Milan Kundera
He is a Czech and French world-renowned writer and has been living in France since 1975. Through his work he has defined novels as a genre. His work is famous all over the world and it is primarily conceived as a whole, with a focus on vitally fundamental themes, as he himself calls them. Such meta-themes are for example exile, identity, history as a perpetual recurrence, or life beyond borders (those can be the borders of love, art, etc.). His protagonists are thus rather representatives and expressions of these themes and they are not crucially important in themselves – they are his means of expression. In his work he drew inspiration from Fridrich Nietzch’s philosophy and
among world writers he is a great admirer of Franz Kafka, Miguel de Cervantes and Hermann Broch.
In 2008 he was the subject of a controversy. According to some newly published documents, Kundera was accused of having been an informant for the StB (communist secret police), an allegation that was received very inconsistently by the Czechs. The discussion wasn’t definitely closed, but various clues tend to counter this accusation. Milan Kundera was supported by Vaclav Havel and the Nobel Prize winners Salmon Rushdie, G. G. Marquez and Carlos Fuentes.
The Joke, 1965
Life is Elsewhere, 1969
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984
The Art of the Novel, 1986
Immortality, 1990