Milan Kundera.. Unauthorized biographies threaten his literary career

Books by Bilal Ramadan

Sunday, July 16, 2023 at 07:00 PM

Throughout his life and with the progress of his literary career and the emergence of his star in the sky of world literature, Milan Kundera refused to write an autobiography about his experience and life, and despite his rejection of this genre of literature, he spent the last four years of his life before his death on his literary career and I learned that two books dealing with his personal life have been published.

Both books are unlicensed. The first is titled “Milan Kundera: The Life of the Writer” by Jean-Dominique Pryor, in which he mentions a small part of Milan Kundera’s personal life, and the second book is “Milan Kundera: His. Czech Life and Times” by John Novak. “, and the book has been described as less sly because its author portrays Milan Kundera as a cynical, “moral relativist” and at times a pessimistic writer. He calls out his past scandals.

However, as noted by foreign media, there is a bigger problem with what Milan Kundera previously identified, which is marginalizing literature and culture in the face of the fragility of his future.

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929 to a father and mother from the Czech Republic. His father, Ludwig Kundera, was a composer and head of the Jančić University of Literature and Music in Brno. Milan Kundera learned to play the piano. From his father, he later studied musicology, cinema and literature. He graduated in 1952. He worked as an assistant professor and lecturer at the Faculty of Cinema at the Prague Academy of Arts. He published poems, essays and plays during his studies and joined the editorial staff of several literary journals.

Milan Kundera joined the Communist Party in 1948, and he and writer Jean Travolga were expelled in 1950, then returned to the party in 1956, then split again in 1970.

Milan Kundera published his first collection of poetry in 1953, but it did not receive enough attention, and Kundera did not become known as an important writer until 1963, after he published his first collection of funny love stories.

After the Soviet Union entered Czechoslovakia and his involvement in the so-called Prague Spring, Milan Kundera lost his job in 1968. His books were banned from circulation for five years, forcing him to emigrate to France in 1975. He worked as an assistant. A professor at the University of Rennes in Brittany (France), he obtained French citizenship in 1981 after applying for it after his Czechoslovak nationality was revoked in 1978 as a result of writing the book “Laughter and Forgetting”. Under the weight of these circumstances and the developments in his life, Kundera wrote his famous novel “Why the Unbearable Light Matter”, which made him a well-known international writer through philosophical reflections, came under Nietzsche’s idea of ​​eternal return. In 1995, Kundera decided to make French his vernacular.literature through his novel “Slowly”.