novel received generally negative reviews. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times describes the book as being a "knowing, pre emptive joke about its own superficiality". A review in the Economist stated that the book was "sadly let down by a tone of breezy satire that can feel forced."

François Ricard suggested that Kundera conceived his fiction with regard to the overall body of his work, rather than limiting his ideas to the scope of just one novel at a time, his themes and meta themes traversing his entire œuvre. Each new book manifests the latest stage of his personal philosophy. Some of these meta themes include exile, identity, life beyond the border (beyond love, beyond art, beyond seriousness), history as continual return, and the pleasure of a less "important" life. Many of Kundera's characters seem to develop as expositions of one of these themes at the expense of their full humanity. Specifics in regard to the characters tend to be rather vague. Often, more than one main character is used in a novel; Kundera may have even completely discontinued a character, resuming the plot with somebody new. As he told Philip Roth in an interview in The Village Voice: "Intimate life [is] understood as one's personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one's originality". Kundera's early novels explore the dual tragic and comic aspects of totalitarianism. He did not view his works, however, as political commentary. "The condemnation of totalitarianism doesn't deserve a novel", he said. According to the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, "What he finds interesting is the similarity between totalitarianism and the immemorial and fascinating dream of a harmonious society where private life and public life form but one unity and all are united around one will and one faith". In exploring the dark humor of this topic, Kundera seems deeply influenced by Franz Kafka. Kundera also ventured often into musical matters, analyzing Czech folk music for example; or quoting from Leoš Janáček and Bartók; or placing musical excerpts into the text, as in The Joke; or discussing Schoenberg and atonality.

On 13 October 2008, the Czech weekly Respekt reported that an investigation was being carried out by the state funded historical archive and research Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, into whether a young Kundera had denounced a returned defector, Miroslav Dvořáček, to the StB, or Czechoslovak secret police, in 1950. The accusation was based on a police station report which named "Milan Kundera, student, born 1.4.1929" as the informant in regard to Dvořáček's presence at a student dormitory. But the report did not include his ID card number, which was usually included, nor his signature. In his response to Respekts announcement, Kundera denied turning Dvořáček in to the StB, On 14 October 2008, the Czech Security Forces Archive announced that they had ruled out the possibility that the document could be a forgery, but refused to arrive at any other definite conclusions. Vojtech Ripka of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes said, "There are two pieces of circumstantial evidence [the police report and its sub file], but we, of course, cannot be one hundred percent sure. Unless we find all survivors, which is unfortunately impossible, it will not be complete." Ripka added that the signature on the police report matches the name of a man who worked in the corresponding National Security Corps section and that a police protocol is missing. With time, the Western journalists realized the whole controversy was flawed, with French newspapers defending Kundera.

In 1973, Life Is Elsewhere received the French Prix Médicis. In 1985, Kundera received the Jerusalem Prize. In 2009, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. In 2010, he was made an honorary citizen of his hometown, Brno. When he died the Greek Newspaper Efimerida ton Syntakton (Journal of the editors) published a special section where all the current affairs on each page were described with a book title of Kundera's. In 2011, he received the Ovid Prize. The asteroid 7390 Kundera, discovered at the Kleť Observatory in 1983, is named in his honor. In 2020, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, a Czech literary award.

Stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979, Kundera became a French citizen in 1981. He maintained contact with Czech and Slovak friends in his homeland, but rarely returned and never with any fanfare. He saw himself as a French writer and insisted his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in bookstores. Kundera was married twice. His first wife was the singer Olga Haasová Smrčková, daughter of composer Pavel Haas. Vera reportedly was his secretary, translator of his works and the gatekeeper between Kundera and the outside world. He was cremated in Paris on 19 July 2023.