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After publishing “The Joke”, a satire on Czechoslovakian-style Stalinism, Milan Kundera was fired from his job and ultimately forced to live abroad.
Profession: Writer
Country of Origin: Czech Republic
Country of Asylum: France
Date of birth: 1 April 1929
In 1967, Milan Kundera published his first novel, “The Joke”, a satire on Czechoslovakian-style Stalinism. Needless to say, the authorities did not find it funny, and as Kundera refused to be silenced, he was fired from his job and ultimately forced to live abroad.
Kundera had started publishing poems and newspaper articles in the 1950s. Many were openly critical of the regime. In 1950, he was expelled from the Communist Party, although he was later readmitted.
He wrote “The Joke” at the age of 38. The novel tells the story of a student whose joking reference to Trotsky earns him a sentence to hard labour. In 1969, following the Russian invasion and the end of the Prague Spring, Kundera was fired from his post at the Film Faculty and the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, where he lectured in cinematographic studies.
He was again expelled from the Communist Party in 1970. His works were banned from publication and withdrawn from public libraries. In his own words: “After the Soviet invasion this [his call for greater artistic freedom] led to the absurd charge that I was a counter-revolutionary.”
To escape the restrictions on freedom of thought and expression, Kundera moved to France, where he was appointed associate professor at the University of Rennes. He came to prominence in the west with “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (1979) and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1984).
Kundera today lives in Paris and continues to write bestsellers. “Slowness” (1995), written in French, touches on one of his recurrent themes, the relation of speed to memory, but also reveals his typical style – philosophical digressions, multiple points of view, black humour and cerebral eroticism. He has written other political satires such as “Life is Elsewhere” and “The Farewell Party”.
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