Milan Kundra
People best know Czech-born writer Milan Kundera for his novels, including
The Joke
(1967),
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
(1979), and
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism.
Since 1975, he lived in exile in France and in 1981 as a naturalized citizen.
Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations.
The Communist government of Czechoslovakia censored and duly banned his books from his native country, the case until the downfall of this government in the velvet revolution of 1989.
“...Mirek rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past." (P. 30)”
Milan Kundra