Visiting Prague

Summary: life and work of the great writer winner of lots of awards

Milan Kundera was born in the 1st of April in the year of 1929 in Brno although he moved to France in 1975 and there he naturalized himself as French. Therefore Kundera write in both languages Czech and French. All the translations of his work that have been done, to French his has revised them himself like this they are considered originals instead of translations. Although, because of communism, his works weren’t published in the Czech Republic, his homeland.
The Kundera family was a middle class and high cultured family. His father studied music at a high level in the Janácek Music Academy from 1948 and 1961 in Brno. The music influence is visible in all of his works, sometimes even using musical notes, besides learning to play the piano he has studied musicology and musical compositions.
After finishing his secondary studies in Brno, Kundera moved to Prague to study literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. Although he only stayed for two terms because he attended lectures in film direction and script writing in the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He graduated only in the year of 1952 because there was a political interruption in his studies. Without any experiences of democracy in Czechoslovakia the ideology of young people was massively influenced by the German occupation and the II World War, therefore Kundera joined the Communist Party but not for a long time. In the year 1959 Kundera and another writer, Jan Trefulka, were expelled because of “anti-party activities”. Both writers used this incident in theirs works Trefulka in his novel Pršelo jim štěstí (Happiness Rained On Them, 1962) and Kundera in his novel Žert (The Joke, 1967). But Kundera didn’t give up on the communism and entered the party for the second time in 1956 to be expelled again in 1970.
They year of 1968 was particularly important to Czechoslovakia, it was the year of the Prague Spring. This revolution was organized by many artists such as Kundera or Václav Havel although the soviet troops invaded the country putting an end to their dream for freedom.
Kundera had the goal to reform the communist ideas in the Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party he thought that people should remain calm because until that point there haven’t been arrestments for personal opinions. He thought people should wait peacefully and the situation would get better in the Czechoslovakia. Although that did not happen and in 1975 Kundera moved to France. Form the year of 1981 he become a French Citizen.
His most famous work is definitely The Unbearable Lightness of Being 1984, witch is a chronicle regarding the fragile nature and they fate of each individual. The book already has a film version directed by the American Philip Kaufman. The Joke is Kundera’s first work, a satirical novel about the totalitarian communist regime in his homeland. Already in France he wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting telling about the ways to oppose to the communist regime. In 1990 he wrote Immortality the most cosmopolitan novel with a less political mark and more philosophical.
This irreverent writer received many awards like the Jerusalem Prize in the year of 1985. In 1987 he won The Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and others.
Kundera is one of the best writers of novels, poetry, drama, fiction and essays of his generation and his homeland.

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