
	Where results make sense

Topic: Milan Kundera

Related Topics

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Literature of the Czech Republic

Michal Viewegh

Josef Skvorecky

Jaroslav Rudis

Adam Thirlwell

Ivan Klima

Madame Bovary

Ivan Cankar

Carson McCullers

Sister Carrie

Booker Prize

Edith Wharton

Ivan Franko

In the News (Sat 28 Nov 09)

Northern Trust

Marvin Harrison

Peter Chernin

Gary Locke

Match Play

Penelope Cruz

Mickey Rourke

AR Rahman

Danny Boyle

Hugh Jackman

	Milan Kundera
		Milan Kundera started writing it during the liberal Prague Spring of 1968 and completed it in 1970, during the first wave of the post-1968 clampdown in Czechoslovakia.
		The departure from Czechoslovakia was a watershed for Kundera.
		Kundera deliberately produces a complicated structure, a mosaic of events where themes and motives from various parts of the novel are interrelated in an intricate, precarious balance.
	www2.arts.gla.ac.uk /Slavonic/Kundera.htm (12009 words)

	Milan Kundera Biography (born 1929)
		At the time The Joke was written and published, Kundera served as an opposition leader in the reform movement that resulted in the Prague Spring of 1968, in which Czech artists and intellectuals led a cultural uprising denouncing governmental repression of the arts.
		Eschewing the straightforward linear narrative, Kundera constructs his novels by putting together a series of seemingly unconnected "stories" that are nonetheless related through theme or situation.
		Often described as ironic, satiric, pessimistic, and erotic, Kundera's work is difficult to capture in a brief summary, which amuses the novelist because he dislikes the Western media's penchant for reducing art to brief explanatory descriptions.
	www.leninimports.com /milan_kundera.html (903 words)

	Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		"Milan Kundera and the Crisis of Language." Tr.
		"The Fallen Idyll: A Rereading of Milan Kundera." Tr.
		"Milan Kundera or the Hazards of Subjectivity." Tr.
	www.georgetown.edu /irvinemj/english016/kundera/kundera.html (479 words)

	Who is Milan Kundera?
		Milan Kundera was born on 1 April 1929 in Brno, Bohemia, which is now called Czechoslovakia.
		Milan Kundera has written novels in French, which have been translated into German, Spanish and English and are now read the world over.
		Milan Kundera is regarded as one of the great writers of the 20th century.
	www.wisegeek.com /who-is-milan-kundera.htm (520 words)

	Milan Kundera : Ignorance : Book Review
		Kundera writes that ignorance is "derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss)." He links it, etymologically, with the word nostalgia, which he says "seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing.
		Kundera makes numerous references in the book to the story of Ulysseus, his twenty-year absence from Ithaca, and then his "Great Return," which were highly traumatic, Kundera says, both the absence and the return.
		Milan Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia.
	mostlyfiction.com /world/kundera.htm (1199 words)

	Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
		Kundera's novel explores timeless issues about what it is to be human, but in the context of an oppressive Communist society, Czechoslovakia in the 1960s.
		Kundera's novel, by contrast, considers the predicament of young adults who have arrived at their destiny, the promised land of the "classless society," and find it wanting.
		Kundera's point is that to give oneself to kitsch for either side in the Cold War is a dehumanizing process, for it means giving up one's human identity for an abstract, ideological one.
	www.uvm.edu /~hst19/Online_Reading/Milan_Kundera.htm (2212 words)

	Amazon.de: Slowness: English Books: Milan Kundera (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Kundera's latest (after Immortality) is a scintillating jeu d'esprit, as coolly elegant and casually brutal as the 18th-century French arts to which the text pays tribute.
		Milan Kundera creates an impression that he exists in a timeless empirea, sitting on a cloud beside Mozart, Bodelaire, Voltaire, etc,etc. He is an intellectual, who crosses the borders of countries and cultures, travels in time.
		Kundera's worst aspects are all on ample display here: his clumsy, if not indifferent, depictions of women; the valorization of the sexual conquest (coupled with degradation here); and his philosophical and historical musings.
	www.amazon.de /Slowness-Milan-Kundera/dp/0571179436 (1601 words)

	The ambiguities of Milan Kundera
		Kundera pauses throughout to descant on subjects as diverse as mass psychology, the nature of the novel, and the fate of various heroes of the Czech resistance.
		Kundera suggests that erotic intimacy promises a real, if already threatened, refuge for individuality in the modern world; hence he often insists that his books are essentially “love stories.” Yet it must be said that in Kundera’s novels sex is generally a rather chilly, dehumanizing event, an exercise that offers precious little refuge.
		Kundera, too, would seem to ask whether the beautiful illusions that art produces are to be taken seriously; certainly, his fiction adopts a posture of questioning their apparent self-sufficiency.
	www.newcriterion.com /archive/04/jan86/kundera.htm (4711 words)

	Barnes & Noble.com - Milan Kundera - Books: Meet the Writers
		Milan Kundera's study of philosophy is evident in his books, which are part meditation, part love story and part satire.
		Kundera sets out to prove the old saying that you can't go home again, with this story of a man and woman who return to Prague 20 years after leaving and try to pick up where they left off.
		Kundera's first major international success, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a masterpiece of experimental technique, weaving together narrative, autobiography and philosophy, and combining Kundera's penchant for grotesque erotic farce with the brittle irony of disillusionment.
	www.barnesandnoble.com /writers/writer.asp?cid=978701 (280 words)

	Milan Kundera biography
		Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1929.
		His father was a well-known pianist and Milan himself was a jazz musician for a while.
		Although Kundera went on to write many novels, his first major publication was The Art of the Novel in 1960.
	www.biogs.com /famous/kundera.html (574 words)

	Reading Group Guide \| THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Milan Kundera's masterful novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), tells the interlocking stories of these four relationships, with a primary focus on Tomas, a man torn between his love for Tereza, his wife, and his incorrigible "erotic adventures," particularly his long-time affair with the internationally noted painter, Sabina.
		The world of Kundera's novel is one in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events.
		Kundera insists that "the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise." What visions or versions of paradise are presented in the novel?
	www.readinggroupguides.com /guides/unbearable_lightness_of_being.asp (623 words)

	Amazon.ca: The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Books: Milan Kundera,Michael Henry Heim (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Kundera disdains the emotions (he hates feelings and is an uber-rationalist) and for some reason chooses not to go for part 1, either.
		But Kundera purposefully puts the climax of his books before the ending (he wants his works to be like a "feast" not a "bicycle race"), with the result that the reader is enchanted by the beginning but let down by the end.
		Kundera is a world-class philosopher, cleverly disguised as a world-class writer.
	www.amazon.ca /Unbearable-Lightness-Being-Milan-Kundera/dp/0060932139 (2288 words)

	Milan Kundera: Unbearable Lightness of Being. Professor Jolanta Wawrzycka
		The ontological basis of Kundera's inquiries and their epistemological ambitions seem to be at odds in the novel because the questions, rather than providing answers, perpetually bifurcate, until their initial gravity and urgent relevance dilapidate, thin out, become imponderous, weightless, unbearably so.
		Sabina, as conceived by Kundera, is, in fact, "charmed more by betrayal than by fidelity." (91) She has always associated the word "fidelity" with the sheltered, limited world of her Puritan father, a provincial Sunday-painter of "woodland sunsets and roses in vases" (91).
		However, as Kundera shows, by recognizing kitsch as kitsch, she manages to render harmless its "authoritarian power" and to make it "as touching as any human weakness." (256) "For none among us," proclaims Kundera, "is superman enough to escape kitsch completely.
	www.runet.edu /~jolanta/publications/Kundera1992.htm (3746 words)

	Biography Milan Kunder
		Milan Kundera wrote his first poems during high school.
		Although Kundera had published several poetry collections, he gained notoriety with the publication of a collection of short stories entitled “Laughable Loves“;, written between 1958 and 1968.
		of August, 1968, Kundera, as one of the leading figures of the failed radical movement the “Prague Spring,”; lost his teaching position and his books were banned from libraries the country over.
	www.kundera.de /english/Biography/biography.html (608 words)

	Critical Essays on Milan Kundera Canadian Slavonic Papers - Find Articles
		These are primarily used as a contrast to Kundera's specific concept of the novel (Sartre) and the explicit role of the author in his work (Barthes).
		Equally critical is Kimball's "The Ambiguities of Milan Kundera" (1986), which takes Kundera to task for refusing to assume a clear political stand and to admit a fundamental difference between the East and the West.
		The third article to focus on Kundera's political importance is Matejka's "Milan Kundera's Central Europe" (1990), which considers in a factual way the Czech novelist's role in the debate on "Central Europe." Francois Ricard's short article does not contain footnotes or a bibliography and deals with the novel Life is Elsewhere.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_qa3763/is_200009/ai_n8910855 (822 words)

	Kundera, Milan - HighBeam Encyclopedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		`Ignorance,' by Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher; HarperCollins.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)
		Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino: The Author As Critic
		Memory, sex and history continue to haunt the muse of Milan Kundera.
	www.encyclopedia.com /doc/1E1-kundera.html (353 words)

	Reading Group Guide \| IMMORTALITY by Milan Kundera
		Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera.
		From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose; to explore thoroughly the great, themes of existence.
		Kundera writes, "Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that archillusion, we cannot live, or at least we cannot take life seriously." In what ways do the concept of the individual self and its expression gather importance in the novel?
	www.readinggroupguides.com /guides/immortality.asp (671 words)

	Milan Kundera
		Kundera's books are read by students and they are very popular among them.
		Unfortunatelly Kundera does not thought himself as Czech anymore and all his new books are written in French.
		Kundera used to be an ardent young communist back in the 1950s, and the insights into the communist/collectivist mentality that he, with the benefit of hindsight, offers in his books are simply mind-boggling.
	www.phrasebase.com /forum/read.php?TID=6239 (843 words)

	Amazon.co.uk: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Books: Milan Kundera,Aaron Asher (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Kundera owes a lot to Kafka although he seems to have a more optimistic outlook on life.
		All characters, and there are dozens of them, have a life of their own, are described in immense detail, and they often surprise the reader as well as the author.
		Kundera is also included in the character list, and this is his most autobiographic novel I've read.
	www.amazon.co.uk /Book-Laughter-Forgetting-Milan-Kundera/dp/057117437X (738 words)

	Milan Kundera
		Kundera has long denied any political motivation in his writings, however.
		In The Art of the Novel (1988), a collection of essays, Kundera repeats his conviction that the novel must be "autonomous," created independent of any system of political belief.
		Life Is Elsewhere; Milan Kundera, Peter Kussi; Paperback; $10.75
	www.levity.com /corduroy/kundera.htm (564 words)

	Ignorance by Milan Kundera - read excerpt
		The foregoing is excerpted from Ignorance by Milan Kundera.
		Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.
		In The Art of the Novel (1988), a collection of essays, Kundera repeats his conviction that the novel must be "autonomous," created independent of any system of political belief.
	mostlyfiction.com /excerpts/ignorance.htm (1045 words)

	Amazon.com: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Books: Milan Kundera (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Kundera's frequent personal anecdotes told in the midst of the novel can be quite disconcerting -- and there's a parody of this book floating around the web that makes light of Kundera's self-indulgent practice of using his books as personal therapy sessions.
		Kundera's mix of heavily symbolic story with philosophical musing was highly effective in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." As for this book, I found much beauty in the first half, but had to force myself through the second half.
		While Kundera repeats the sins of the state several times, even opening two chapters with identical accounts of a man erased by the state, his characters fumble with sins of their own.
	www.amazon.com /Book-Laughter-Forgetting-Milan-Kundera/dp/0060932147 (2162 words)

	Milan Kundera (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Milan Kundera, nació en Brno, de la antigua Checoslovaquia, en 1929.
		Milan Kundera, el más grande escritor de novelas filosóficas contemporáneo, el último existencialista.
		Kundera dice: "...Pero cuando el adagio sonó en la habitación por octava vez, por novena vez, el poder de la música había perdido su filo; cuando hizo sonar el disco por decimotercera vez, no le emocionó más que si hubiera oído el himno nacional paraguayo." Dato curioso, como no.
	www.geocities.com /poeticarte/milankundera.htm (4107 words)

	Identity - Milan Kundera
		We were then pleasantly surprised: there is a story, and it is rather well presented -- and the usual thoughtful Kundera asides can also be found, though he does not expound on his points as much as previously.
		The tale is a light and slight one, gently exploring the issue of identity with a Kunderian spin.
		Those who enjoyed Kundera's broader Czech tapestries might want to think twice before picking this up, those who enjoy contemporary French and German literature and don't approach the book with expectations of laughter and forgetting should definitely have a look.
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/kunderam/identity.htm (616 words)

	Guardian Unlimited Books \| Authors \| Kundera, Milan
		Despite the political ramifications of his writing - Kundera's first novel, The Joke, in which a flippant scrawl of "Long live Trotsky!" ruins the hero's life, caused him to lose his citizenship - Kundera has always insisted that the novel must be "autonomous", independent of politics.
		Kundera calls Bohumil Hrabal, author of the tragicomic I Served the King of England - Czech history through the eyes of a small libidinous waiter - "our very best writer today".
		Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction (ed Aron Aji) includes essays by Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes.
	books.guardian.co.uk /authors/author/0,5917,-99,00.html (295 words)

	Milan Kundera - "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
		In his story of irreconcilable loves and infidelities, Kundera addresses himself to the nature of 20th-century "Being".
		Kundera led me to understand that the "specialness" of relationships is not really held in the place that we tend to think it is nor manifests itself in the way that we wish.
		Kundera plays with opposites: life and death, heaviness and lightness throughout his story.
	bookreviews.nabou.com /reviews/unbearable_lightness_kundera.html (903 words)

	Powell's Books - The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Perennial Classics) by Milan Kundera
		Milan Kundera's masterful novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), tells the interlocking stories of these four relationships, with a primary focus on Tomas, a man torn between his love for Tereza, his wife, and his incorrigible " erotic adventures, " particularly his long-time affair with the internationally noted painter, Sabina.
		Kundera insists that " the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise." What visions or versions of paradise are presented in the novel?
		The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years.
	www.powells.com /n/100/cgi-bin/biblio/0060932139 (1089 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)