Novelist, born on 1/4/1929 in Brno (Bohemia / Czech Republic). His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891-1971), has been musicologist and rector of the Brno University. Milan Kundera wrote his first poems during high school time.

After World War II he jobbed as worker and jazz-musician before beginning his studies. He studied musicology, film and literature and aesthetics ath the Prague Charles University. After he had finished he had been assistent at first and later on professor at the film faculty of the Prague Academy of performing arts.

He published poems, essays and stage plays. At the same time he joined the editorial staff at the literature magazines “Literarni noviny” and “Listy”. Kundera joined the communist party in 1948 and he got expelled from it because of individualistic tendencies. After graduation in 1952 he was appointed as lecturer in world literature at the Film Academy until he lost his post after the Russian invasion of 1968.

His first novel, Zert (1967, The Joke), was a satire on Czechoslovakian-style Stalinism. After the Soviet invasion at 08/21/1968 Kundera as one of the main figures of the put down “Prague Spring“, lost his permission to teach and his books where removed from all public libraries of the country. Because of his committment in the revolution he got a publication prohibition already in 1970. His second novel, Life is elsewhere, was already published in Paris.

In 1975 he fled to Paris, where he has lived ever since, taking French nationality in 1981 and became guest professor at the University in Rennes (Bretagne, France). In 1979 he was deprived of the Czechoslovakian citizenship by the Czech government as reaction to his Book of Laughter and Forgetitbusng. The following novels were not permitted to be published in the CSSR.

He came to prominence in the West with Kniha smichu a zapomneni (1978, Book of Laughter and Forgetitbusng). Nesnesitelna lehkost byti (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) appeared in 1982, and filmed in 1987. Immortality (1991) is set in his adoptive France.

Later works include Testaments Betrayed (1992), Identity (1996), and La Ignorancia (2000), published in spanish language.

Kundera deducts his inspirations, as he underlines often enough, from the Renaissance and from the reconnaissance with Boccacio, Rabelais, Sterne, Diderot, but also from the works of Musil, Gombrowitz, Broch, Kafka and Heidegger.

Selected works:

• Poetry:
  • Man: A Broad Garden (1953)
  • The Last May (1954-1955-1961)
  • Monologues (1957-1964-1965)
• Plays:
  • The Owner of the Keys (1962)
  • Two Ears,Two Weddings (Slowness) (1968)
  • The Blunder (1969)
  • Jaques and His Master (1971)
• Fiction:
  • The Joke (1965)
  • Laughable Loves (1969)
  • Life is Elsewhere (1969/70)
  • The Farewell Waltz (1970/71)
  • The Book of Laughter and Forgetitbusng (1978)
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982)
  • Immortality (1988)
  • Slowness (1994)
  • Identity (1996)
  • Ignorance (2000)
• Essays:
  • About the Disputes of Inheritance (1955)
  • The Art of the Novel (1960)
  • The Czech Deal (1968)
  • Radicalism and Exhibitionism (1969)
  • The Stolen West or the Tragedy of Central Europe (1983)
  • The Art of the Novel (1985)
  • Testaments Betrayed (1992)

Bibliography:

• Tilman, A. (2002). Milan Kundera
• Pichova, H. (2001). The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera
• Petro, P. (ed.) (1999). Critical Essays on Milan Kundera
• O'Brien, J. (1995). Milan Kundera and Feminism: Dangerous Intersections
• Agi, A. (ed.) (1992). Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction: Critical Essays