Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929. 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. His most recent work is The Festival of Insignificance was published by Faber in 2014. He lives in France.
Milan Kundera on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir
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The Online Edition
The Great Return
Milan Kundera
‘The decades hovered above the dishes’.
Essays & Memoir
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The Online Edition
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
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The Online Edition
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
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The Online Edition
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.'
Fiction
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The Online Edition
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
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The Online Edition
Somewhere Behind
Milan Kundera
‘There are periods in modern history when life resembles the novels of Kafka.’
Essays & Memoir
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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
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Issue 11
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.’