The music in Kundera’s life
Writer Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia. His father, Ludwik Kundera, was a well-known music critic and musicologist who worked alongside composer and musicologist-ethnographer Leoš Janáček. The father instilled in the heir a love of music: the author had been playing the piano since childhood.
In his youth, Kundera began writing musical compositions, a cycle of songs to Apollinaire’s poems. Years later, at his father’s funeral in 1971, he forbade those present to speak – as he left the crematorium, only the music performed by the Second String Quartet Janacek, whom he called the country’s greatest composer, sounded.
In an interview, Kundera said that he uses musical composition techniques in the making of his literary works: “For me, the contrast of tempos is extremely important. It’s one of the first ideas I had about a new novel long before I started writing it.”
When creating novels, he also used the principle of polyphony – when several plots of different lengths develop in parallel in one work.
Kundera and the communists
In 1948, Kundera joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KPC), which had just come to power in the country. Sympathetic to his ideas at the time, he translated Mayakovsky and wrote a poem about Julius Fucik, publisher and activist of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The author described the October Revolution of 1917 as “the cradle of a new era in human history”.
Two years later, Kundera was expelled from the HRC for “anti-party activities and individualistic tendencies”. In 1956 the writer returned to the party and remained at the party until 1970.
In 1968, Alexander Dubcek, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, organized reforms aimed at expanding the rights and freedoms of citizens. The author supported the party chairman. In the Prague Spring he saw an opportunity to build “socialism with a human face”.
After the end of the Prague Spring, the persecution of Czech intellectuals began. Banned from publishing and teaching, Kundera began making money by writing horoscopes for a magazine. Because of these events, he stopped addressing political issues, and in his article “Broken Wills” (1993) stated that after 1948 he understood “the important role of lyrical blindness in a time of terror”:
“As a result, I got into these weird dialogues: “Are you a communist, Mr. Kundera? No, I’m a novelist. “Are you a dissident? No, I’m a novelist. “Right or left? – Neither one nor the other. I am a novelist.”
moving to france
In 1975, the University of Rennes in Brittany invited Kundera to become a professor. After moving to France, she continued to write in Czech and taught French. In the novel “Immortality”, completed in 1990, the author alternated between French and Czech, and wrote his next works in French – the novels “Slowness”, “Authenticity”, “Ignorance” and others. It also banned the translation of texts into Czech:
“Seeing me being translated into my mother tongue by someone else seems perverse to me.”
In his collection of essays, The Art of the Novel, Kundera published a reflection on whether he was a Czech or French writer. The author compared himself to another Czech immigrant, Vera Lingartova:
“When Lingartova writes in French, does she still write in Czech? NO. French writer? Also no. He’s out there somewhere.”
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
Nearly unemployed in 1968, Kundera wrote Life Is Not Here and Goodbye Waltz, and then planned to end his writing career. However, after moving to France, he published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In 1982, Kundera wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being, first published in 1984. The plot develops around three characters – Tomasz, Teresa and Sabina, set in Prague in 1968.
In the book, Kundera explains that existence is filled with unbearable lightness because everyone lives only once: “What happens once can never happen.” Therefore, according to the author, every life carries a mysterious accident. But if you constantly think about the consequences of actions, they become unbearable – hence the name “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.
Four years after the novel’s release, Philip Kaufman produced a film adaptation that Kundera didn’t like. He was dissatisfied with the minimization of the philosophical component in the film.
indoor lifestyle
In 1985, Kundera completely refused to give an oral interview because, according to her, journalists had misrepresented her speech. He lived in Paris and rarely and secretly visited the Czech Republic. Kundera published only Czech books at Atlantis publishing house and worked at Gallimard publishing house in France. The author was also loyal to the translators with whom he worked throughout his career: for example, all of Kundera’s Czech novels were translated into Russian by Nina Shulgina.
In an interview, Kundera expressed his view that the personal lives of writers and other creators should not be made public: “An artist should leave behind the impression as if he had never lived. His private life is not public.”
“Kundera’s Notice”
In 2008, the Czech newspaper Respekt published an article entitled “Milan Kundera’s denunciation” dedicated to the pilot Miroslav Dvořáček. He arrived in Prague in April 1950 as an American intelligence agent and left his luggage at a friend’s dormitory. According to the article’s author, a mutual friend told Kundera about this and allegedly reported the pilot to state security agencies. Dvořáček was sentenced to 22 years in prison, 14 of them in prison.
Kundera broke his silence regarding the accusation and personally denied this information when he called Czech television. But later historians found that the publication’s information was confirmed.