Milan Kundera (UK: /ˈkʊndərə, ˈkʌn-/ KU(U)N-dər-ə; Czech: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra]; 1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a writer from the Czech Republic and France. In 1975, Kundera left his home country and moved to France. He became a French citizen in 1981. His citizenship in Czechoslovakia was taken away in 1979, but he was given Czech citizenship again in 2019.

Kundera’s most famous book is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the Communist government in Czechoslovakia banned his books. During this time, Kundera lived a quiet life and rarely talked to reporters. He was considered a possible winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and was also nominated for other awards.

Kundera received several honors, including the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, and the Herder Prize in 2000. In 2021, he was awarded the Golden Order of Merit by the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor.

Early life and education

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, at Purkyňova 6 (6 Purkyně Street) in Královo Pole, a district of Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). He was born into a middle-class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891–1971), was a respected Czech music expert and pianist. He led the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961. His mother, Milada Kunderová (born Janošíková), was an educator. His father passed away in 1971, and his mother died in 1975.

Kundera learned to play the piano from his father. Later, he studied musicology and musical composition. Music-related ideas and notes appear in his writings. Kundera was related to Ludvík Kundera, a Czech writer and translator. As a young man, his father helped him explore music. One of his teachers was Pavel Haas. However, his father could not support a career as a pianist because Kundera wanted to play music by Arnold Schoenberg, a modernist Jewish composer. This made Kundera less interested in music.

In 1947, when he was 18, Kundera joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In 1984, he said, "Communism fascinated me as much as Stravinsky, Picasso, and Surrealism."

He studied music and composition at Charles University in Prague. Later, he moved to the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) to learn film. In 1950, he was removed from the Communist Party. After finishing his studies, the Film Faculty hired him as a teacher of world literature in 1952. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he lost his job at the Film Faculty. In 1956, Kundera married Olga Haas, an operetta singer. She was the daughter of Pavel Haas, his teacher, and Sonia Jakobson, a doctor of Russian origin and the first wife of Roman Jakobson.

Political activism and professional career

His removal from the Communist party was written about by Jan Trefulka in his novella Pršelo jim štěstí (Luck Rained on Them, 1962). Kundera also used this event as a central idea in his novel Žert (The Joke, 1967), where he criticized the ruling Communist party. In 1956, Kundera was allowed back into the party, but he was removed again in 1970. He participated in the Fourth Congress of the Czech Writers Union in June 1967, where he gave a powerful speech. In the speech, he discussed Czech efforts to keep cultural independence from its larger European neighbors. Along with other reform-minded Communist writers, such as Pavel Kohout, he had a small role in the 1968 Prague Spring. This short period of reform was stopped by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Kundera continued to support changes in Czechoslovak Communism and argued strongly in print with another Czech writer, Václav Havel. He claimed that people should stay calm and noted that "nobody is being locked up for his opinions yet," and that "the significance of the Prague Autumn may ultimately be greater than that of the Prague Spring." In 1968, the year his books were banned by the Czech government, he traveled to Paris for the first time. There, he became friends with the publisher Claude Gallimard. After returning to Prague, Gallimard often visited Kundera, encouraging him to move to France and helping to smuggle the manuscript for Life Is Elsewhere out of Czechoslovakia. Eventually, Kundera agreed to move to France in 1975. In 1979, his Czechoslovak citizenship was taken away. He taught at the University of Rennes for a few years before moving to Paris.

Works

Although his early poems strongly supported communism, his novels are hard to classify by political ideas. Kundera often said he was a novelist, not a writer focused on politics. After his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published, political ideas in his novels became less common, except when tied to bigger philosophical questions. His writing style, which mixes storytelling with philosophical thoughts, was influenced by the works of Robert Musil and the ideas of Nietzsche. In 1945, a journal called Gong published his translation of poems by the Russian poet Vladimir Majakovsky. The next year, a journal named Mladé archy printed one of his poems, which was inspired by his cousin Ludvík Kundera, who was also a writer.

In the mid-1950s, he joined the Communist Party again and published Man: A Wide Garden in 1953, a long poem titled The Last May in 1955, and a collection of poems called Monologue in 1957. These works, along with other parts, were written in a way that avoided controversy, allowing him to benefit from being a recognized writer in a Communist environment. In 1962, he wrote a play called The Owners of the Keys, which became successful internationally and was translated into many languages. He said his inspiration came from Renaissance writers like Giovanni Boccaccio, Rabelais, and especially Miguel de Cervantes, whom he felt most connected to. Other influences included Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Denis Diderot, Robert Musil, Witold Gombrowicz, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, and Georges Bataille.

Originally, he wrote in Czech, but starting in 1985, he made a deliberate choice to write in French, which became the standard for his translations. Between 1985 and 1987, he revised the French translations of his earlier works. His first book in French, Slowness, was published in 1995. His works have been translated into more than eighty languages.

In his first novel, The Joke (1967), he criticized the strict control of the Communist government. After the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968, the book was banned. His criticism of the Soviet invasion led to his books being banned and his name being removed from official lists in Czechoslovakia.

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 tells the story of a young, idealistic poet named Jaromil who gets involved in political problems. That same year, Kundera won the Prix Médicis for this novel.

In 1975, Kundera moved to France, where The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in 1979. This book mixed elements of a novel, short stories, and the author’s reflections. It explored how Czechs resisted the Communist government. Critics noted that the Czechoslovakia Kundera described no longer existed in the same way, a theme he explored in his writing.

Kundera’s most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was published in 1984. The book examines how small choices shape a person’s life, using the idea from Nietzsche that in an endless universe, everything repeats forever. A film version was made in 1988, but Kundera did not like it. The book follows a Czech surgeon who moves from Prague to Zurich and returns to Prague, where he cannot work as a doctor. Instead, he becomes a window washer and arranges relationships with many women. In the end, he and his wife move to the countryside. The book was not published in Czechoslovakia because Kundera feared it would be poorly edited. An official Czech translation was finally released in 2006, though a version had been published in 1985 by a Czech expatriate in Canada.

In 2000, Ignorance was published. The novel focuses on the relationship between two Czech émigrés, twenty years after the Prague Spring of 1968. It explores the pain of leaving one’s homeland and challenges the idea that returning home is always better. Kundera suggests that memory and nostalgia can create emotional distance between people and their past selves. The main characters, Irena and Josef, find freedom through forgetting their pain. Kundera draws on the story of Odysseus, especially the idea of home and belonging. The French version of the novel was translated into English by Linda Asher in 2002.

In 2014, Kundera published a novel about four friends in Paris who discuss relationships and life’s challenges. The book received mostly negative reviews. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times called it a "knowing, pre-emptive joke about its own superficiality." A review in The Economist said the book was "sadly let down by a tone of breezy satire that can feel forced."

Writing style and philosophy

François Ricard said that Kundera thought about his stories in the context of all his books together, rather than focusing only on one book at a time. His themes and larger ideas appear throughout all of his work. Each new book shows the latest part of his personal beliefs. Some of these larger ideas include exile, identity, life beyond love, beyond art, and beyond seriousness, history repeating itself, and the happiness of a life that is not always important.

Many characters in Kundera’s books are used to explain one of these themes, which can make them less fully developed as people. Details about the characters are often not clearly described. Sometimes, more than one main character appears in a novel. Kundera may even stop using a character and continue the story with someone new. He once told Philip Roth in an interview in The Village Voice: "Intimate life is seen as a personal secret, something valuable and protected, and the foundation of one’s uniqueness."

Kundera’s early books looked at both the sad and funny parts of living under strict, controlling governments. However, he did not see his books as political messages. He said, "The criticism of strict, controlling governments does not need a novel." Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes said, "What interests Kundera is how strict governments are similar to an old and interesting idea of a perfect society where private and public life are one, and everyone shares the same goals and beliefs." In exploring the humor of this topic, Kundera was greatly influenced by Franz Kafka.

Kundera said he was not a writer with a clear message. In Sixty-three Words, a section of The Art of the Novel, he described a Scandinavian publisher who was unsure about publishing The Farewell Party because it seemed to have an anti-abortion message. Kundera explained that the publisher was wrong about this message. He added, "I was happy about the misunderstanding. I had succeeded as a writer. I had kept the uncertain moral choices in the story. I stayed true to the nature of a novel as an art: humor. And humor does not care about messages!"

Kundera also often wrote about music. For example, he analyzed Czech folk music, quoted from composers like Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók, included musical examples in his books like The Joke, and discussed composers like Arnold Schoenberg and the musical style called atonality.

Miroslav Dvořáček controversy

On 13 October 2008, the Czech weekly newspaper Respekt reported that a government-funded historical archive and research institute, the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, was investigating whether a young Milan Kundera had informed the Czechoslovak secret police, known as the StB, about the return of a defector named Miroslav Dvořáček in 1950. The claim was based on a police report that listed "Milan Kundera, student, born 1.4.1929" as the person who provided information about Dvořáček’s presence at a student dormitory. However, the report did not include Kundera’s ID card number, which was typically required, or his signature. According to the report, the information about Dvořáček’s earlier desertion from the military and his defection to the West came from a woman named Iva Militká.

Dvořáček had allegedly left Czechoslovakia after being ordered to join the infantry following a purge at a flight academy. He later returned to Czechoslovakia as an agent for an anti-communist spy group organized by Czechoslovak exiles, though this was not mentioned in the police report. Dvořáček secretly returned to the student dormitory of a friend’s former girlfriend, Iva Militká. Militká was dating and later married a student named Ivan Dlask, who knew Kundera. The police report claimed Militká told Dlask about Dvořáček’s return, and Dlask told Kundera, who then informed the secret police. Dvořáček was sentenced to 22 years of hard labor, fined 10,000 crowns, had his personal property taken, and lost his civic rights for ten years. He served 14 years in a labor camp, including time working in a uranium mine, before being released.

In response to Respekt’s report, Kundera denied informing on Dvořáček, stating he had never met him and could not recall anyone named "Militká." On 14 October 2008, the Czech Security Forces Archive said the document was not a forgery but could not confirm other details. A researcher from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Vojtech Ripka, noted there were two pieces of indirect evidence—the police report and a related file—but no certainty could be reached without finding all survivors, which was not possible. Ripka also mentioned the signature on the report matched someone who worked in the relevant security section, but a missing police protocol remained unclear.

Many people in the Czech Republic criticized Kundera as a "police informer," while others accused Respekt of poor research for publishing the report. However, presenting an ID card was standard when dealing with the StB in 1950. Kundera was the student representative of the dormitory Dvořáček had visited, and while it was possible another student used Kundera’s name to report Dvořáček, pretending to be someone else in that time was very risky. Conflicting statements from Kundera’s classmates appeared in the media. Historian Adam Hradílek, who co-wrote the Respekt article, was accused of a conflict of interest because one person involved in the incident was his aunt. Respekt stated its goal is to "impartially study the crimes of the former communist regime." Over time, Western journalists realized the controversy had flaws, with French newspapers supporting Kundera. A literary scholar, Karen de Kunes, studied the reports and concluded that even if Kundera had filed the report, he only mentioned the presence of a suitcase in a hallway.

On 3 November 2008, eleven internationally recognized writers defended Kundera, including four Nobel Prize winners: Orhan Pamuk, Gabriel García Márquez, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. Other writers who supported Kundera included Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, and Jorge Semprún.

Awards and honours

In 1973, the book Life Is Elsewhere won the French Prix Médicis. In 1979, Kundera received the Mondello Prize for his work The Farewell Party. In 1985, he was given the Jerusalem Prize. His speech at that event was later included in a collection of essays titled The Art of the Novel. In 1987, he won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. In 2000, he was awarded the international Herder Prize. In 2007, he received the Czech State Literature Prize. In 2009, he was given the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. In 2010, he was named an honorary citizen of his hometown, Brno. After his death, the Greek newspaper Efimerida ton Syntakton (Journal of the Editors) published a special section. Each page of the section used a book title from Kundera’s works to describe current events.

In 2011, he received the Ovid Prize. An asteroid named 7390 Kundera, discovered in 1983 at the Kleť Observatory, was named in his honor. In 2020, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, a Czech literary award.

Personal life

In 1979, Kundera lost his Czechoslovak citizenship. He became a French citizen in 1981. He stayed in touch with friends in the Czech and Slovak regions but rarely returned to his homeland and never made a public return. In 2019, he was given Czech citizenship again. He considered himself a French writer and believed his work should be studied as French literature and placed in French sections of bookstores.

Kundera was married twice. His first wife was Olga Haasová-Smrčková, born in 1937 and died in 2022. She was the daughter of composer Pavel Haas, and they married in 1956. His second wife was Věra Hrabánková, born in 1935 and died in 2024. They married in 1967. Věra worked as Kundera’s secretary, translated his books, and helped manage his communications with others.

Kundera died after being sick for a long time in Paris on July 11, 2023, at the age of 94. He was cremated in Paris on July 19, 2023.