Milan kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in the city of Brno, in what was then Czechoslovakia. His father was a famous pianist. The writer became prominent for satire and poetic prose, he had sought to express all that is compelling and absurd in his life, inspired by his own experiences of being stripped of his Czech nationality for dissent. Kundera was forced to revisit his background in 2008 when the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes of the Czech Republic produced documentation indicating that in 1950, as a 21-year-old student, Kundera had told police about someone in the dormitory of him. The man was eventually convicted of espionage and sentenced to hard labor for 22 years. In 1975 Kundera was allowed to emigrate (with his wife, Věra Hrabánková) from Czechoslovakia to teach at the University of Rennes (1975-78) in France; in 1979 the Czech government stripped him of his citizenship
His most famous book
His by far most famous work, "The unbearable lightness of being“, was released in 1984 and made into a film starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis in 1987. The novel is a morality tale about freedom and passion, both individually and collectively, set against the Prague Spring and the its consequences in exile. A quote from the book: "The greatness of a man lies for us in the fact that he carries his destiny as Atlas carried the vault of heaven on his shoulders“. It was not published in the Czech Republic until 2006, 17 years after the Velvet Revolution, although it had been available in Czech since 1985 by a fellow countryman who set up a publishing house in exile in Canada.
His novels
In the 70s and 80s his novels, including Valčík na rozloučenou (1976; “Farewell Waltz”; The Farewell Party), Kniha smíchu a zapomnění (1979; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) and Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (1984. Nesmrtelnost (1990; Immortality) explores the nature of artistic creation Kundera began writing in French with La Lenteur (1994; Slowness), followed by L'Identité (1997; Identity); La ignorancia (2000; Ignorance), a story about emigrants written in French but first published in Spanish; Le Rideau (2005; The Curtain) and Une Rencontre (2009; Encounter), and finally, La fête de l'insignificance (2013; The Festival of Insignificance), on a group of Parisian friends.
