Concept
Milan Kundera
Overview
Milan Kundera (UK: KU(U)N-dər-ə; Czech: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra] ; 1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.
Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the country's ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia banned his books. He led a low-profile life and rarely spoke to the media. He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was also a nominee for other awards.
Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, and the Herder Prize in 2000. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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_Human all-too-Human,_ with its two sequels, is the memorial of a crisis. It is called a book for free spirits: almost every sentence in it is the expression of a triumph--by means of it I purged myself of everything in me which was foreign to my nature. Idealism is foreign to me: the title of the book means: "Where ye see ideal things I see--human, alas! all-too-human things!" ... I know men better. The word "free…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen
States what Milan Kundera is; the author is tied to Milan Kundera in the knowledge graph.
From our degenerate literary art, as also from that itch for scribbling of our learned men which has now reached such alarming proportions, wells forth the same sigh: Oh that we could forget ourselves! The attempt fails: memory, not yet suffocated by the mountains of printed paper under which it is buried, keeps on repeating from time to time: 'A degenerate man of culture! Born for culture and brought up to…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Future of our Educational Institutions
The author is tied to Milan Kundera in the knowledge graph.
By his writings and his personal influence he was a great centre of light to his generation. During his later years he was quite as much the head and leader of the intellectual radicals in England, as Voltaire was of the _philosophes_ of France. It is only one of his minor merits, that he was the originator of all sound statesmanship in regard to the subject of his largest work, India. He wrote on no subject which…
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
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Philosophers who discussed Milan Kundera
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- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Franz Kafka
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- Laurence Sterne
- The Guardian
- Miguel de Cervantes
- Georges Bataille
- Collins English Dictionary
- Nobel Prize in Literature
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- Prague
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- Surrealism
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Place in the tradition
Part of Czech philosophy.