Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (born on April 1st 1929 with Brno, Czechoslovakia, today Tchéquie) is a writer of Czech language and French E. Born in old Czechoslovakia, it obtained the French Nationalité in 1981.

It received the foreign Médicis price in 1973 (for its Romance the life is elsewhere), the Price of Jerusalem in 1985, the Price Today in 1993 (for its test " The wills trahis"), the Herder Price in 2000 and the Grand Prix of literature of the French Academy for the whole of its work in 2001.

Biography

Milan Kundera was born in 1929 with Brno, in Moravie Tchèquie, where he lived until his years of Lycée. It grew in a medium where the Art and the Culture are dominating. His/her father Ludvík Kundera (1891-1971), celebrates musicologist and Czech Pianiste, director of the musical academy of Brno teaches very early him the Piano. It makes profitable this training when, excluded from the Communist party, it must live odd jobs, in particular as pianist of Jazz. The Music influence its work and its life, but not only: his/her cousin Ludvik Kundera for example is a famous Poète.

Starting from 1948, Kundera starts studies of Littérature and Esthétique to the Faculty of Arts, but it changes direction after two quarters and is registered at the university of Cinéma of Prague (FAMU celebrates it). It finishes its studies in 1952, not without to have had to stop them some time following “intrigues against the capacity” which excluded it from the Communist party. It is only in 1956 that it is reinstated, but it will be definitively excluded from it in 1970.

Czech period

Its first delivers, the Man, this vast garden (1953) is a collection of lyric poems in which Kundera tries to adopt a critical attitude vis-a-vis the literature known as of “socialist Réalisme”, but does it only by positioning from the Marxist point of view.

A few years later, it publishes last May (1955), a part consistent Politique in a homage to Julius Fučík, a hero of communist resistance against the occupation Nazi E in Czechoslovakia during the Second world war.

Follows in 1957, Monologs , a collection of poems into which Kundera rejects political propaganda and accentuates the importance of the authentic human experiment. It is a book of poetries of Amour, rational inspiration and intellectual.

End of the Years 1950 and at the beginning of 60, in communist Czechoslovakia, Kundera very known and is appreciated. It gives a breath liberator to the Czech official literature under “socialist realism”. But in second half of the years 1960, a need for Liberté is felt among the writers and intellectual Czech.

With the 4th Congress of the Czech writers (June 1967) the writers are, for the first time, in total dissension with the policy of the leaders of the party. Kundera becomes the figurehead of this movement for the Liberté. The Speech which it holds with this congress made time in the history of the independence of the thought Czech self-criticism.

Disappointed by Communism, it develops in the joke (1967) a major Thème of its writings: it is impossible to include/understand and control reality. It is in the atmosphere of freedom of the Printemps of Prague that he writes Risibles loves (1968). Two works seen like messengers anti Totalitarianism.

Risibles loves is composed of several small texts which speak about the human close relations and through that about the dysfunction about the Parole, topic which appears in all mature works of Kundera. It analyzes the topics of the identity, the authenticity and the phenomenon of the illusion (how the facts change in an imperceptible way into their opposite). The majority of the stories proceed in the Czech company of the late Stalinisme and testify to the reality of this time.

The Soviet invasion in 1968 puts an end to this period Freedom of expression of the Média S and plunges the country in the néo- Stalinisme pure and hard. This atmosphere remained unchanged until the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989. In this cold climate, its militancy in favor of the independence and the freedom of the culture cost him its post of teacher at the Cinematographic Institute of Prague; its books are withdrawn from the bookstores and it is to him interdict to publish.

the life is elsewhere is a form of Catharsis for Kundera, it is confronted with its past of Communist, his place as a Artiste…. and it is released some.

The environment of the waltz to the good-byes , supposed to be its last novel (the original title was Épilogue ), is influenced by the arid mode which reigned in Czechoslovakia after the invasion of the USSR. Not Political question of in this book. The choking situation which reigns apart from the world of the fiction appears in the account only in an occasional way.

French period

In 1975, it leaves, with his wife Véra, Czechoslovakia for the France where it initially teaches with the university of Rennes 2 and thereafter at the School of the High Studies of Social sciences in Paris. Czechoslovakian nationality was withdrawn to him in 1979 and it was thus made naturalize French. Boris Livitnof lights us, in his article Milan Kundera: derision and pity , on the manner of acting of the Czech government:

“Not that Kundera was an enemy of the socialist mode, but its manner of thinking and of writing there is considered to be highly subversive. One thus let leave the author to teach in a French university (…) ”

Or:

“It is not the writer who turns the back on his country. But these is the country which puts the writer outlaw, obliges it with clandestinity and with martyrdom”

pushes it

As absurd as that can appear, the fact that it is interdict of publication in its country gets him a feeling of freedom. For the first time of its life it can write freely, the Censure not existing more. Knowing that consequently he writes only for translators (its work not being able more to be published in its country of origin), its language is radically simplified.

The controlled French language, Kundera launches out in the correction of the translations of its books, tries which takes much time to him. In the joke, note of the author , it explains the importance and the reason which push it to react in this manner:

“One day, in 1979, Alain Finkielkraut lengthily interviewed me for the Corriere beyond will be : " Your style, flowered and baroque in the joke , became stripped and limpid in your following books. Why this change? "

Quoi? My flowered style and baroque? Thus I read for the first time the French version of the joke . (Hitherto I was not accustomed to reading and controlling my translations; today, alas, I devote to this sisyphesque activity almost more time than with the writing itself.)

Je were amazed. Especially starting from the second quarter, the translator (ah not, it was not François Kérel, which, it, dealt with my following books!) the novel did not translate; it rewrote it:

Il introduced a hundred there (yes!) metaphors embellishing (at home: the sky was blue; at his place: under a sky of periwinkle October hoisted its sumptuous bulwark; at home: the trees were coloured; at his place: with the trees a polyphony abounded with tons; at home: it started to beat the air around it furiously; at his place: its fists broke out out of frantic windmill (…).

Oui, today still, I am unhappy. To think that during twelve years, in many reprintings, the joke , was exhibait in France in this getup! … Two months during, with Claude Courtot, I worked over again the translation. The new version ( entirely revised by Claude Courtot and the author) appeared in 1980.

Quatre years later, I read again this revised version. I found perfect all that we had changed and corrected. But, alas, I discovered how much assignments, of grooved turnings, inaccuracies, darknesses and excesses had escaped me!

Indeed, at the time, my knowledge of French was not subtle enough and Claude Courtot (who does not know Czech) had been able to rectify the text only at the places that I had indicated to him. I thus have just spent again a few months on the joke. ”

During its first years in France Milan Kundera supported that he had said all that he had to say and which he would not write any more novels.

It occurs six years before the book of the laughter and the lapse of memory (completed in 1978 and published in 1979) is not born. What differentiates this book from those written previously it is the visual angle. In this book, Kundera re-examines its communist past and denounces it through topics as the lapse of memory (in the East people are thorough to forget by the authorities while in the West they forget of their own initiative) or the ideal to create a communist company but this time from an external point of view, “West”.

It is in 1978 qu ' it settles with Paris. It finishes insupportable lightness to be it in 1982 (published in 1984), which is its most known novel. With this book Kundera becomes an author recognized universally, especially after the exit of film, carried out by Philip Kaufman in 1988.

In Insupportable Lightness to be it , the author studies the Mythe nietzschéen eternal return. It concentrates on the fact that the Man saw only once, its life is not repeated and thus it cannot correct its errors. And since the life is single, the man prefers to live it in lightness, in an absolute lack of responsibilities. He introduces also his definition of the kitsch , i.e. what denies the ugly sides of the life and does not accept death: “The kitsch is the negation of the shit” (it acts all in all of any ideology: kitsch catholic, protesting, Jewish, communist, fascistic, democratic, feminist, European, American, national, international, etc).

immortality is published in 1990. This novel is presented as a meditation on the statute of the writing in the modern world where the image dominates. He denounces the contemporary tendency to make any thing surface, easily digestible. Kundera reacts vis-a-vis this attitude by building its accounts in manner deliberately that they cannot be summarized easily.

In 1993, Milan Kundera finishes its first novel written in French, slowness (published in 1995). It continues, here, which it had begun with immortality , a criticism of the civilization of the west of Europe. Kundera compares the concept of slowness, associated with the Sensualité in the past but also an act which supports the memory, with the obsession of Speed of the contemporary world.

the identity (completed in 1995, published in 1998) is the second novel that Kundera writes directly in French. Just like slowness , the identity is a work of Maturité. This novel is a Romance of Amour. It pays homage to the authentic love, with its value vis-a-vis the contemporary world. The only one which can protect us from a hostile and primitive world.

ignorance (initially published in Spanish in 2000, French in 2003): starting from the second book, one spoke already about a “French cycle” in the work of Kundera, of a “second cycle”. This time it is confirmed. The same form is in the three novels: less pages, a reduced number characters, nevertheless one finds the dense and major writing preceding “cycle”. This novel speaks about the impossible return (in its country of origin). One finds a continuity in the topics used before and those employed in this book. The author inlassablement examines the human experiment and his paradoxes. The misunderstanding in love is the gun.

Milan Kundera also wrote in the literary review the Workshop of the Novel, directed by Lakis Proguidis and currently published by Flammarion and Boréal.

Kundera is somebody of very private. It keeps the details of its Private life as a secrecy “which looks at only him”. Since 1985 it does not grant any more a Entretien S, but agrees to answer in writing. Any information in connection with its private life is scrupulously controlled by him. Its official Biographie in the French editions is summarized with two sentences:

“Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia. In 1975 it settles in France”

Ideas

the history of the European novel (Romance born in Europe with Rabelais and Cervantès) is the history of the exploration of the human existence. At the moment when science autonomise to analyze the things of outside, without living them (the “lapse of memory to be it”, according to the formula of Heidegger), arrives the novel to explore the “world of the life” ( Lebenswelt ) like one cartography an area. The history of the novel is a succession of attempts to seize it to me, the human identity (by the acts, psychology, possibilities…).

Thus, Rabelais and Cervantès studies the man starting from his actions and of the adventure; Richardson initiates the psychological novel; Balzac studies the man in the history and the company; Tolstoï watch the irrationality of the human heart; Flaubert concentrates on the everyday life and the trouble; Proust over the imperceptible last moment; Joyce over the imperceptible moment present; Kafka, as for him, watch what became the possibilities of life in the contemporary world.
Milan Kundera was also influenced much by what even calls him the “large novel of Central Europe”: in its tests, he thus likes to comment on works of Hermann Broch ( the Sleepwalkers ) and of Robert Musil ( the Man without qualities )
At the end of this evolution is the final paradoxes XXe century, due to the multiple upheavals which shake this one.

progress with work in the history of the European novel is thus not an improvement of a preceding analysis but rather the discovery of new existential possibilities.

Thus, the only “morals” of the novel would be knowledge, distinguishing it from the philosophy which, abstract (whereas the novel always studies concrete situations), brings a judgment. The novel suspends this judgment by showing facts likely to be interpreted and judged variously.

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