However, Kundera and others who followed his lead were subjected to even more oppression.įor a brief period in 1968 known as the ' Prague Spring,' the government eased restrictions on its writers and citizens. Kundera's frustration with the censors climaxed with a speech he gave at the Fourth Czechoslovak Writers Congress. The book caused problems with the national censors, and consequently it was not published until 1967 (the English edition was first published in 1969).

In 1962 Kundera began writing his first novel, The Joke. He was a member of the central committee of the Czechoslovak Writers Union from 1963 to 1969. He studied film at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Prague, where he later held a position as assistant professor from 1958 to 1969. With Paul Haas and Vaclav Kapral and attended Charles University in Prague. Milan Kundera was born April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), the son of Ludvik and Milada Kundera. At its most fundamental level, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about the ambiguity and paradoxes of human existence, as each person teeters between lightness and weight between the belief that all is eternal return and Nietzsche's concept that life is an ever-disappearing phenomenon and between dream and reality. Indeed there are several critics who focus their entire analysis on the way Kundera uses musical structure to put together his novel. Because the work is so complex, there are many themes that intertwine throughout the novel, just as a theme in a musical composition will be introduced only to reappear later in a different key. As an expatriate Czechoslovakian writer, Kundera draws upon his firsthand experience of the 1968 Prague Spring and subsequent Soviet occupation of his country to provide the backdrop for the story of four people whose lives are inextricably enmeshed. The Unbearable Lightness of Being Introductionįirst published in 1984 in both Paris and New York, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a rich and complicated novel that is at once a love story, a metaphysical treatise, a political commentary, a psychological study, a lesson on kitsch, a musical composition in words, an aesthetic exploration, and a meditation on human existence.

The unbearable lightness of being novel