Researched and Compiled by Editor Meghana and published by Editor Mrinali Jadhav

“When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I’m successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.”

When one reads about the dramatic life and times of the great writer Milan Kundera, the quote mentioned above would make a lot more sense. The writer who rose to international acclaim with his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being passed away on July 11, 2023, in Paris. 

Although born and brought up in Czechoslovakia, Kundera would go on to attribute his creative genius to France, to where he exiled himself. He considered himself a French writer and insisted that his works should be classified as French literature. He once said, “I lived in Czechoslovakia until I was 45. Given that my real career as a writer began when I was 30, I can say that the larger part of my creative life will take place in France. I am much more tied to France than is thought.”As a young man, Kundera was a passionate communist apart from being a poet, playwright, and novelist.

As an 18-year-old, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1947. The same party would later go on to denounce him and in 1979, strip him off his citizenship in his homeland. He was expelled from the party in 1950 for alleged “anti-communist activities,” after which his readmission happened in 1956.In 1967, Kundera entered his second marriage, which was to Věra Hrabánková, and published his first novel, Žert (The Joke), which became a massive hit. It also attracted his second expulsion from the communist party in 1970.

He was dedicated to reforming the party and purging it from its anti-democratic ideals. In Žert, a joke about the Russian socialist leader Trotsky that a student wrote to impress a girl and his satirical criticism of Communist totalitarianism landed him in trouble. The Prague Spring, which began in January 1968 with the democratic reforms brought about by the First Secretary of the party Alexander Dubček, was received with outrage from the Warsaw Pact members. They invaded the country in August 1968 following which Kundera, who was involved although minimally in the Prague Spring, was blacklisted, fired from his lecturer in World Literature post at the Film Faculty, and his Žert removed from bookshelves. Kundera visited France for the first time after this event.

There he befriended the French publisher Claude Gallimard, a friendship that would determine a major turning point in his life.After returning from France Kundera was able to find jobs in small-town cabarets as a jazz trumpeter, to the music education he received from his father Ludvik Kundera, who was a musicologist and pianist, and due to his brief training under the Jewish composer Pavel Haas. Haas was murdered by the Nazis in 1944 in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Kundera was initially married to Haas’ daughter, the Czech Jewish singer Olga Haasová-Smrčková. As a blacklisted writer, Kundera had the freedom to write without worrying about censorship. In this period, his second novel – Life is Elsewhere – was conceived. Claude Gallimard would make frequent visits to Prague and to try and convince Milan Kundera to move to France.

He smuggled the manuscript of Life is Elsewhere out of the country and implored its author to move to France and unleash his artistic genius. It was published in France in 1973 titled La vie est ailleurs for which he was awarded that year’s Prix Medicis. In 1975, he moved to France with his family, losing all hope in the reformation of his native country.  Life is Elsewhere would go on to be published in Czech in 1979, due to which his citizenship would be taken away. In 1979, his third novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in France. It was in fact a combination of a novel, a collection of short stories, and personal musings, a style which would become a defining characteristic of Kundera’s works in exile. The same year, he officially became a French citizen.In 1984, his landmark novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published.

The publication of this novel catapulted Kundera into the status of a celebrated writer. The novel follows two couples as they grapple with politics and infidelity, while exploring the tension between freedom and responsibility. The book is an exploration of the fragility of fate, and contains the very memorable and recognizable concept, “In an infinite universe, everything is guaranteed to recur infinitely.” In 1988, a Hollywood adaptation of his The Unbearable Lightness of Being was released. It was directed by Philip Kaufman and starred big names like Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day Lewis. Kundera was unhappy with the oversimplifications done by the adaptation from the multilayered structure of his novel. He notably had a deep distrust towards the media. One of his statements surrounding the matter goes, “An author, once quoted by a journalist, is no longer master of his word … And this, of course, is unacceptable.”In 1988, Kundera released Nesmrtelnost (Immortality), his final book to be written in the Czech language.

This philosophical novel of ideas paved the way for the following three French novellas – La Lenteur (1995), L’Identité (1998), and L’Ignorance (2000) – that dealt with nostalgia, remembrance, and the prospect of a homecoming.His last novel, the Festival of Insignificance (2014), was met with a slew of negative reviews. It centred on the musings of four male friends who live in Paris and talk about their relationships with women and the existential dilemma that people face in the world. Although Kundera wished to leave his Czech roots behind, the Czech Republic have extended reconciliatory measures to the writer.

The Klet’ Observatory named an asteroid they discovered in 1983 as 7390 Kundera, intending it as a tribute to the writer. His Czech citizenship, as well as that of Vera’s, was restored in 2019. Petr Drulák, the Czech Republic’s ambassador to France, delivered Kundera’s citizenship certificate and described the occasion as “a symbolic return of the greatest Czech writer in the Czech Republic.” In 2020, the Czech Republic’s most prestigious literary award The Franz Kafka Prize was bestowed to Milan Kundera, for his “extraordinary contribution to Czech culture” and the popular reception of his works throughout the world. 

To say the least, the death of Milan Kundera is a great loss to the literary world. Now his life is elsewhere – in the memory and legacy of his works. 

We publish our editorials everyday. So if you loved reading articles on a broad spectrum of topics.. please subscribe to our website.