2. Origins and formation
• Born in Brno (Moravia’s capital) April 1st, 1929.
• From a family which considers art and culture very
importantly (his father, Ludvík Kundera is a famous
musician).
• Milan learned to play the piano from his father; he later studied
musicology and musical composition.
• Musicological influences and references can be found
throughout his work; he has even gone so far as to include
musical notation in the text to make a point.
• He is a cousin of Czech writer and translator Ludvík Kundera.
3. Biography
• He belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had had little or no experience of the pre-war
democratic Czechoslovak Republic (their ideology was greatly influenced by the experiences of World
War II and the German occupation).
• Still in his teens, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which seized power in 1948.
• He completed his secondary school studies in Brno in 1948. He studied literature and aesthetics at the
Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, and after two terms, he transferred to the Film Faculty of
the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he first attended lectures in film direction and script
writing.
• In 1950, his studies were briefly interrupted by political interferences.
• He and writer Jan Trefulka were expelled from the party for "anti-party activities".
• In 1956, he was readmitted into the Party. He was expelled for the second time in 1970 because he was
involved in the 1968 Prague Spring.
• He moved to France in 1975, and taught for a few years in the University of Rennes. He was stripped of
Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979; he has been a French citizen since 1981.
4. Bibliography
• His early poetic works are staunchly pro-communist.
• His novels escape ideological classification (he has repeatedly insisted
on being considered a novelist, rather than a political or dissident writer):
political commentary has all but disappeared from his novels.
• He takes his inspiration from different authors, including some from the
Renaissance (Giovanni Boccaccio, Rabelais, Denis Diderot).
• Originally, he wrote in Czech, but from 1993 onwards, he has written his
novels in French.
• Between 1985 and 1987 he undertook the revision of the French
translations of his earlier works.
• His books have been translated into many languages.
5. Bibliography
The Joke (1967)
Life is Elsewhere (1973)
The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting (1979)
The Unbearable Lightness
of Being (1984)
Immortality (1990)
