Milan Kundera was born on 1/4/1929 in Brno (Bohemia / Czechoslovakia).
His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891-1971), has been musicologist and rector of the Brno University. Milan Kundera wrote his first poems during high school time. After World War II he jobbed as worker and jazz-musician before beginning his studies
He studied musicology, film and literature and aesthetics at the Prague Charles University. After he had finished he had been assistent at first and later on professor at the film faculty of the Prague Academy of performing arts. He published poems, essays and stage plays. At the same time he joined the editorial staff at the literature magazines “Literarni noviny” and “Listy”. Kundera joined the communist party in 1948 full of enthusiasm, as did so many intellectuals.1950 he got expelled from the communist party because of individualistic tendencies. After graduation in 1952 he was appointed as lecturer in world literature at the Film Academy. Once again from 1956 to 1970 he joined the communist party. 1953 he published his first book and he acted in the middle of the 50ies also as a translator, essayist and author of stage plays.
Kundera got known after collections of poems through his three volume prose writing “Laughable Loves“, created and published between 1958 and 1968. In his first novel, “The Joke“ (1967), he deals with Stalinism. After the Sovjet invasion at 21/08/1968 Kundera as one of the main figures of the put down „Prague Spring“ lost his permission to teach, his books had been removed from all public libraries of the country. Because of his committment in the revolution he got a publication prohibition already in 1970. His second novel, “Life is elsewhere”, was already published 1973 in Paris.
1975 Kundera became guest professor at the University in Rennes (Bretagne, France). In 1979 he was deprived of the Czechoslovakian citizenship by the Czech government as reaction to his “Book of Laughter and Forgetting”. The following novels were not permitted to be published in the CSSR. Since 1981 he is French citizen. Since 1985 he gives only written interviews becaus he felt himself often wrong cited. 1986 Kundera published his first Oeuvre written in French language, the essay “L'Art du Roman“ (The Art of the Novel). In 1988 “Immortality“ has been his first novel written in French. After a lectureship for comparing language-sciences at the University of Rennes of several years up to 1978 Kundera is a member of the lecturers of the noted publishing house Gallimard. He nowadays lives together with his wife, Vera Hrabankova, in Paris
"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?" -from The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In his in 1994 published essay “Testaments trahis” (Testaments Betrayed) he settled up with adulterators, interpretators and translators, because he counts himself to their victims. So he let translate novels again in Germany. In France he later doublechecked himself the transcriptions of all his works written in Czech. Kunderas newer novels are the 1994 published “Slowness” and “Identity” from 1998. In 2000 finally Kundera published his actual book, but up to now only in spanish language with the titel “La Ignorancia”. It seems as if the publishing in other languages will take some more months.
Kundera deducts his inspirations, as he underlines often enough, from the Renaissance and from the reconnaissance with Boccacio, Rabelais, Sterne, Diderot, but also from the works of Musil, Gombrowitz, Broch, Kafka and Heidegger. It is not only that his publishers name rightly Kunderas books as classic of the 20th century, as well as Kundera himself as one of the great novelists of its second half. In contrary to other publicity addicted authors Kundera cultivated the attitude to as a person fully disappear behind his books. That is why he is said to be anonymous on his way frequently.