The Hitchhiking Game (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, on April 1, 1929. In addition to studying music, he attended Charles University in Prague. In 1948, he went to study scriptwriting and directing at the Film Faculty at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Prague. Beginning in 1952, he taught cinematography a the Prague Academy. From 1958 to 1969 he was an assistant professor at the Film Faculty at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. From 1963 to 1969 he was also a member of the central committee of the Czechoslovak Writers Union. Kundera began writing his first novel, The Joke, in 1962, but, due to conflict with the national censors, it was not published until 1967. In June, 1967, Kundera gave a speech at the Fourth Czechoslovak Writers Congress, criticizing censorship and encouraging greater freedom of expression for Czech writers. Many writers followed his example in giving similar speeches. As a result, the government increased oppression of those writers who had spoken out. By 1968, however, in a briefly more permissive atmosphere referred to as “Prague Spring,” Kundera was one of the most prominent writers of his nation. However, after Russian tanks rolled into Prague in the summer of 1968, initiating a repressive occupation, Kundera’s books and plays were banned and removed from libraries and bookstores. He was also fired from his job and forbidden to publish any of his work in Czechoslovakia. In 1975, he was given permission to move to France in order to accept a position as Invited Professor of Comparative Literature at the Universite des Renne II, in Rennes, which he held until 1979. When his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in 1979, his Czechoslovakian citizenship was remanded. Beginning in 1980 he became a Professor in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, France, and in 1981, he became a naturalized French citizen. His novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), was made into a movie in 1988. Immortality (1990) was his first book set in France. Slowness (1996) was his first novel originally written in the French language, as was Identity (1998).