The music in Kundera’s life
Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia. His father, Ludwik Kundera, was a respected music critic and musicologist who collaborated with Leoš Janáček, the renowned composer and ethnographer. Music ran in the family, and the young Kundera learned piano early, laying a foundation that would echo through his later work.
In adolescence, Kundera experimented with composing, creating a cycle of songs set to the poems of Apollinaire. At his father’s funeral in 1971, Kundera asked for silence from those present; as he left the crematorium, the only sound came from the Second String Quartet Janáček, whom he regarded as the country’s greatest composer.
In interviews, Kundera described how musical craft informed his prose. He noted that tempo contrasts play a crucial role in shaping a novel, long before the first sentence is written. When drafting, he employed polyphony—the parallel development of multiple plots of differing lengths within a single work—creating a layered narrative texture.
Kundera and the communists
In 1948, Kundera joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which had recently come to power. He translated Mayakovsky and wrote a poem about Julius Fučík, a publisher and party activist. Kundera characterized the 1917 October Revolution as the cradle of a new era in human history.
Two years later, he was expelled from the party for alleged anti-party activities and individualistic tendencies. He returned to the party in 1956 and remained until 1970.
In 1968, Alexander Dubček led reforms aimed at expanding citizen rights and freedoms. Kundera supported the party leadership during the Prague Spring, viewing it as an instance of socialism with a human face. After the Prague Spring was crushed, Czech intellectuals faced renewed persecution. Kundera found himself banned from publishing and teaching and turned to writing horoscopes for a magazine to make ends meet. These pressures shaped his later stance on political engagement, and in his 1993 essay Broken Wills he reflected on how lyrical blindness can arise in a time of terror. He recalled a dialogue that captured his stance: Are you a communist, Mr. Kundera? No, I’m a novelist. Are you a dissident? No, I’m a novelist. Right or left? Neither. I am a novelist.
Moving to France
In 1975, the University of Rennes invited Kundera to join as a professor, prompting a move to France. He continued writing in Czech while teaching French, eventually producing novels in French, including Immortality (completed in 1990), Slowness, Authenticity, Ignorance, and others. He resisted translations of his Czech works into Czech, remarking that being translated back into his mother tongue felt perverse to him.
In The Art of the Novel, a collection of essays, Kundera mused on whether he functioned as a Czech or a French writer. He compared his own situation to that of Vera Lingartová, another Czech immigrant, asking whether writing in French still means writing in Czech. The question lingered: is a writer truly rooted in one linguistic soil or adrift between them? [citation: Kundera biography]
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, Kundera produced works such as Life Is Not Here and Goodbye, Lenore? then pivoted to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting after relocating to France. The Unbearable Lightness of Being appeared in 1982 and was first published in 1984, centered on Tomas, Teresa, and Sabina in Prague during 1968. The novel explores a central paradox: existence carries an unbearable lightness because each life occurs only once, making every action seem weightless yet fatefully consequential. This tension is what gives the book its title. A film adaptation by Philip Kaufman appeared four years after the novel’s release, but Kundera dismissed it, feeling that the philosophical core had been diminished in the translation to cinema.
Indoor lifestyle
By 1985, Kundera stopped giving oral interviews, citing misrepresentations in some reports. He resided in Paris and kept his visits to the Czech Republic limited and discreet. Czech publications at Atlantis published his works in Czech, while he collaborated with the Galimard publishing house in France. Translator loyalties remained strong; for instance, Nina Šulgina translated all of Kundera’s Czech novels into Russian. In interviews, Kundera argued that a writer’s private life should not be a public spectacle, suggesting that art should leave behind only the impression that one never quite lived in a conventional sense.
“Kundera’s Notice”
In 2008, the Czech newspaper Respekt published a piece titled Milan Kundera’s denunciation, concerning Miroslav Dvořáček, who arrived in Prague in 1950 as an American intelligence operative and allegedly left luggage with a friend. The article suggested that a mutual associate had reported Dvořáček to state security, resulting in a lengthy imprisonment. Kundera initially denied the accusation when contacted by Czech television, but later historical research confirmed portions of the story. [citation: Respekt archives]