Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera was a Czech-born novelist and essayist who wrote about love, memory and politics under totalitarian rule. Born in Brno, he taught in Prague but lost his post and saw his books banned after the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, and in 1975 he moved to France, where he lived until his death and later wrote in French. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), set around the Prague Spring, follows four lives and asks whether a life lived only once can carry any weight. His essays in The Art of the Novel present the novel as a way of exploring human existence.

Key ideas

• If each life happens only once, our choices may lack weight; what happens once might as well not have happened at all.
• It is uncertain whether lightness or weight, freedom or commitment, is the better way to live.
• Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal that denies whatever in human existence is unacceptable, and it serves political movements.
• The novel investigates possibilities of existence that philosophy and history leave unexamined.

Major works

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
• The Joke (1967)
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
• The Art of the Novel (1986)

In the Book corner

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being 1984 (French translation); Czech original 1985 · Intermediate
  A novel set in Czechoslovakia from the Prague Spring of 1968 through the Soviet invasion and its aftermath, in which Kundera regularly…

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