Milan Kundera | Granta Magazine

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929 and died in 2023 in France. His novels include The Joke, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. ‘The Great Return’, published in Granta 78, is taken from his novel Ignorance.

Milan Kundera on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | Issue 78 padlock
Essays & Memoir | Issue 78 padlock

The Great Return

Milan Kundera

‘The decades hovered above the dishes’.

Essays & Memoir | Issue 17
Essays & Memoir | Issue 17

Prague: A Disappearing Poem

Milan Kundera

‘Prague, this dramatic and suffering centre of Western destiny, is gradually fading away into the mists of Eastern Europe, to which it has never really belonged.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 13
Essays & Memoir | Issue 13

Paris or Prague?

Milan Kundera

‘May in Paris was an explosion of revolutionary lyricism. The Prague Spring was the explosion of post-revolutionary scepticism.’

In Conversation | Issue 11
In Conversation | Issue 11

Milan Kundera | Interview

Milan Kundera & Ian McEwan

‘If you are a small nation, though, you do not make history. You are always the object of history.’ Ian McEwan interviews Milan Kundera in 1984.

Fiction | Issue 11
Fiction | Issue 11

Soul and Body

Milan Kundera

‘What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of the body and soul, banish perhaps even time.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 11
Essays & Memoir | Issue 11

Somewhere Behind

Milan Kundera

‘There are periods in modern history when life resembles the novels of Kafka.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 11
Essays & Memoir | Issue 11

A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out

Milan Kundera

‘But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 6 padlock
Essays & Memoir | Issue 6 padlock

The Story of a Variation

Milan Kundera

‘I have often heard it said that the novel has already exhausted all its possibilities. I have the opposite impression: that in four hundred years of existence the novel has missed many of its opportunities: it has left many great opportunities unexploited, many roads forgotten, many calls unheard.’

Granta magazine is run by the Granta Trust (charity number 1184638)

The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. For reprint enquiries, contact us.

  • Granta
  • 12 Addison Avenue
  • London W11 4QR
  • United Kingdom
  • Tel +44(0)20 7605 1360