Zenrin-kushū (禪林句集, meaning "Anthology of Passages from the Forests of Zen") is a collection of writings used in the Rinzai school of Zen. Initially it was a compilation of Zen writings by Tōyō Eichō (東陽榮朝, 1428–1504) a disciple of Kanzan Egen of the Myōshin-ji line of Rinzai school in Kyoto, Japan. Tōyō's anthology consisted of 5,000 writings compiled from writings of various traditions, such as Confucianism, Taoism and Zen, and the poetry of Tang and Song China.[1]
This was known as the Ku Zōshi (The Phrase Book), and circulated in manuscript form until the 17th century, when Ijūshi published for the first time in 1688 an expanded version of the book, titled Zenrin-kushū.[4] It is known that at least since the time of Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1788) the Zenrin-kushū has been used as part of the kōan practice, as the jakugo or capping verses — responses by students to problems given to them by their teachers.[5]
References
Shigematsu, p.7
Baroni, p.389
Blyth, p.25
Baroni, p.201
Baroni, p.389
Bibliography
Baroni, Helen Josephine (2002). The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Zen Buddhism. The Rosen Publishing Group. ISBN0-82392-240-5.
Heine, Steven; Wright, Dale S. (November 2005). Zen Classics: Formative Texts in the History of Zen Buddhism. Oxford University Press. ISBN0195175255.
Hori, Victor Sōgen (July 2010). Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Koan Practice. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN978-0824835071.
Shigematsu, Sōiku (1981). A Zen Forest, Sayings of the Masters. Tokyo, Japan: Weatherhill. ISBN0-8348-0159-0.
Miura, Isshu; Fuller Sasaki, Ruth (2015). Zen Dust: The History of the Koan and Koan Study in Rinzai (Linji) Zen (Rev. ed.). Quirin Press. ISBN978-1922169129.
Lewis, Zenrin (July 1996). The Book of the Zen Grove (2nd ed.). Zen Sangha Press. ISBN0965149935.
"The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return." (03/22/2023)
Milan Kundera (born April 1, 1929, Brno, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]—died July 11, 2023, Paris, France) was a Czech novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet whose works combine erotic comedy with political criticism and philosophical speculation.
The son of a noted concert pianist and musicologist, Ludvik Kundera, the young Kundera studied music but gradually turned to writing, and he began teaching literature at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Prague in 1952. He published several collections of poetry in the 1950s, including Poslední máj (1955; “The Last May”), an homage to the Communist resistance leader Julius Fučík, and Monology (1957; “Monologues”), a volume of love poems that, because of their ironic tone and eroticism, were later condemned by the Czech political authorities. During his early career he moved in and out of the Communist Party: he joined in 1948, was expelled in 1950, and was readmitted in 1956, remaining a member until 1970. According to an article published in 2008 in a Czech magazine, Kundera in 1950, after his expulsion from the party, informed police in Prague of the presence of a Western intelligence agent, who was then arrested and imprisoned for 14 years. Kundera denied the article’s claims, which were based on a researcher’s discovery of a police report on the arrest.
Several volumes of short stories and a highly successful one-act play, Majitelé klíčů (1962; “The Owners of the Keys”), were followed by his first novel and one of his greatest works, Žert (1967; The Joke), a comic, ironic view of the private lives and destinies of various Czechs during the years of Stalinism; translated into several languages, it achieved great international acclaim. His second novel, Život je jinde (1969; Life Is Elsewhere), about a hapless, romantic-minded hero who thoroughly embraces the Communist takeover of 1948, was forbidden Czech publication. Kundera had participated in the brief but heady liberalization of Czechoslovakia in 1967–68, and after the Soviet occupation of the country he refused to admit his political errors and consequently was attacked by the authorities, who banned all his works, fired him from his teaching positions, and ousted him from the Communist Party.
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Poetry: First Lines
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. In the 1970s and ’80s his novels, including Valčík na rozloučenou (1976; “Farewell Waltz”; Eng. trans. The Farewell Party), Kniha smíchu a zapomnění (1979; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), and Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (1984; The Unbearable Lightness of Being), were published in France and elsewhere abroad but until 1989 were banned in his homeland. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one of his most successful works, is a series of wittily ironic meditations on the modern state’s tendency to deny and obliterate human memory and historical truth. 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 Czech émigrés written in French but first published in Spanish; and La fête de l’insignifiance (2013; The Festival of Insignificance), about a group of Parisian friends.
Kundera’s wide-ranging reflections appear in L’Art du roman (1986; The Art of the Novel), Les Testaments trahis (1993; Testaments Betrayed), Le Rideau (2005; The Curtain), and Une Rencontre (2009; Encounter).
Milan Kundera was born on 1 April 1929 at Purkyňova 6 (6 Purkyně Street) in Královo Pole, a district of Brno, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic), to a middle-class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891–1971), was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961.[8][9][10] His mother Milada Kunderová (born Janošíková)[11] was an educator.[10] His father died in 1971, and his mother in 1975.[10]
Kundera learned to play the piano from his father and later studied musicology and musical composition. Musicological influences, references and notation can be found throughout his work. Kundera was a cousin of Czech writer and translator Ludvík Kundera.[12] In his youth, having been supported by his father in his musical education, he was testing his abilities as a composer.[13][14] One of his teachers at the time was Pavel Haas.[15] His approach to music was eventually dampened due to his father not being able to launch a piano career for insisting on playing the music of modernist Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg.[14]
He 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 (FAMU) to study film.[18] In 1950, he was expelled from the party.[13] After graduating, the Film Faculty appointed Kundera a lecturer in world literature in 1952.[19] Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he lost his job at the Film Faculty.[20] In 1956, Kundera also 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.[21][22]
His expulsion from the Communist party was described by Jan Trefulka in his novella Pršelo jim štěstí (Luck Rained on Them, 1962).[19] Kundera also used the expulsion as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel Žert (The Joke, 1967),[19] in which he ridiculed the ruling Communist party.[20] In 1956 Kundera was readmitted to the party but was expelled for a second time in 1970.[14][23] He took part in the Fourth Congress of the Czech Writers union in June 1967, where he delivered an impressive speech.[24] In the speech he focused on the Czech effort to maintain a certain cultural independence among its larger European neighbours.[24] Along with other reformist Communist writers such as Pavel Kohout, he was peripherally involved in the 1968 Prague Spring. This brief period of reformist activities was crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Kundera remained committed to reforming Czechoslovak Communism, and argued vehemently in print with fellow Czech writer Václav Havel, saying, essentially, that everyone should remain calm and that "nobody is being locked up for his opinions yet," and "the significance of the Prague Autumn may ultimately be greater than that of the Prague Spring." In 1968, the year his books were banned by the Czech Government, he made his first journey to Paris, where he befriended the publisher Claude Gallimard.[14] After he returned to Prague, he was frequently visited by Gallimard who encouraged Kundera to emigrate to France and also smuggled the manuscript for Life Is Elsewhere out of Czechoslovakia.[14] Finally, Kundera gave in and moved to France in 1975.[14] In 1979, his Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked.[17] He lectured for a few years at the University of Rennes.[14][23] After three years, he moved to Paris.[14]
Although his early poetic works are staunchly pro-communist,[25][26] his novels escape ideological classification. Kundera repeatedly insisted that he was a novelist rather than a politically motivated writer. Political commentary all but disappeared from his novels after the publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being except in relation to broader philosophical themes. Kundera's style of fiction, interlaced with philosophical digression, was greatly inspired by the novels of Robert Musil and the philosophy of Nietzsche.[27] In 1945 the journal Gong published his translation of some of the works from the Russian poet Vladimir Majakovsky.[19] The next year the journal Mladé archy printed a poem of his, to which he was inspired by his cousin Ludvík Kundera, also a writer.[19]
In the mid-1950s he was readmitted to the Communist party and he was able to publish Manː A Wide Garden in 1953, a long epic poem in 1955 called The Last May dedicated to Julius Fucik and the collection of lyrical poetry Monologue in 1957.[13] Those, together with other fore and afterwords are deemed to be written in the fashion of uncontroversial propaganda which allowed him to benefit to a certain degree from the advantages that came with being an established writer in a Communist environment.[13] In 1962 he wrote the play The Owners of the Keys, which became an international success and was translated into several languages.[13] 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. Other influences include Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Denis Diderot, Robert Musil, Witold Gombrowicz, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger and Georges Bataille.[28] Originally he wrote in the Czech language, but from 1985 onwards, he made a conscious transition from Czech towards the French which has since become the reference language for his translations.[13] Between 1985 and 1987, he undertook the revision of the French translations of his earlier works himself. With Slowness his first work in French was published in 1995.[29] His works were translated into more than eighty languages.[13]
In his first novel, The Joke (1967), he satirized the totalitarianism of the Communist era.[30] Following the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the book was banned.[20] His criticism of the Soviet invasion in 1968 led to his blacklisting[19] in Czechoslovakia and the banning[31] of his books.
Kundera's second novel was first published in French as La vie est ailleurs in 1973 and in Czech as Život je jinde in 1979. Life Is Elsewhere is a satirical portrait of the fictional poet Jaromil, a young and very naïve idealist who becomes involved in political scandals.[32] For the novel Kundera was awarded the Prix Médicis the same year.[33]
In 1975, Kundera moved to France where The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in 1979.[13] An unusual mixture of novel, short story collection, and authorial musings which came to characterize his works in exile, the book dealt with how Czechs opposed the Communist regime in various ways. Critics noted that the Czechoslovakia Kundera portrays "is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there," which is the "kind of disappearance and reappearance" Kundera ironically explores in the book.[34]
Kundera's most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was published in 1984. The book chronicles the fragile nature of an individual's fate, theorizing that a single lifetime is insignificant in the scope of Nietzsche's concept of eternal return. In an infinite universe, everything is guaranteed to recur infinitely. In 1988, American director Philip Kaufman released a film adaptation, which Kundera disliked.[17] The book focuses on the life of a Czech dissident surgeon's journey from Prague to Zurich and his return to Prague, where he was not permitted to take up work as a surgeon.[31] He worked instead as a window washer and used his job to arrange sex with hundreds of women.[31] At the end he and his wife move to the country.[31] The book was not published in Czechoslovakia due to Kundera's fear it would be badly edited. He eventually delayed the publishing date for years and only in 2006 would an official translation be available in the Czech language.[31] The book had previously been available in Czech, however, as a Czech expatriate in Canada had translated the book in 1985.[31]
In 2000, Ignorance was published. The novel centres on the romance of two alienated Czech émigrés, two decades after the Prague Spring of 1968. It is thematically concerned with the suffering of emigration. In it, Kundera undermines the myths surrounding nostalgia and the émigré's longing for return. He concludes that in the "etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing." Kundera suggests a complex relationship between memory and nostalgia, writing that our memory can "create rifts both with our earlier selves and between people who ostensibly share a past." The main characters of Irena and Josef discover how emigration and forgetfulness have ultimately freed them from their pain. Kundera draws heavily from the myth of Odysseus, specifically the "mythology of home, the delusions of roots."[35][36] Linda Asher translated the original French version of the novel to English in 2002.[37]
The 2014 novel focuses on the musings of four male friends living in Paris who discuss their relationships with women and the existential predicament confronting individuals in the world, among other things. The novel received generally negative reviews. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times describes the book as being a "knowing, pre-emptive joke about its own superficiality".[38] A review in the Economist stated that the book was "sadly let down by a tone of breezy satire that can feel forced".[39]
François Ricard suggested that Kundera conceived his fiction with regard to the overall body of his work, rather than limiting his ideas to the scope of just one novel at a time, his themes and meta-themes traversing his entire œuvre. Each new book manifests the latest stage of his personal philosophy. Some of these meta-themes include exile, identity, life beyond the border (beyond love, beyond art, beyond seriousness), history as a continual return, and the pleasure of a less "important" life.[40][verification needed]
Many of Kundera's characters seem to develop as expositions of one of these themes at the expense of their full humanity. Specifics in regard to the characters tend to be rather vague. Often, more than one main character is used in a novel; Kundera may have even completely discontinued a character, resuming the plot with somebody new. As he told Philip Roth in an interview in The Village Voice: "Intimate life [is] understood as one's personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one's originality".[41]
Kundera's early novels explore the dual tragic and comic aspects of totalitarianism. He did not view his works, however, as political commentary. "The condemnation of totalitarianism doesn't deserve a novel", he said. According to the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, "What he finds interesting is the similarity between totalitarianism and the immemorial and fascinating dream of a harmonious society where private life and public life form but one unity and all are united around one will and one faith". In exploring the dark humour of this topic, Kundera seems deeply influenced by Franz Kafka.[28]
Kundera considered himself a writer without a message. In Sixty-three Words, a chapter in The Art of the Novel, Kundera tells of a Scandinavian publisher who hesitated to publish The Farewell Party because of its apparent anti-abortion message. Not only was the publisher wrong about the existence of such a message, Kundera explained, but, "I was delighted with the misunderstanding. I had succeeded as a novelist. I succeeded in maintaining the moral ambiguity of the situation. I had kept faith with the essence of the novel as an art: irony. And irony doesn't give a damn about messages!".[42]
Kundera also ventured often into musical matters, analyzing Czech folk music for example; or quoting from Leoš Janáček and Bartók; or placing musical excerpts into the text, as in The Joke;[43] or discussing Schoenberg and atonality.[44]
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,[45] into whether a young Kundera had denounced a returned defector, Miroslav Dvořáček, to the StB, or Czechoslovak secret police, in 1950.[46] The accusation was based on a police station report which named "Milan Kundera, student, born 1.4.1929" as the informant in regard to Dvořáček's presence at a student dormitory.[47] But the report did not include his ID card number, which was usually included, nor his signature.[47] According to the police report, the ultimate source of the information about Dvořáček's previous desertion from military service and defection to the West was Iva Militká.[46]
Dvořáček had allegedly fled Czechoslovakia after being ordered to join the infantry in the wake of a purge of the flight academy, and returned to Czechoslovakia as an agent of an anti-communist espionage agency organised by Czechoslovak exiles, an allegation which was not mentioned in the police report.[46] Dvořáček returned secretly to the student dormitory of a friend's ex-girlfriend, Iva Militká. Militká was dating and later married a fellow student, Ivan Dlask, who knew Kundera.[46] The police report alleges that Militká told Dlask of Dvořáček's presence, and that Dlask told Kundera, who told the secret police.[46] Although the prosecutor sought the death penalty, Dvořáček was sentenced to 22 years of hard labour, fined 10,000 crowns, stripped of personal property, and deprived of his civic rights for ten years.[46] Dvořáček served 14 years in a labor camp, some of it working in a uranium mine, before he was released.[48]
In his response to Respekt's announcement, Kundera denied turning Dvořáček into the StB,[48] stating he never knew him at all, and could not even remember an individual named "Militká".[49] On 14 October 2008, the Czech Security Forces Archive announced that they had ruled out the possibility that the document could be a forgery, but refused to arrive at any other definite conclusions.[50] Vojtech Ripka of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes said, "There are two pieces of circumstantial evidence [the police report and its sub-file], but we, of course, cannot be one hundred percent sure. Unless we find all survivors, which is unfortunately impossible, it will not be complete." Ripka added that the signature on the police report matches the name of a man who worked in the corresponding National Security Corps section and that a police protocol is missing.[50]
Many in the Czech Republic condemned Kundera as a "police informer", while many others accused Respekt of committing journalistic misconduct by publishing such a poorly researched piece. On the other hand, presenting an ID card was a procedure whenever dealing with the StB in 1950. Kundera was the student representative of the dorm Dvořáček had visited, and while it cannot be ruled out that another student could have denounced him to the StB using Kundera's name,[47] impersonating someone else in a Stalinistpolice state posed a significant risk. Contradictory statements by Kundera's fellow students appeared in the Czech news media in the wake of this scandal. Historian Adam Hradílek, the co-author of the Respekt article, was also accused of an undeclared conflict of interest since one of the individuals involved in the incident was his aunt.[47] Nonetheless, Respekt states on its website that its task is to "impartially study the crimes of the former communist regime".[51] With time, the Western journalists realized the whole controversy was flawed, with French newspapers defending Kundera.[47] The literary scholar Karen de Kunes investigated the reports and came to the conclusion that even if Kundera had issued the report, all he reported was the existence of a suitcase in the hallway.[47]
Stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979, Kundera became a French citizen in 1981.[60] He maintained contact with Czech and Slovak friends in his homeland,[61] but rarely returned and never with any fanfare.[4] He was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.[62] He saw himself as a French writer and insisted his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in bookstores.[63]
Kundera was married twice. His first wife was the singer Olga Haasová-Smrčková (1937–2022), daughter of composer Pavel Haas,[15] whom he married in 1956.[64] His second marriage was to Věra Hrabánková (1935–2024),[65] whom he married in 1967.[10] Vera reportedly was his secretary, translator of his works and the gatekeeper between Kundera and the outside world.[10]
Kundera died after a prolonged illness, in Paris on 11 July 2023, at the age of 94.[66][67] He was cremated in Paris on 19 July 2023.[68]
^Ricard, François; Kundera, Milan (2003). Le dernier après-midi d'Agnès: essai sur l'œuvre de Milan Kundera. Arcades. Paris: Gallimard. ISBN978-2-07-073024-7.
^ Jump up to:abcJungmannova, Lenka (2024). "Unsigned play by Milan Kundera? An authorship attribution study". Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 39: 191–197. arXiv:2212.09879. doi:10.1093/llc/fqad109.
Leonidas Donskis. Yet Another Europe After 1984: Rethinking Milan Kundera and the Idea of Central Europe (Amsterdam Rodopi, 2012) 223 pp. ISBN978-90-420-3543-0. online review
Charles Sabatos. "Shifting Contexts: The Boundaries of Milan Kundera's Central Europe," in Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Brian James Baer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), pp. 19–31.
Nicoletta Pireddu, "European Ulyssiads: Claudio Magris, Milan Kundera, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt," in Comparative Literature, Special Issue "Odyssey, Exile, Return" Ed. by Michelle Zerba and Adelaide Russo, 67 (3), September 2015: pp. 67–86. JSTOR24694591.
Milan Kundera, Literary Star Who Skewered Communist Rule, Dies at 94
The author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” he was known for sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in his native Czechoslovakia.
Milan Kundera in 1984, when his novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” became an instant success and later the basis of a movie.Credit...Francois Lochon/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images
Milan Kundera, the Communist Party outcast who became a global literary star with mordant, sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in the workers’ paradise of his native Czechoslovakia, died on Tuesday in Paris. He was 94.
A spokeswoman for Gallimard, Mr. Kundera’s publisher in France, confirmed the death, saying it came “after a prolonged illness.”
Mr. Kundera’s run of popular books began with “The Joke,” which was published to acclaim in 1967, around the time of the Prague Spring, then banned with a vengeance after Soviet-led troops crushed that experiment in “socialism with a human face” a few months later. He completed his final novel, “The Festival of Insignificance” (2015), when he was in his mid-80s and living comfortably in Paris.
“Festival” was his first new fiction since 2000, but its reception, tepid at best, was a far cry from the reaction to his most enduringly popular novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
An instant success when it was published in 1984, “Unbearable Lightness” was reprinted over the years in at least two dozen languages. The novel drew even wider attention when it was adapted into a 1988 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis as one of its central characters, Tomas, a Czech surgeon who criticizes the Communist leadership and consequently ends up washing windows for a living.
But washing windows is a pretty good deal for Tomas: A relentless philanderer, he’s always open to meeting new women, including bored housewives. But the sex as well as Tomas himself and the three other main characters — his wife, a seductive painter and the painter’s lover — are there for a larger purpose. In putting the novel on its list of best books of 1984, The New York Times Book Review observed that “this writer’s real business is to find images for the disastrous history of his country in his lifetime.”
“He uses the four pitilessly, setting each pair against the other as opposites in every way, to describe a world in which choice is exhausted and people simply cannot find a way to express their humanity.”
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Mr. Kundera’s 1984 novel has been reprinted in at least two dozen languages.Credit...Fred Marcellino
Mr. Kundera could be especially pitiless in his use of female characters — so much so that the British feminist Joan Smith, in her book “Misogynies” (1989), declared that “hostility is the common factor in all Kundera’s writing about women.”
Other critics reckoned that exposing men’s horrible behavior was at least part of his intent. Still, even the stronger women in Mr. Kundera’s books tended to be objectified, and the less fortunate were sometimes victimized in disturbing detail. The narrator of his first novel, “The Joke,” for example, vengefully seduces the wife of an old enemy, slaps her around during sex, then says he doesn’t want her. The woman’s husband doesn’t care; he’s in love with a very cool graduate student. In a final indignity, the distraught woman tries to kill herself with a fistful of pills, which turn out to be laxatives.
Mr. Kundera’s fear that Czech culture could be erased by Stalinism — much as disgraced leaders were airbrushed out of official photos — was at the heart of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” which became available in English in 1979.
It was not exactly what most Western readers would have expected of a “novel”: a sequence of seven stories, told as fiction, autobiography, philosophical speculation and much else. But Mr. Kundera called it a novel nonetheless, and likened it to a set of Beethoven variations.
Writing in The Times Book Review in 1980, John Updike said the book “is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out.”
Mr. Kundera had a deep affinity for Central European thinkers and artists — Nietzsche, Kafka, the Viennese novelists Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, the Czech composer Leos Janacek. Like Broch, Mr. Kundera said, he strove to discover “that which the novel alone can discover,” including what he called “the truth of uncertainty.”
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Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche in a scene from the 1988 movie “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” an adaptation of the Kundera novel.Credit...Orion, via Getty Images
His books were largely saved from the weight of this heritage by a playfulness that often meant using his own voice to comment on the work in progress. Here is how he begins to invent Tamina, a tragic figure in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” who starts out as a forlorn Czech widow in France and somehow ends up dying at the hands of cruel children in a fairy tale:
I calculate that two or three new fictional characters are baptized here on earth every second. That is why I am always hesitant about joining that vast crowd of John the Baptists. But what can I do? After all, my characters need to have names.
Mr. Kundera told The Paris Review in 1983: “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.”
He acknowledged that the names of his books could easily be swapped around. “Every one of my novels could be entitled ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ or ‘The Joke’ or ‘Laughable Loves,’” he said. “They reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me and, unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or to write.”
Though written in the Czech language, both “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” were composed in the clear light of France, where Mr. Kundera resettled in 1975 after giving up hope of political and creative freedom at home.
His decision to emigrate underlined the choices available to the Czech intelligentsia at the time. Thousands left. Among those who stayed and resisted was the playwright Vaclav Havel, who served several prison terms, including one of nearly three years. He survived to help lead the successful Velvet Revolution in 1989, and then served as president, first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic after the Slovaks decided to go their own way.
With that great turnabout, Mr. Kundera’s books were legal in his homeland for the first time in 20 years. But there was scant demand for them or sympathy for him there. By one estimate only 10,000 copies of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” were sold.
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Mr. Kundera’s 1967 was published to acclaim in 1967 and then banned by the Soviet authorities. Credit...Fred Marcellino
Many Czechs saw Mr. Kundera as someone who had abandoned his compatriots and taken the easy way out. And they tended to believe a Czech magazine’s allegation in 2008 that he had been an informer in his student days and had betrayed a Western spy. The agent, Miroslav Dvoracek, served 14 years in prison. Mr. Kundera denied turning him in.
Cast Out of the Party
The rocky history of Mr. Kundera’s first novel, “The Joke,” is a good illustration of the trouble he faced while still trying to promote reform from within.
When the Prague Spring ended, the book was condemned as cynical, erotic and anti-Socialist; and if the reader could somehow adopt the censors’ mind-set, the reader would see their point.
Ludvik, the main narrator of “The Joke,” is a Prague university student in the 1950s who is under suspicion by party members for his perceived individualism. “You smile as though you were thinking to yourself,” he is told. Then he gets a letter from a credulous female friend praising the “healthy atmosphere” at the summer training camp she’s been sent to. Resentful that she should be happy when he is missing her, young Ludvik makes a horrible mistake:
“So I bought a postcard,” he says, “and (to hurt, shock and confuse her) wrote: ‘Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!’”
There is a trial. For his little joke, Ludvik is thrown out of the party and sentenced to work as a coal miner in a military penal unit.
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Mr. Kundera in about 1950. As a young man he was twice expelled from the Communist Party, the second time for advocating reform. Credit...Abraham Pisarek/ullstein bild via Getty Images
Mr. Kundera didn’t suffer quite that fate, but he was twice expelled from the party he had supported from age 18, when the Communists seized power in 1948.
His first expulsion, for what he called a trivial remark, was imposed in 1950 and inspired the central plot of “The Joke.” He was nevertheless allowed to continue his studies; he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1952 and was then appointed to the faculty there as an instructor in world literature, counting among his students the film director Milos Forman.
Mr. Kundera was reinstated to the Communist Party in 1956 but kicked out again, in 1970, for advocating reform. This time the ejection was forever, effectively erasing him as a person. He was driven from his job and, as he said, “No one had the right to offer me another.”
Over the next several years he picked up money as a jazz musician (he played the piano) and day laborer. Friends sometimes arranged for him to write things under their names or pseudonyms. Which was how he became an astrology columnist.
Mr. Kundera had actually had experience casting horoscopes. So when a magazine editor, whom he identified as R., proposed a weekly astrology feature, he agreed, advising her to “tell the editorial board that the writer would be a brilliant nuclear physicist who did not want his name revealed for fear of being made fun of by his colleagues.”
He even cast a horoscope for R.’s editor in chief, a party hack who would have been disgraced if anyone had known of his superstitious beliefs. R. later reported, he said, that the boss “had begun to guard against the harshness the horoscope warned him about,” that “he was setting great store by the bit of kindness he was capable of” and that “in his often vacant gaze you could recognize the sadness of a man who realizes that the stars merely promise him suffering.”
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Mr. Kundera in France in 1979. He settled in Paris in 1975.Credit...Jean-Pierre Couderc/Roger-Viollet
The two of them had a good laugh. Inevitably, though, the authorities would learn the true identity of the brilliant nuclear physicist-astrologer, and Mr. Kundera realized with certainty that there was no way to protect friends who wanted to help him.
In London, the first English translation of “The Joke” had been so botched that it was hard to know what to make of it. Chapters were rearranged or simply omitted. Irony became satire. Isolated in Prague, there was little he could do about it. (Not until 1992 was there an edition that satisfied him. He wrote an author’s note for it that began, “If it didn’t concern me, it would certainly make me laugh: this is the fifth English-language version of ‘The Joke.’”)
In his 1980 Times review, Mr. Updike commented that Mr. Kundera’s struggle “makes the life histories of most American writers look as stolid as the progress of a tomato plant, and it is small wonder that Kundera is able to merge personal and political significances with the ease of a Camus.”
Bred on Music and Books
Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, the son of Milada Janosikova and Ludvik Kundera. His father, a noted concert pianist and musicologist, taught him piano, and he considered a career in music before his interests shifted to literature, particularly French.
“From an early age,” he told an interviewer for the literary journal Salmagundi in 1987, “I read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Breton, Cocteau, Bataille, Ionesco and admired French surrealism.”
Having grown up in a country occupied by German forces from 1939 to 1945, the young Mr. Kundera was one of many millions who embraced Communism after the war. It was a heady time, with new lists of winners and losers.
“Old injustices were redressed, new injustices were perpetrated,” he wrote in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” “Factories were nationalized, thousands of people went to prison, medical care was free, tobacconists saw their shops confiscated, aged workers vacationed for the first time in expropriated villas, and on our faces we had the smile of happiness.”
Too late, he said, he realized that the evil done in the name of Socialism was not a betrayal of the revolution but rather a poison inherent in it from the beginning.
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Mr. Kundera in Paris in 1984. “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form,” he said. Credit...Francois Lochon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
When Communism ended in 1989, Mr. Kundera, who spoke little about his personal life, had been living in France for 14 years with his wife, Vera Hrabankova, first as a university teacher in Rennes and then in Paris. Czechoslovakia revoked his citizenship in 1979, and he became a French citizen two years later. The Czech Republic restored his citizenship of his homeland in 2019. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.
The last book Mr. Kundera wrote in Czech before switching to French was “Immortality,” in 1990. Beginning there, his later novels were notably less political and more overtly philosophical: “Slowness” (1995), “Identity” (1998) and “Ignorance” (2000).
Of that group, “Immortality,” with bright inventions like the friendship of Hemingway and Goethe when they meet in heaven, was the most favorably received. It enjoyed a few weeks on the Times best-seller list.
With “Slowness,” Mr. Kundera dismayed more than a few readers by supplying no ending and by exceeding the safe limit of first-person discourse: “And I ask myself: Who was dreaming? Who dreamed this story? Who imagined it? She? He? Both of them?” and so on.
Besides the long works of fiction, he had written short stories and a play, “Jacques and His Master.” He was also the author of essays, including several that illuminated his work and that of other writers, collected under the title “The Art of the Novel.”
He was often nominated but not selected for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Enigmatic and private, and more than a little grumpy about the clatter and clutter of modern Western society, Mr. Kundera was largely out of the public eye from 2000 until the announcement in 2014 that he had created yet another novel, “The Festival of Insignificance,” originally written in French.
Mr. Kundera and his wife, Vera Hrabankova, second from left, in Paris in 2010.Credit...Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images
Set in Paris and barely exceeding 100 pages — the critic Michiko Kakutani dismissed it in The Times as “flimsy” — it follows the perambulations of five friends through whom Mr. Kundera considers familiar themes of laughter, practical jokes, despair, sex and death.
“It may be that when Kundera writes about laughter,” she wrote, “he conceives of it not as a subjective expression of appreciation or surprise, the way we usually understand it, but as a material form of aggression, an actual act of self-defense, even a duty.”
As Mr. Kundera himself wrote in “Insignificance”: “We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.”
He had struck a similar note in 1985, on accepting the Jerusalem Prize, one of several honors he received.
“There is a fine Jewish proverb,” he said in his acceptance speech: “Man thinks, God laughs.” And then a fine Kunderian flourish:
“But why does God laugh? Because man thinks, and the truth escapes him. Because the more men think, the more one man’s thought diverges from another’s. And finally, because man is never what he thinks he is.”
