THE WRITINGS MILAN KUNDERA DIES
Last Tuesday 11 July, Milan Kundera died in Paris at 94 years. of Czech origin, has been a writer acclaimed by the public and critics, and has received several literary awards throughout his career.
Biography of Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera was born in 1929 in the present-day Czech Republic. Son of an important pianist, I studied musicology and musical composition in childhood, something that would later influence his literature. Although he began to study literature, soon transferred to the Film Academy of the Prague Academy, where he finished his studies in 1952. Shortly after he started working as a film history professor.
Firm defender of your ideas, He had a tense relationship with his country's policy. Despite its affiliation to communism, It was also very critical, something that won problems with the regime of his country. en 1950 They were expelled from the Communist Party, to whom after World War II, for acting against the party. It was readmitted in 1956.
en 1967, After the country's invasion by the USSR, Kundera's works were prohibited in Czechoslovakia and lost his job. He had to devote himself to other activities, mainly jazz pianist.
en 1970 He was expelled again from the Communist Party, This time definitively. The reason was his relationship with the spring of Prague. This movement was a period of political liberation and protest in Czechoslovakia. His reforms towards decentralization were not well seen by the Soviets.
Five years later, en 1975, Milan Kundera emigrated to France. There he combined writing with work as a professor of comparative literature. It was in 1993 When he began writing his works in French.
Milan Kundera's work
Kundera published his first work in 1967, A novel called The joke. This satire of Stalinist communism resulted in 21 languages and received the prize of the Union of writers Czechoslovacos. With his following works, Life is elsewhere y The farewell, He won the Medicis award in France and Mondello in Italy respectively.
en 1981 He received the Commonwealth Award in recognition of his entire work, and in 1982 They gave him the European Literature Award. By then he was already a worldwriter consecrated worldwide.
It was also in 1981 When he published The book of laughter and oblivion, That Czechoslovaca citizens cost him. His masterpiece, The unbearable lightness of being, He arrived three years later in 1984. It was not published in your country until 2006. A year later he received the Czech National Prize for Literature.
His latest novel in Czech, Immortality, Less political and more philosophical, marked the tone of his subsequent works in French, as The slowness, Love Empty Cover y Ignorance. His last work was published in 2014 With the title of The feast of insignificance.
Kundera's name rang several times as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, although he never received it. Yes he received in 2020 The Franz Kafka Award, An international literary award awarded in your country, Czech Republic.
Poetic ideas in Kundera's literature
For Kundera, to literature, And specifically the novel, It was not a simple literary genre. It was an ethic, A vehicle for observation, The reflection and analysis of the world, An intellectual commitment.
His works, Despite political character, they escape the ideological classification. They highlight the tragic-communication aspects and black humor as literary resources.
Kundera's narrative style was mostly inspired by Robert Musil's novels and Nietzsche's philosophy, although authors like Kafka also influenced him, Sterne or even Miguel de Cervantes, entre otros. It is important to highlight the essential characterization that made its characters, based on their words and not on descriptions of physical aspects
By Maite Vallejo
ILLES.CAT
Online literary platform
#Melqart
#MelqartMedia
