Milan Kundera is among the few novelists to emerge from East-Central Europe since the Second World War to have achieved international recognition and critical acclaim. Lucid and cerebral, writing a prose charged in equal measure with flippant eroticism, dark existential metaphysics, and ironic humour, the Czech-Parisian writer is published in translation in over twenty-two languages. His literary and essayistic output made a decisive contribution to literary and intellectual debate on both sides of the Berlin Wall in the final decades of communist totalitarianism.
A particularly reclusive author-figure, Kundera is famously reluctant to speak about his life. Having experienced in his native country the curse of “total public visibility” and the consequences of the State's intrusion into
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Citation: Sandru, Cristina. "Milan Kundera". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 April 2006; last revised 21 March 2024. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2569, accessed 21 November 2024.]
