Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera was a Czech writer; since 1975 he lived in France.

Milan’s father was a pianist, musicologist, and rector of the University of Brno. His cousin was the writer and translator Ludvík Kundera. While studying at secondary school, Milan wrote his first poems. After the Second World War, he earned extra money as a manual laborer and jazz musician.

Milan graduated from school in 1948. He began studying at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in Prague, where he studied musicology, film, literature, and aesthetics; after two semesters he transferred to the Film Faculty of the Prague Academy.

In 1950 he interrupted his studies for political reasons, but nevertheless completed them in 1952. He worked as an assistant and later professor at the academy’s film faculty, where he taught world literature. At the same time, he joined the editorial boards of the literary journals Literarni noviny and Listy.

He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1950. In 1950 he was expelled for “anti-party activity and individualist tendencies.” From 1956 to 1970 he was again in the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

In 1953 he published his first book. Until the mid-1950s he worked on translations, essays, and drama. He became widely known after the publication of a poetry collection and the release of the three parts of the cycle of novellas Laughable Loves, written and published from 1958 to 1968.

His first novel, The Joke (1967), deals with the situation of the Czech intelligentsia under Soviet rule. In the same year, Kundera took part in the Fourth Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers, where calls for the democratization of the country’s social and political life were voiced publicly for the first time, and which initiated the processes that led to the Prague Spring.

After the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Kundera took part in a number of demonstrations and protest meetings, for which he was denied the right to teach. His books were removed from all libraries in Czechoslovakia. In 197