Milan Kundera is a Czech author naturalized French, born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czechia). After secondary school, he attended Charles University to study literature and later transferred to the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague to study film directing. His foray into the literary realm was characterized by heavy political commentary and criticisms of communism. Kundera’s first and second novels, The Joke (1967) and Life is Elsewhere (1973), respectively, were biting satires on communist regimes. Accordingly, Kundera’s works were banned from pro-communist territories, and he received a great deal of backlash for his political writings.
While he published numerous books throughout his career, Milan Kundera's most acclaimed piece is The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). It tells the story of Tomas, a womanizer surgeon, Tereza, his wife, and a talented photographer, Sabina, a freedom-loving artist and Tomas' mistress, and Franz, a swiss professor obsessed with Sabina. Kundera ponders on many existential questions related to freedom, sex, and death as these characters are affected both by their actions and by the political context of the Prague Spring of 1968 and subsequent invasion by the Warsaw Pact in August of that year.
When it was published, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was immensely popular and soon became Kundera's most popular work. Four years later, in 1988, the novel was adapted into a film of the same name, directed by Philip Kaufman and written by Jean-Claude Carrière. It ultimately grossed $10 million at the box office and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Despite the film's success, Kundera himself believed that it did not capture the spirit of the story, and, consequently, he does not allow any further screen adaptations of his novels.
