Lost Citizenship, Found Words: His Stories Fight Oppression. ✨💔
Play & learn about Milan Kundera's arty refugee experience 🎮
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Back Story
Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was a Franco-Czech novelist. Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, his most famous works include The Joke (1967), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), and Immortality (1988).
Kundera’s father was a pianist and his mother an educator. He studied Film at the Academy of the Performing Arts in Prague, joining the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) in 1947. A year later, the CPC would take power and establish a one-party state. Kundera once said that “Communism enthralled me in much the way Stravinsky, Picasso and surrealism had.”
Despite being a Communist, he was threatened by the regime throughout his life. He was expelled from the CPC in 1950, re-admitted in 1956, and removed once more in 1970. This final expulsion followed the Prague Spring, a movement led by the newly-elected Secretary of the CPC Alexander Dubcek, which aimed at reforming the oppressive regime. At this point Kundera had become a reformist Communist, and alongside other writers supported Dubcek. The Prague Spring would ultimately be crushed by the Soviet Union, who invaded Czechoslovakia and removed Dubcek only a few months after he took office.
Although Kundera’s writing tended to stay away from directly engaging with politics, he did do so at times, such as in Unbearable Lightness, where he describes the Soviet invasion of his native country in a deeply personal manner. Kundera often drew on broader philosophical themes and ideas in order to comment on political developments. Due to his peripheral support of the Prague Spring, he found himself forced to flee to France in 1975, a few years after his works were blacklisted by the Czech government.
Kundera is in many ways paradoxical: a political refugee that nonetheless believed in the ideas espoused by the regime which had suppressed him. In his life and work, we see a struggle between his reality and his ideas. This often troubled his identity. In 1979, his citizenship was revoked, and from 1985 he started writing in French, possibly a representation of his inward struggles.
Milan Kundera died in 2023, still in France. A giant of European Literature, his work remains a testimony against oppression and for holding one’s beliefs close to heart.
In this post Gui highlights the arty refugee experience of Milan Kundera He is a citizen journalist on a placement with us organised by Oxford University Career Services. He also organised the micro game to make the journalistic experience interactive.
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