By Jyothi Swaroop Makena
17th July, 2023
Milan Kundera, (born April 1, 1929, Brno, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]—died July 11, 2023, Paris, France), is a Czech novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet whose works combine erotic comedy with political criticism and philosophical speculation.
Kundera's style of fiction, interlaced with philosophical digression, greatly inspired by the novels of Robert Musil and the philosophy of Nietzsche.
Kundera's characters are often explicitly identified as figments of his own imagination, commenting in the first-person on the characters in entirely third-person stories. Kundera is more concerned with the words that shape or mould his characters than with the characters' physical appearance.
Many of Kundera's characters are intended as expositions of one of these themes at the expense of their fully developed humanity. Specifics in regard to the characters tend to be rather vague.
Kundera takes his inspiration, as he notes often enough, not only from the Renaissance authors Giovanni Boccaccio and Rabelais, but also from Laurence Sterne, Fielding, Denis Diderot, Musil, Witold Gombrowicz, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, and Martin Heidegger.
Kundera was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, in 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2000 Herder Prize. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor. Kundera died after a prolonged illness, in Paris on 11 July 2023, at the age of 94.