1. Milan Kundera led a low-profile life and rarely spoke to the media.
38 Facts About Milan Kundera
1. 2.
Milan Kundera was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was a nominee for other awards.
3.
Milan Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, and the Herder Prize in 2000.
4.
Milan Kundera was born on 1 April 1929 at Purkynova 6 in Kralovo Pole, a district of Brno, Czechoslovakia, to a middle-class family.
5.
Milan Kundera's father, Ludvik Kundera, was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janacek Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961.
6.
Milan Kundera's father died in 1971, and his mother in 1975.
7.
Milan Kundera learned to play the piano from his father and later studied musicology and musical composition.
8.
Milan Kundera was a cousin of Czech writer and translator Ludvik Milan Kundera.
9.
Milan Kundera attended lectures on music and composition at the Charles University in Prague but soon moved to the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague to study film.
10.
In 1956, Milan Kundera married for the first time, the operetta singer Olga Haas, the daughter of the composer and his teacher Pavel Haas and the doctor of Russian origin Sonia Jakobson, the first wife of Roman Jakobson.
11.
Milan Kundera used the expulsion as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel Zert, in which he ridiculed the ruling Communist party.
12.
In 1956 Milan Kundera was readmitted to the party but was expelled for a second time in 1970.
13.
Milan Kundera took part in the Fourth Congress of the Czech Writers union in June 1967, where he delivered an impressive speech.
14.
Finally, Milan Kundera gave in and moved to France in 1975.
15.
Milan Kundera lectured for a few years at the University of Rennes.
16.
Milan Kundera repeatedly insisted that he was a novelist rather than a politically motivated writer.
17.
Milan Kundera himself claimed inspiration from Renaissance authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Rabelais and, perhaps most importantly, Miguel de Cervantes, to whose legacy he considered himself most committed.
18.
Milan Kundera's works were translated into more than eighty languages.
19.
In 1975, Milan Kundera moved to France where The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in 1979.
20.
Critics noted that the Czechoslovakia Milan Kundera portrays "is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there," which is the "kind of disappearance and reappearance" Milan Kundera ironically explores in the book.
21.
Milan Kundera eventually delayed the publishing date for years and only in 2006 would an official translation be available in the Czech language.
22.
Many of Milan Kundera's characters seem to develop as expositions of one of these themes at the expense of their full humanity.
23.
Milan Kundera did not view his works as political commentary.
24.
In exploring the dark humour of this topic, Milan Kundera seems deeply influenced by Franz Kafka.
25.
In Sixty-three Words, a chapter in The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera tells of a Scandinavian publisher who hesitated to publish The Farewell Party because of its apparent anti-abortion message.
26.
Milan Kundera ventured often into musical matters, analyzing Czech folk music for example; or quoting from Leos Janacek and Bartok; or placing musical excerpts into the text, as in The Joke; or discussing Schoenberg and atonality.
27.
On 13 October 2008, the Czech weekly Respekt reported that an investigation was being carried out by the state-funded historical archive and research Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, into whether a young Milan Kundera had denounced a returned defector, Miroslav Dvoracek, to the StB, or Czechoslovak secret police, in 1950.
28.
The accusation was based on a police station report which named "Milan Kundera, student, born 1.4.1929" as the informant in regard to Dvoracek's presence at a student dormitory.
29.
The police report alleges that Militka told Dlask of Dvoracek's presence, and that Dlask told Milan Kundera, who told the secret police.
30.
Milan Kundera was the student representative of the dorm Dvoracek had visited, and while it cannot be ruled out that another student could have denounced him to the StB using Milan Kundera's name, impersonating someone else in a Stalinist police state posed a significant risk.
31.
The literary scholar Karen de Kunes investigated the reports and came to the conclusion that even if Milan Kundera had issued the report, all he reported was the existence of a suitcase in the hallway.
32.
In 1979 Milan Kundera was awarded the Mondello Prize for The Farewell Party.
33.
Milan Kundera won The Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987.
34.
The asteroid 7390 Milan Kundera, discovered at the Klet Observatory in 1983, is named in his honour.
35.
Milan Kundera maintained contact with Czech and Slovak friends in his homeland, but rarely returned and never with any fanfare.
36.
Milan Kundera saw himself as a French writer and insisted his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in bookstores.
37.
Milan Kundera died after a prolonged illness, in Paris on 11 July 2023, at the age of 94.
38.
Milan Kundera was cremated in Paris on 19 July 2023.