By Jyothi Swaroop Makena
17th July, 2023
Milan Kundera, (born April 1, 1929, Brno, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]—died July 11, 2023, Paris, France), is a Czech novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet whose works combine erotic comedy with political criticism and philosophical speculation.
In his lifetime, Milan Kundera had published 16 books.
His reputation will rest, it seems fair to say, on the three great “middle period” novels: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. Before these, we have a triptych of serio-comic novels – The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere and Farewell Waltz.
Of all contemporary writers, only Kundera can transform such a hidden and disconcerting perception into the material for a novel, one of his finest, most painful, and most enlightening. Which, surprisingly, turns out to be a love story.
The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.
Kundera was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, in 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2000 Herder Prize. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor. Kundera died after a prolonged illness, in Paris on 11 July 2023, at the age of 94.