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Chapter Four Chapter Four: Milan Kundera and His World Chapter Four: Milan Kundera and His World Page 4.1. Introduction: Milan Kundera, Biography and His Works 4.1.1. Biography 216 4.1.2. Style and Attitude 228 4.1.3. Major Works 231 4.1.4. Controversy 243 4.1.5. Literary Achievements 245 4.1.6. Awards 246 4.1.7. Notes and References 247 4.2. Intra/Extra-textual Features of The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being A2.\. The Joke 249 4.2.1.1. Intra-textual Features 249 4.2.1.1.1. General Overview and Structure 249 4.2.1.1.2. Plot and Setting 255 4.2.1.1.3. Narration, Narrator and Characterization 263 4.2.1.1.4. Themes 272 4.2.1.2. Extra-textual Features 277 4.2.1.3. Notes and References 284 4.2.2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being 289 4.2.2.1. hitra-textual Features 289 4.2.2.1.1. General Overview and Structure 289 4.2.2.1.2. Plot and Setting 296 4.2.2.1.3. Characterization 309 4.2.2.1.4. Narration and the Narrator 317 4.2.2.1.5. Themes 321 4.2.2.2. Extra-textual Features 326 4.2.2.3. Notes and References 334 "Biography: sequence of events which we consider important to our life. However, what is important and what isn't? Because we ourselves don't know (and never even think of putting such a silly question to ourselves) we accept as important whatever is accepted by others, for example, by our employer, whose questionnaire we fill out: date of birth, parents' occupation, schooling, changes of occupation, domicile, marriages, divorces, births of children, serious diseases. It is deplorable, but it is a fact: we have learned to see our own lives through the eyes of business or government questionnaires..."' (Milan Kundera, Immortality) 4.1, Introduction: Milan Kundera, Biography and His Works^ 4.1.1. Biography The Franco-Czech novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, poet, critic and essayist Milan Kundera was bom on April 1, 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) into a highly cultured middle class family. His father, Ludvik Kundera, was a well-known pianist and musicologist who collaborated with the famous Czech composer Leos Janacek. From early years on, Milan Kundera learnt to play the piano with his father and later was educated in music under the direction of Paul Haas and Vaclav Kapral. This music education in his young age appeared later as musicological influences and references found throughout his works. In addition to musical themes, terms and analogies in most of Kundera's novels he has even gone so far as including notes in the text to make a point. Peter Kussi, a translator of Kundera into English has expounded on this theme: "The musical form of Kundera's novels, in which the tension between precision and freedom is expressed in terms of theme and variations, also poses difficulties for the translator. In Kundera's novels certain words and phrases appear again and again, like musical leitmotifs ..."^ However, at the age of nineteen, he decided that music was not his true vocation. Kundera completed his secondary school studies in Brno in 1948 and then studied literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. After two terms, he transferred to the Film Faculty of the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Prague, where he first attended lectures in film direction and script writing. In 1952 he began teaching cinematography at the Prague Academy. Kundera came fi"om a generation of young Czechs who had had little or no experience of the pre-war democratic Czechoslovak Republic. The ideologies of such idealistic and progressive students were greatly influenced by the experiences and -216- atrocities of World War II and the German occupation. Still in his teens and much attracted to Marxist philosophy, which seemed to promise a new freedom and peace, Kundera joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which seized power in 1948. In 1950, his studies were briefly interrupted by political interference. In fact, Kundera tended to have a complicated relationship with the Communist Party but then was expelled in 1950 together with another writer named Jan Treftilka, because of criticizing the totalitarian nature of party and conducting anti-party activities; Treftilka described the incident in his novella Happiness Rained on Them (Prselo Jim stesti, 1962). This event also greatly influenced Milan Kundera and later appeared in his autobiographical novel The Joke (Zert, 1967); he re-joined the party in 1956 and was re-expelled in 1970. Afterwards, he was also expelled from the University, lived among workmen, played in a jazz band and wrote poetry. Kundera has experienced many ups and down during his relatively long and difficult expedition to reach literary maturity. In 1945, Kundera first published franslations of poetry by the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the journal Gong in Bmo-Kralovo pole; in 1946, a surrealist poem by Milan Kundera, written undoubtedly under the influence of cousin Ludvik Kundera (bom in 1920), a well- known Czech writer and poet in his own right, was printed in the journal Mlade archy (The Young Notebooks). The first literary works he produced (three volumes of poetry and a play) were essentially Communist propaganda, though they didn't always conform to the tenets of socialist realism approved by the state. It was five years after the communist takeover of power in Czechoslovakia and during the period of widespread Stalinism that Milan Kundera's first book came out in 1953. It was a collection of lyrical poems, Man, a Wide Garden (Clovek zahrada sira, 1953). This was immediately condemned by the Communists for using surrealistic techniques and lacking universality. But the young author and many of his contemporaries saw this as unorthodox departure from the poetics of literature which had been by this time fully enslaved by the orthodox communist dogma. As Jan Culik puts it, "the period after the communist takeover of power in February 1948 produced attempts at "socialist realism" in Czech literature. Poems and novels were written about the "mass proletarian movement," the "class struggle" and the "successful progression of society -217- towards communism". It was propaganda, made up of cardboard cut-outs and empty political cliches."'' It was in such atmosphere that, in this first collection of poems, Kundera attempted to assume a critical attitude towards this type of literature, but he still did so from a strictly Marxist point of view. Nevertheless, he boldly transgressed against most of the tenets of the then only permissible literary method of socialist realism, as disseminated by the official state and party literary propagandist Ladislav StoU. Man, a Wide Garden (Clovek, zahrada sira) is a collection of low profile verse in which the author systematically attempts to illustrate and enliven the official Marxist dogma by personal experience. Thus the poet feels encouraged when he hears a young boy, playing in Brno near a railway track, singing the hymn of the left-wing movement, the Internationale. Kundera uses the atmosphere of the familiar Czech surroundings as a symbol of comfort and peace. In all his work written before leaving Czechoslovakia, Kundera is firmly rooted in his home environment. In Clovek, zahrada sira, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia is for Kundera a guarantor of all the values associated with his home: of everything that is comfortable and reassviring. Kundera wrote two other volumes of poetry, The Last May (Posledni mdj, 1955^ and Monologues (Monology, 1957) while teaching at the academy - though he later renounced these works as adolescent and insignificant. The long poem The Last May had a positive mythical hero, the Communist militant and writer Julius Fucik, who was executed by the Nazis during the Second World War. Full of bathos, the work conforms to the creed of socialist realism and the strictly official communist version of history. Some commentators have speculated that Kundera had been commissioned to write this propagandistic piece and did not really believe in what he was writing. Yet some others believe that his poetry displayed a critique of "socialist realism," though still from a Marxist point of view. He tended to reject political propaganda as a theme and instead stressed the importance of natural, authentic human experience. Monologues (Monology, 1957) is a collection of poems in which Kundera highlights between lovers. Here he rejects political propaganda and again stresses the -218- importance of natural, ordinary, authentic human experience. Monologues is a book of love poetry of a rational, intellectual inspiration. Many poems are based on paradoxes. ("I cannot live with you, you are too beautiful.") Some of them highlight the tension between emotion and the intellect and the irrationality of love which often conquers even those who would be guided by the intellect alone. These are also typical Kunderaesque themes, developed later in his work. In some of the poems, the poet is physically repulsed by women, while being attracted to them. Erotic passion can be a burden. The sexual impulse is disconcerting. Lovemaking can sometimes assume the form of escapism which hides unpleasant reality. The theme of the pettiness of everyday female concerns, which makes women unaware of what is really going on in life, re-appears in this collection, as does the theme of one's beloved native covmtry. Women are obedient, while men are warriors who try to understand the meaning of existence. While doing so, they invariably break their heads against impenetrable walls. Some of the poems deal with the dilemmas of infidelity; others are preoccupied with the fear of ageing and death.
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