Comedy is everywhere

Novelist, playwright and short story writer Milan Kundera is one of the many Czech authors who, though they represent the best in their country's contemporary literature, cannot publish their work in Prague. Acclaimed in France, where in 1973 he won a major literary prize for his last but one novel, and published in English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Hebrew, Japanese and many other languages, he remains one of the 400 or more writers who are ‘on the index’ in post-invasion, ‘normalised’ Czechoslovakia. Born in Brno forty-eight years ago, Kundera was until 1969 a professor at the Prague Film Faculty, his students including all the young film makers who were to bring fame to the Czechoslovak cinema in the sixties with such movies as The Firemen's Ball, A Blonde in Love and Closely Observed Trains. In 1960 he published a highly influential essay, ‘The Art of the Novel’. Two years later the National Theatre put on his first play, The Owners of the Keys. Produced by Otomar Kreja, the play was an immediate success and was awarded the State Prize in 1963. His first novel, The Joke, came out in 1967, being reprinted twice in a matter of months and reaching a total of 116,000 copies. This book, whose appearance was delayed by a long, determined struggle with the censor, opened the way to publication abroad, where Aragon called it one of the greatest novels of the century. After the Soviet invasion Kundera was forced to leave the faculty, his work was no longer published in Czechoslovakia, all his books being removed from the public libraries. Since then, his works have only come out in translation. Life Is Elsewhere ( see Index 4/1974, pp.53–62) first appeared in Paris in 1973, where it won the Prix Medicis for the best foreign novel of the year. The French version of his latest novel, The Farewell Party, was published last year. In 1975 Kundera was offered a professorship by the University of Rennes and obtained permission from the Czechoslovak authorities to go to France, which is now his second home. All his prose works now exist in English translation. (For an appraisal of his work, see Robert C. Porter's article in Index 4/1975, pp.41–6). Unfortunately, The Joke - published by Macdonald in London and Coward McCann in New York in 1969 - was drastically cut without the author's consent, forcing Kundera to write an indignant letter to the Times Literary Supplement, disclaiming all responsibility - an interesting case of a non-political, commercial censorship. The irony of the situation was certainly not lost on the author, who is a master of the genre. His collection of short stories, Laughable Loves ( with a foreword by Philip Roth) and his other two novels have since been published by Knopf, and The Farewell Party has just been brought out by John Murray in London. This selection of Kundera's stimulating and often provocative views on such topics as the writer in exile, committed literature, the death of the novel, the nature of comedy, and so on, has been compiled by George Theiner.