About Milan Kundera Poem by Paul Hartal

In the summer of 2023 came the news that Milan Kundera died.
He was 94 years old. Th great writer was born in Brno, Czechia.
Kundera. who as a young idealist Communist danced on
the streets of Prague, was expelled from the Communist Party
for subversive views, was also revoked his Czech citizrnship
in 1979 and reinstated only 40 years later.
In 1975 Kundera went to exile. Through a process
of spiritual substantiation Kundera became a French writer
and he lived in Paris.
His 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was translated
into dozens of languages. The book chronicles the uncertain mature
of an individual's life. It advances the idea that a single lifetime
is insignificant. We live in an infinite universe in which everything
is cyclical, everything is due to repeat itself and return
eventually in infinite episodes.
Kundera's earlier volume,
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, appeared in 1979.
It is a collection of disconnected seven stories.
featuring sex and life under Communism.
In one of them poets are portrayed with names
such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Lermontov, Voltaire
and Goethe; angels hover above a student's bed;
a certain bad mood is described as litost
and laughter rises as an evil trait.
Kundera was also a literary theorist.
He argued that in its 400 years history, the novel
accomplished a lot on describing the human condition
but also left many themes unexplored, missed many
possibilities, ignoring, forgetting countless paths.
In his lifetime Kundera received many awards
and was the subject of international recognition.
Among these, in 1985 he was awarded
the Jerusalem Prize and in 1987 the Austrian State
Prize for European Literature.