Milan Kundera on 'The Joke'

1968

Czechoslovakian novelist Milan Kundera (1929-) talks about his 1967 novel The Joke. In Kundera's mind, the work was written as a tale of romance, but the author cannot deny that the novel is highly political. It traces the rise of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War through the life of Ludvik Jan, a student who supported the party and then fell out of favour with it.

Milan Kundera is a Czech-born author and intellectual. He studied literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, Prague, later transferring to the Czech capital's Film Academy, where he became a lecturer in world literature upon graduation. Kundera joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia whilst still in his teens, but was expelled from the party in 1950 along with Czech writer Jan Trefulka. Kundera was re-admitted in 1956 only to be expelled a second time in 1970. His bold and often critical writing would lead to his exile from his homeland, moving to France in 1975 where he would become a French citizen in 1981.

Kundera's first novel, The Joke (1967), was a satire based around totalitarianism during the Communist era. It is his 1984 work The Unbearable Lightness of Being for which he is perhaps best known. The work follows the lives of its protagonists in the 'Prague Spring' of 1968, based around a central theme which challenges Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence. His most recent novel is 2000's Ignorance.