Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera , 1929-, Czechslovakian-born novelist and essayist. His first novel, The Joke (1967, tr. 1974), brought him government disapproval and resulted in the loss of his citizenship. This, coupled with the 1968 Soviet invasion, prompted him to flee Czechoslovakia; he settled (1975) in France, where he became a citizen in 1980. Often set against a totalitarian backdrop yet usually apolitical in tone, his widely translated fiction looks ironically at love, sex, and the possibility of spiritual fulfillment in the modern age. His works frequently treat themes of exile and return, memory and forgetfulness, nostalgia and regret. Kundera's most acclaimed novels are The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (tr. 1980, 1996) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (tr. 1984). Among Kundera's other novels are Life Is Elsewhere (tr. 1974, 2000) and Immortality (1990, tr. 1991), both written in Czech; and Slowness (1995, tr. 1996), Identity (1997, tr. 1998), and Ignorance (2000, tr. 2002), all originally in French. He has also written plays, short stories, poetry, and essays. Among the latter are three collections containing his reflections on fiction, The Art of the Novel (1986, tr. 1988), Testaments Betrayed (tr. 1995), and The Curtain (2005, tr. 2007).

Bibliography: See studies by M. N. Banerjee (1990) and F. Ricard (2003).