Summaries of secondary literature pieces on Milan Kundera


Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Draft version: version 10 (3 August Priban added; Mai added; v8 Sanders added, Margala and Bilek updated; v7 Steiner added, 14 June; version 6 Julia's Books and Mike Sutton added, 14 June; summaries begin in 2023 in hospital)
Note: accents removed from names, because my computer sometimes shows other characters instead. More recent summarizes seem to be fuller, sorry!


1. Robert C. Porter. 1975. Freedom is my love. The works of Milan Kundera. Index on Censorship 4: 41-46. Available at:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227508532475
Introduces a classification of three post-1968 Czech writers with Kundera as a third kind: publishing abroad with the hope of publishing in his homeland. Summarizes a system of relations in the short stories, specified by Milan Blahynka: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Provides a history of the English publication of The Joke at odds with Kundera's history, it seems: amicable meeting and correction. Life is Elsewhere described as structurally simpler and Jaromil as a parody of a poet and revolutionary. Porter declares that there is nothing new in Czech literature in saying man is a parody.


2. Terry Eagleton. 1987. Estrangement and Irony. Salmagundi 73: 25-32. (Not freely available.)
Influential literary critic. Opens by presenting Eastern Europe as a place where nothing is thought as merely accidental. [Uses "Eastern Europe" rather than Kundera's preferred "Central Europe."] Well, opens more precisely with a joke which is interpreted as conveying this. A Czech is vomiting in the middle of Prague after the Soviet invasion. Another Czech says, "I know what you mean." Eagleton takes the joke to turn on overinterpretation: there is no meaning. [But one can take it as meaningful and still laugh: at the gap between vomiting and the controlled verbal substitute, "This is disgusting," as reactions. Eagleton has probably thought of this and is discreetly alluding to the later Wittgenstein on refined verbal replacements for bodily expression - he wrote the script for a film on Wittgenstein.] Eagleton's main point seems to be this: that Kundera's texts are about how uniqueness cannot be valuable, because it does not exist or value needs to compare one thing and another, but meaning fades with repetition. He says this more than once! [Little support is explicitly given; the article has plenty of unsupported assertions, which don't seem especially plausible to me - should we subject everything to analysis, like how we extracted an allusion to Wittgenstein? Eagleton's reading plausibly fits well with the opening of The Unbearable Lightness of Being; earlier novels?] Eagleton says that this focus comes out in sex: the particularity of the relationship; the repetitive character of bodily drives. He says sex is usually the funniest part of Kundera's novels. [But they mostly document realistic unpleasant sexual encounters. The non-consummation between the student and the butcher's wife; Hugo's misguided displays of stamina; etc. Dislike for the characters does not lead me personally to amusement. "I hate quickly and easily and have little empathy, so it does"? Become a literary critic?] Eagleton describes Kundera's novels as postmodern and carnivalesque. Towards the end, he interestingly says that "Kundera seems genuinely unable to imagine any universally shared emotion  which would not, by definition, be intolerably banal. It is this which leads him to write that 'The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.' " [A crumb for the interested reader?]
  
3. Douglas Lauen. 1988. Oedipus Fallen: Irony in the Fiction of Milan Kundera. Student thesis, Oberlin College. Available at:
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1593&context=honors
"The ironic tone which pervades all of Kundera's novels is not an authorial indulgence devoid of interpretive import, but a central vehicle of Kundera's perspective, one which has its roots in the ironies of Czech history and Kundera's role in it." p.7.  "In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, irony mediates between the evils of the past and the pain of remembering." And "Only one character recurs in BL&F, which tempts readers to call this a book of stories rather than a novel." The one character recurrence argument: if only one character recurs, then it is a book of stories; only one character recurs; therefore… A lot of engagement with Roger Kimball. Oedipal interpretation of Tomas from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, focusing on turning into a rabbit.


4. Mark Harper. 1990. The role of the narrator in the novels of Milan Kundera. MA thesis for Texas Tech University. Available at:
https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/items/6d8f5d25-4b60-478c-9568-ba39bf327369
Focusing on chapter five, David Lodge finds The Book of Laughter and Forgetting fragmentary, but the chapter argues that it is a novel by Kundera's definition. In a Philip Roth interview, Kundera tells us, "A novel is a long piece of synthetic prose based on play with invented characters. These are the only limits." The chapter argues that unity of themes (e.g. laughter and forgetting) and structural control (variations) produces the unity of a novel.


5. Ann Jefferson. 1991. Counterpoint and forked tongues: Milan Kundera and the art of exile. Culture, Theory and Critique 34(1): 115-136. (Not freely available.) Title is a bit misleading I feel and a blunter version would have this title: "Kundera, a rebel who won the lottery with exile." [This summary is more the blunter version? Significant reorganization.] We are told that in a 1967 speech, Kundera said 19th century Czech culture could have oriented itself to a flourishing Germanic culture or try to be independent: both options are unpromising, serving others and being ungreat or being  independent but small and ungreat. The solution was become cosmopolitan, interested in all literature, rather than being a poor provincial. Translation flourished. Czech translations were among the first to appear of Ulysses and A la recherche du temps perdu and the translator is a prominent personality there. The environment of a small country with this culture, often subject to occupations, was the best preparation for exile, as Ewa Thompson observes [or she just focuses on occupations and Jefferson's analysis adds the cosmopolitan, translator-big factor]. Jefferson says Kundera was merely famous in his nation in 1968 and exile ended his claustrophobic relationship to local audiences and forced him to reach global ones and achieve international fame, rather than being (what he regards as) a backward, pre-Goethe writer,  focused on a national readership. In Kundera's eyes: for the literary writer not to be part of world literature is to be nonexistent. Instead of the usual lot of an exile - loss, separation, poverty, misrecognition - Kundera is a bestselling literary figure. Jefferson SUGGESTS Kundera is a perpetual rebel going against the surrounding trend, while she writes explicitly of counterpoint: he was part of a famous film school and focused on a novelist,  Vladislav Vancura; during Stalinist occupation, he took up Enlightenment French literature. Continuing the trend abroad, he does not use his exile in the expected way: "Kundera demonstrates his distaste for flag-waving emigre communities." [Accents removed for computer reasons.] And he does not do the expected thing and identify with Joseph Conrad, who left a repressive regime in Poland to enjoy a 'free-living' and 'free-thinking' society in the West and a career as a major European novelist, rather with Ovid as poet of exile. And having seemingly moved from the periphery to the cultural centre, Kundera sets about arguing for the centrality of what he left behind.  For Kundera, Western European culture is exhausted, Joyce and Proust are a culmination; France patiently awaits events that will never happen; the future lies with Central Europe, a term he prefers to Eastern Europe.  [By the way, a joke I tell in stand-up comedy: "Poles don't like being called Eastern European, they say Poland is central Europe; well one said: no, you're Eastern European."] Jefferson partakes in her own rebellion [I suppose] and proposes to construe Kundera as a novelist of counterpoint in a way that is disconnected from his interest in music and his father's work. [Presents this as a main line of argument, but not well-developed, though there is potential: can you really apply musical concepts to the novel?] Not transparently connected to these themes of rebellious personality (or counterpoint!) and exile, there is interesting attention for some pages to the "mobile play of oppositions" in his novels: soul and body, demonic and angelic laughter, idolizers and misogynists, the political and the aesthetic, French formalism and Russian sentiment, the novel and totalitarian ideology, etc. Later Jefferson praises Laughable Loves [well–crafted fiction which isn't enough for Kundera to stand out from the crowd?] and The Joke [a merely solid novel, for many readers, I suspect - an opinion I have heard and agreed with, as a teenager]. Jefferson returns repeatedly to the theme of exile in her paper, at one point considering the claim that exile illuminates the situation of all of us. She sounds as if she disagrees: "I think it is Edward Said who has the best account of exile when he argues that, unlike most people who are aware of only one culture or home, exiles are aware of at least two, and that 'this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that - to borrow a phrase from music - is contrapuntal'." Towards the very end of her article, she  says: "Kundera's conception of the novel makes it the genre most suited to the exile writer. Not only does the novelist not have the poet's almost insuperable problems with translation, nor the playwright's need for institutional connections with the theatre, but the multiple perspective latent in its structure mirrors the multiple vision imposed, as Said pointed out, upon the exile." [Perhaps a useful warning of how he will be perceived by conservative critics: a peculiar writer who started out well-enough, with the realistic fiction that got his foot in the door. By the way, forked tongues refers to be able to communicate to home audiences and ones in the country of exile.]
A response by me, by Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZbkk4tNxSn/
And: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZdFLRpBCkZ/


6. Ivan Sanders. 1991. Mr. Kundera, The European.  Wilson Quarterly 15(2): 102-109. (Not freely available.) Opens with "Eastern Europeans have so often bemoaned the lack of recognition of their cultures that when one of their artists does achieve world standing, they are quick to proclaim him a genius who speaks for the entire region." Evidence of Kundera's fame, far above other writers from there: Ivo Andric, Miroslav Krleza, or Danilo Kis. [Accents removed by cut and paste.] And: "Writers from small countries who make a name for themselves abroad are frequently accused by their countrymen of 'internationalizing' their art." A Czech journalist in the New Yorker describes Kundera as not a Czech author, rather a French wit. An urban intellectual is quoted as saying Kundera has more than 10 times the talent of Josef Skvorecky. [As response to Jefferson?] Later notes Bohumil Hrabal is considered to be the greatest living Czech storyteller and is a far more down to-earth literary figure. Some information about Kundera's life, including that he enrolled in a film academy because music and poetry were too close to his heart. Realism to Kundera is too simplistic and he is judged to be true to 17th and 18th century innovators. Instead of an objective Marxist portrait of history, The Joke presents different plausible interpretations of the postcard message "Optimism is the opium of the people… Long live Trotsky" and aftermath, inconsistent ones. The reflections Kundera offers in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting on tanks and pears is the sort-of material that leads to the Czech reaction "Kundera is just too clever, too cool a writer, too caught up in his cerebral games." Sanders responds to The Unbearable Lightness of Being by noting his surprise that the puckish, ironic Kundera does not favour lightness over heaviness more. His new novel Immortality is about how freedom is no guarantee against spiritual impoverishment. A criticism: "Kundera the intellectual, the man of culture, often obscures the novelist. One need not be a devotee of old-fashioned realism to be bothered by the thinness of novelistic textures." Refers to Bronislaw Geremek, George Konrad, and Janos Kis as European intellectual heavyweights. Notes that Kundera's novels are read as political exposes. Later we are told Kundera is no longer interested in speaking for his region: he demands to be judged as a European writer. He would probably be dismissive of the old criticism of internationalizing his writing. Final paragraph says that in France and the USA he is no longer regarded as an author in exile.  [A missing metaphor? If Kundera were a brown man from the Indian subcontinent, various critics would conveniently call him a coconut.]


7. Peter Steiner. 2000. Ironies of History: The Joke by Milan Kundera. Chapter 5 of The Deserts of Bohemia: Czech Fiction and its Social Context. Cornell University Press. 
Steiner opens by observing that Kundera, in his 1980s interviews, depicts various histories as having a first half, a break or rupture, and then second half: European  literature, music, his own life, and the life of a favourite novelist of his, namely Witold Gombrowicz. Kundera addresses the most basic metaphysical question of Western historiography:  how can this be the same thing given such change. His answer is as if he were dealing with a person, in which continuity of psychological relations is what ensures sameness. The first half is a source of traumas and obsessions. In the second half, one proceeds (or the history does) while forgetting or repressing these, but what is repressed often seeks expression. Kundera also identifies an ethical relation between the two halves: the forgetting in the second half of the first is morally wrong. The trauma for Kundera's generation was the turning of Stalinism from its ideals into the perversion of them: from love of truth into denunciation; from love of humankind to cruelty towards them. Quotes Karl Mannheim's definition of ideology, which seems to mean this: a set of ideas about the world which can be introduced beyond the situation people who have them are in - they are situation-transcendent - but there is some perpetual problem with ever realizing these, so they never are. He analyses characters in Kundera's novel The Joke in terms of their ideologies: they are kinds of utopian. Kostka is a Christian whose belief in love-thy-neighbour actually leads him to side with Party over Church. Jaroslav is a conservative, for whom the present is legitimate only insofar as it evolved out of the past. [By gradual moves, presumably.] He engages in amateur study of Moravian folklore and ritual, connecting it to the present: "the Pentecostal ritual known as 'the Ride of the Kings' – a festive procession of male equestrians in female dresses leading a blindfolded and muted 'king'—that reenacts, according to some, the flight of the defeated Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus through southern Moravia in 1469." The ritual is related further back to Dionysiac rites, omitted from the first translation of the novel. Jaroslav is a member of the Communist Party because of how folklore provides an alternative to decadent bourgeois art. Helena and Ludvik are more oriented towards the official socialist aim of utopia than the previous two. For Helena social revolution is connected to personal sexual revolution; Ludvik is more intellectual and, as Jaroslav perceives, "had an air all the Communists had at that time. As if he'd made a secret pact with the future and had the right to act in its name." Article asks why two characters have the same ideology. It also observes that only Ludvik is historical, by Kundera's standards, with a second half and a first. Helena often says, "I don't want my life split down the middle." The "unhistorical" three are not able to construct anything after their utopian projects collapse. Ludvik is different. The article analyses Ludvik's project of revenge after unjust dismissal from Party and university [the memorable details omitted - the only thing one expects readers to remember?] in terms of litost, a concept explained in Kundera's later novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [explained as if wounded pride, it seems to me; is this a second half of repression?]. Ludvik holds onto the belief that injustice can be rectified, until proved wrong, and coming to see history as like a series of jokes. Later in the article, we are informed of how Alain Finkielkraut says Kundera's greatest contribution to critique of Communist utopia is, in Life is Elsewhere, depicting how "poet reigned with executioner." Kundera associates utopian projects with lyricism, and this has to do with his own pre-novelistic past as lyrical poet. Kundera's own revenge is to depict his lyrical age ironically in a novel. [Quotation from Kundera's early poetry.] The rest of the chapter returns to The Joke, in which Fucik figures, controversially depicted as someone weak, and discusses Kundera's own relationship to Fucik. It describes Kundera's attitude to the Czech socialist project as changing with time, later no longer seeing it as utopian folly, rather the only viable program. [This seems a reference to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but the article says, "Conceivably I am misconstruing the purport of Kundera's essay 'The Czech Lot,' reading it out of its original context." Amusingly: risk of quotation without "conceivably."] Note: accents removed from Ludvik and Fucik, for computer display reasons.


8. Brian Ward. 2002. A Big Piece of Nonsense for His Own Pleasure: The Identity of Milan Kundera. Limina 8: 144-155. Available at:
https://search.informit.org/doi/epdf/10.3316/informit.304997438961794
Presents how Kundera books in English used to provide a reasonably accurate biography on the back cover but now are reduced to hardly anything. "In the 1980s Penguin English translations of Kundera’s 1970s works, the facts of his life are presented with reasonable thoroughness. These editions state that Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1929; that he was a jazz musician, a lecturer in film studies, and an author; that his books were proscribed after 1968; that he left his homeland to live in France in the early 1970s; and that he gained French citizenship in 1981." And "In the Faber English translations of his 1990s novels like Slowness and Identity (and the revised, authorised translations of his earlier works) the biographical note simply states that 'Milan Kundera was born in 1929 in Czechoslovakia and since 1975 has been living in France.' " Considers two hypotheses: biography is irrelevant and Kundera does not want to elaborate on ambiguous feelings towards his homeland. Charges Kundera with manipulative and distorting representations of personal history in his novels and removing geography even. Ends by saying that Kundera has been writing the work his wife warns against: A Big Piece of Nonsense for His Own Pleasure.

9. Mark Weeks. 2005. Milan Kundera: A Modern History of Humor Amid the Comedy of History. Journal of Modern Literature , Spring, 2005, Vol. 28, No 3 (Spring, 2005): 130-148. Available at: 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236782085_Milan_Kundera_A_Modern_History_of_Humor_amid_the_Comedy_of_History
Opens by declaring that there are certainly funnier authors than Milan Kundera, but he has devoted more attention to the topic. Quotes Kundera: " "I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror. I was twenty then. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn't fear, by the way they smiled." Weeks links Kundera to Bakhtin: Kundera's fondness for the ambiguity of humour and asociation of it with the novel is like Bakhtin's preference for heteroglossia, which is also associated with this fiction type. Kundera's laughter is anti-optimism and he was able to adapt it to the West, against its ideology of ahistorical desire. Weeks describes Kundera as actually anti-postmodern, using humour against it. Kundera's oeuvre identifies three stages in the history of humour and its repression: traditional repression, such as under Stalin; recuperation to serve neo-revolutionary narratives; the postmodern stage in which there are endless reproductions of laughter [not what Kundera counts as real laughter]. Weeks goes on to analyse the texts which do this. [Inconveniently for Weeks, second and third stage appear in one book."] The Joke: Weeks says that oppressive communist ideology is not portrayed as static. Also kaughter is not just opposed to the seriousness of a project, but to future-orientation in general. "Where The Book of Laughter and Forgetting goes beyond The Joke is in dissecting the 'willed' misinterpretation of laughter that allows it to be neutralized, and even turned against itself, through appropriation by narratives of historical purpose." Weeks discusses the laughter of the angels, which expresses confidence in God's plan. "The laughter of Kundera's angels is not necessarily false, but is being falsely interpreted by the angels, and by the narrator, as an endorsement of a particular narrative..." The Book of Laughter and Forgetting also opposes itself to the pursuit of a universal laughter as the accompaniment of sensory pleasure or joy of being, promoted by feminists within capitalism and numerous bad American movies. Quotes Kundera: "All churches, all underware manufacturers, all generals, all political parties have that laughter in common..." [Doesn't this mess up Weeks' stages or his depiction of Kundera as later opposing postmodern laughter?] Weeks also examines the novels Slowness and briefly Identity.
See also (from me, brief response to Hobbes comparison): https://www.academia.edu/129788464/Kundera_and_Hobbes_a_response_to_Mark_Weeks

10. Yvon Grenier. 2006. Milan Kundera on Politics and the Novel. History of Intellectual Culture 6 (1): 1-18. Available at:
https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/hic/article/view/68921
Kundera's essays and other reflections amount to the perspective of an artist on politics. Grenier somewhat challenges the conclusion "that for Kundera, political agents of all stripes manipulate an ignorant and sentimental crowd": "Things are not that simple. It takes a great deal of energy and intelligence — that is, not merely emotional reflexes — to concoct and reproduce political ideologies." p. 10. Challenges Eagleton, but not convincingly, p. 15. Also "Perhaps Kundera is simply reverberating the anti‐liberal or even anti‐modern dispositions of the French intelligentsia." p. 16.


11. David Mosley. 2009. Kundera, Janacek, and the Poetics of Divestment. Words and Music Studies 12. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/369776/Kundera_Janacek_and_the_Poetics_of_Divestment
Features some interesting quotations from Kundera on the influence of music on his novel writing. "Kundera concedes that verbal narratives cannot achieve the simultaneity of voices according to which musical polyphony is defined, i.e. he recognizes what Calvin Brown characterized as the "insuperable barrier" in literature's effort to become musical." "Kundera identifies his prose style with the musical style of Leos Janacek. In the Moravian composer's music the author finds "the will to divest" manifested in "the total absence of mere technique" and "musical automatism" (Art of the Novel, 73) resulting in musical compositions marked by "harsh juxtapositions instead of transitions, repetition [of thematic material] instead of variation" ( The Art of the Novel, 72); the absence of "contrapuntal filler"; and the rejection of routine instrumentation" (Testaments Betrayed, 183). In other words, Janacek cashes out of the late 19th century market of instrumental composition." There is reference to Jastrow's duck-rabbit and Wittgenstein, and how this applies to musical perception. Note: accents removed; computer display issues - Leoš Janáček.


12. Miriam Margala. 2010. The Unbearable Torment of Translation: Milan Kundera, Impersonation, and The Joke. TranscUlturAl, vol.1,3 (2010), 30-42. Available at:
https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/tc/index.php/TC/article/view/10051
Focuses on The Joke. Kundera with each new definitive version revises his texts in ways that he regards unacceptable for translators. p.37. Margala declares this is not a novel observation though. Reasserted more or less on p.41. "Whether we like it or not, when Kundera translates his own works he is, by his own admission, rewriting them as well." Also "Kundera does all he believes he can do to make it easy for his works to live  as translations without being misinterpreted. This exemplifies his distrust towards those who translate, publish or write critically about his work." Margala says that Kundera relates to translators as if he were a God. [Kundera is famous in translation studies for his inconsistent treatment of translators. On the one hand, he demands that translators produce faithful texts, rather than omitting sections or making additions or not achieving his style in another language. On the other hand, when Kundera himself "translates," he does things he tells translators not to do: he cuts material and he rewrites for speakers of another language. But why is this not common hypocrisy, rather than taking up a divine position?] Ends with the thought that Kundera is as much just provoking as thought-provoking.
Brief engagement (by me) with Margala and the God comparison, here:
https://www.academia.edu/129783434/Kundera_as_a_god_versus_translators_a_response_to_Miriam_Margala


13. Petr A. Bilek. 2010. A journey of a name from the realm of reference to the realm of meaning: the reception of Milan Kundera within the Czech cultural context. In P.A. Bilek and V. Papoušek (eds.), Models of Representations in Czech Literary History. Boulder: East European Monographs. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/64769942/A_JOURNEY_OF_A_NAME_FROM_THE_REALM_OF_REFERENCE_TO_THE_REALM_OF_MEANING_THE_RECEPTION_OF_MILAN_KUNDERA_WITHIN_THE_CZECH_CULTURAL_CONTEXT
Begins with analytic philosophy of the name, and says the issue of what does the name "Milan Kundera" refer to is unavoidable in the secondary literature. According to the descriptivist theory of names, when a person uses a name and it refers what happens is this: in their mind the person associates the name with a description and only one thing meets the description. Kundera in the 1950s has a standard image and then is a progressive. He is searching for new topics and forms. In the 1960s, his biographical information presents him as always debuting in a new form. In the late 1960s, prose fiction became his stable form. Using a descriptive theory of names, in the 1970s in his homeland his name apparently meant the same as various others, including Havel, whom he criticized.  Bilek writes, "In the official context of the early 1970s Kundera survived just as the iconic name of a 'bad guy,' with no access to his texts, which were not published any more and were banned even in public libraries. His name was reduced to the meaning of 'the 1968 reformist.' The name of Milan Kundera became synonymous with the names of Vaclav Havel, Pavel Kohout, Ivan Klíma, Ludvík Vaculík." (2010: 188) [Some people would surely have remembered his books, providing a means for reference, using the descriptivist theory.] In 1984, Kundera became a focus for Czech dissident criticism. Much discussion of Milan Jungmann on Kundera. Describes Kundera's 1980s and the public alter ego we are offered. Contemporary Czech reception: either loved as a member of the famous or regarded as a cheap trick author, in line with 1980s criticism.
See here for further brief response to Bilek (from me):
https://www.academia.edu/129782741/Milan_Kundera_and_the_descriptivist_theory_of_names_a_response_to_Petr_A_Bilek


14. Tim Jones. 2012. Slowness, Identity and Ignorance: Milan Kundera's French Variations. PhD thesis for the University of East Anglia. Available at:
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/50555/1/Thesis_Tim_Jones_-_Slowness,_Identity_and_Ignorance_-_Milan_Kundera's_French_Variations.pdf
Thesis argues that The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a novel because of the same themes being analysed again and again, through the form of variations. Jones goes on to argue that the later French novels are exploring themes which have been explored on a number of occasions before, by Kundera, such as slowness and speed in The Joke and The Farewell Waltz. The total body of his texts displays a similar unity to BL&F. Briefly considers why the later novels have been neglected: too recent; because readers are interested in experiences of a totalitarian society?


15. Joseph Mai. 2014. Humanity's "True moral test": shame, idyll, and animal vulnerability in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Studies in the Novel 46(1): 100-116. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/8321986/Humanity_s_True_Moral_Test_Shame_Idyll_and_Animal_Vulnerability_in_Milan_Kundera_s_The_Unbearable_Lightness_of_Being
Mai writes, "To the unknowable selves, the terminal paradoxes, and the criticism of totalitarian regimes (among a host of other approaches), this essay adds a new facet to the understanding of Kunderan irony: the significance of the suffering of animals, both human and nonhuman, to human self-conception." Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being feels a shared vulnerability with nonhuman animals, especially her (female) dog Karenin. Mai finds an interesting quotation from psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, which sounds somewhat Kundera-like, as Mai notes: "The infant who is being held… is not aware of being preserved from infinitely falling. A slight failure of holding, however, brings to the infant a sensation of infinite falling." Some pages later Kundera on vertigo is quoted, Favours Cora Diamond on animal rights over Peter Singer and Tom Regan. [Unsurprisingly.] Referring to Martha Nussbaum, writes: "We may recognize here a common tactic by which certain human groups, for example indigenous people, Jews, or political dissidents, are "contaminated" through disgusting animal traits (See Nussbaum 221-222). This is what the narrator [of Kundera's novel] seems to be getting at when he says that mankind's failure towards animals is at the root of all of its other failures."  Much material on Tereza, including her relationship to Karenin. "She thinks of how little disgust she felt when Karenin was in heat and had to wear Tereza's old underwear so as to not dirty the furniture."  Material on shame too. Refers to a story I associate with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting without citing it: the young woman, concerned about police interrogation, who has to repeatedly go to the toilet, producing in Kundera a desire to rape - Mai proposes this as a source for Tereza. Mai writes, "compassion, and the sense of his power, prevent him from doing so." [Not sure why. It could simply be internalized moral conventions prevent him from ever really being disposed to act on the desire. Or a belief that unplanned nonconsensual penetration of an awake, lively and opposed person is difficult to pull off.]


16. Małgorzata Ciecilzko. 2018. "Being a dancer is not only a passion" - dance forms in the prose works of Milan Kundera. Bohemistyka 2018, no. 2. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/47423756/_Being_a_dancer_is_not_only_a_passion_dance_forms_in_the_prose_works_of_Milan_Kundera
Ciecilzko presents the circle dances (first dimension) from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which are associated with equality and faith and closure. Unlike the open formation of the row, once you leave or are cast out of the circle, you cannot return, analyzes Kundera, who describes his personal experience. Erotic dances (second dimension) are also presented. These serve to slow down the plot and build tension. We are presented with quotations of nurse Alzhbeta's dancing from the story Symposium, from Laughable Loves, which leads to questions of how she learnt to dance like that: a Viennese striptease apparently. The third dimension from the list is the entangled waltz, but no one dances in the novel The Farewell Waltz or refers to dancing, making the title a problem. The problem is addressed. In Slowness, politicians are compared by an academic to dancers, engaged in a moral judo (fourth dimension) to appear superior.


17. Dhee Sankar. 2018. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Narration in Milan Kundera's The 
Unbearable Lightness of Being. Bhatter College Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies 8(1).
https://www.academia.edu/37461775/The_Ethics_and_Aesthetics_of_Narration_in_Milan_Kunderas_The_Unbearable_Lightness_of_Being
The paper raises the question of whether Kundera avoids a solipsistic conception of the novel. Sankar quotes how Kundera regards characters as experimental selves yet denies the novel is solipsistic. Refers to Habermas, the theme of the polyphonic novel, and the theme of reduced privacy. Ends with an interesting quotation from Joseph Mai: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being opens a perspective in which human life is "reduced" to the meat that is absent in the Cartesian tradition."

18. Jiri Priban. 2018. The Kundera Case and the Neurotic Collective
Memory of Postcommunism, VerfBlog, 2018/1/12. http://verfassungsblog.de/the-kundera￾case-and-the-neurotic-collective-memory-of-postcommunism/
"On Monday, 13th December 2008, a Czech weekly magazine Respekt published information that Milan Kundera... apparently reported a young man and agent Miroslav Dvoracek to the state police on 14th March 1950. The denunciation nearly resulted in a death sentence for Dvoracek who eventually spent 14 years in communist prisons. At that time, Kundera was a student of the Academy of Film Arts who had just been
    expelled from the communist party." There were speculations that Kundera feared further persecution if he did not report. "The mass media were
    locked in heated debates whether Kundera’s work could therefore be interpreted as a kind of apology for morally repulsive deeds from times of 'the artist as a young man'." "The information was forwarded to the weekly Respekt by Adam Hradilek who was a young researcher of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes - a public body set up by the Czech conservative government almost two decades after the communist regime's collapse." "one of the central figures of the whole case, Iva Militka, was Hradilek's relative. Militka was actually the person who let Dvoracek stay in her student room in 1950. She informed Hradilek that her then boyfriend and later husband Miroslav Dlask told her on his deathbed that, at that time, he had told his friend Kundera about Dvoracek's presence in the dormitory and that Kundera logically had to be the one who reported it to the police. Instead of historical research, we thus have a possible love triangle almost worthy of Kundera’s novel – Dvoracek staying in Militka's room while her boyfriend Dlask shared the information with his friend Kundera who, according to Dlask’s version revealed to Hradilek by Dlask's wife Militka, informed the police." Kundera made a public statement saying that he had nothing to do with whole saga. Regarding the Institute for the Study of Totalrian Regimes, Priban writes: " If we accept Michel Foucault's claim that sovereignty was typical of the rule of absolutist monarchy while modernity created new forms of governmentality based on policing and social discipline, we have to conclude that the Institute’s organization and functions, rather than legal justice typical of courts, are closer to the policing and disciplining of public morality. This policing function of the Institute came to its full force during the Kundera affair, when the novelist was scandalized not so much for what he allegedly did or did not do in 1950 but because he refused to communicate with the Institute's researchers in 2008." " The typically modern struggle of a man against the public intrusion into his private life, so extreme during communist times, thus carries on in the form of postcommunist neurotic collective memory." Accents removed from names: Jiří Přibáň, Miroslav Dvořáček, Iva Militká.
See also (briefly, from me):  https://www.academia.edu/129259797/Is_Kundera_a_police_informer

19. Gulcehre Kurt. 2019. A Rebel to Totalitarianism: Post-Communist Lives in Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
https://www.academia.edu/40255203/A_postmodernist_Analysis_of_Milan_Kunderas_The_Unbearable_Lightness_of_Being_
Appears to be a student paper for a course. Characterizes Kundera's novel as postmodern. "Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being plainly utilizes intertextual material from the works of Nietzsche, Parmenides, Beethoven, Tolstoy, Kafka, Freud, Hitler and a lot of others  which emphasizes that the text is a fusion merging philosophy, art, history, psychology, and dream." Quotes Roland Barthes: "plurality of discourses. Roland Barthes states that " The text is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original blend and clash." Says "Unlike realist fiction which follows a mere chronological order of events to create an illusion to  gain the reader's confidence and to bring the coherence, postmodernism plays with time and order to  admit the fictitious status of the written word." ("Are there not realistic fictions which the narrative is not strictly chronological," you ask?) Note: name with accents, Gülçehre.
 
20. Carolyn Ownbey. 2018. Milan Kundera and the Radical Autonomy of Art. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 61(1):  1-12. (Not freely available.) Kundera emigrated from Prague to Paris in 1975. Ownbey details features of his role in Prague, behind the Iron Curtain, including a brief biography (omitted here). His vocation as literary writer was doubly political. Firstly (or first), writers, artists, and intellectuals had to fit the socialist programme or they were silenced. Secondly such figures had to serve the Cold War conflict between socialism and capitalism in the international scene: by competing against Western liberal democratic writers. Quotes David Caute, who asserts difference from previous conflicts: "Christians and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, revolutionary France and conservative Britain, had not dispatched their best ballerinas, violinists, poets, actors, playwrights, painters, composers, comedians, and chess players into battle." In the 1970s and 80s, Kundera strongly resisted the overly political reading of his works and art in general - Ownbey says that his 1986 Art of the Novel asserts that the novel is radically apolitical. Ownbey claims that Kundera's novels are, paradoxically, political because they reject politicization: political in negative terms. [Maybe the paradox can be solved with a narrower interpretation of "rejecting politicization" than rejecting all political involvement, e.g. rejecting the interpretation of his novels as chiefly about the merits and demerits of specific types of political regime in favour of their being about something universal - love in any society, etc. -  or the interpretation of his novels as chiefly of interest to people interested in such merits and demerits.] Despite his wishes, Kundera is generally read as a dissident novelist, and therefore political. His writings are referred to in law and  political science in relation to themes of human rights, totalitarianism, and citizenship. People read me as a political document, he complained to Ian McEwan in 1984. We are told: the enemy of Kundera's enemy is not his friend, if that enemy subscribes to politicization of cultural works. His meditative interrogation is a way of opposing grand narratives and totalizing fantasies. Kundera follows Kafka, whom he depicts as not politically motivated. But a quote from Carlos Fuentes says, "Kundera's characters have no need of awakening transformed into insects, because the history of Central Europe took care to demonstrate that a man need not be an insect in order to be treated as such." Kundera's parallel between the desires of a totalitarian government and the desire of a lover are referred to: from part 1 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the state's doctoring a photograph and Mirek's desire to control his past love letters. [Kundera's fairytale story of the former is heavily fictionalized, I have read.] Ownbey's Kundera says that totalitarian states abolish the private-public distinction, demanding no barrier to knowledge of what a citizen does, and this makes citizens into infants, using Tamina and the children to depict an infantocracy. [But note: Tamina encounters the children in the liberal democratic West.] Kundera contrasts the predictable form of political writing, whether left or right, with the novel, which is not formulaic. Ownbey shifts focus to The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Kundera's analysis of kitsch. Kitsch involves formulaic effects.
See also this Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZatQVjAiRQ/


21. Julia's books. 2020. Book review of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. Available at:
https://julias-books.com/2020/10/11/book-review-the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-by-milan-kundera/
The reviewer, who has an English degree, says that she did not warm to the main characters: Tomas [accent removed, computer display reasons] and Tereza. Although he loves Tereza, he is unfaithful and the reviewer regards him as a womanizer and a sex addict. She judges that Tereza stays with Tomas from fear and vulnerability and not love, though she loves him. Tereza works in dead-end jobs, despite being a talented photographer, and is a damaged person, body-dysmorphic, which seems to have been caused by her relationship with her mother. [So she wants affluent well-rounded healthy types? Boring for a novel?] The reviewer judges the book clever and is interested in the political background, but finds that the story is subordinated to the philosophy: not as much as Jostein Gardner's Sophie's World but still too much subordination. [I have encountered a similar criticism of Kundera before - that his characters are pieces on a philosophical chessboard - but I don't recall where. But I worry that someone will simply build on Kundera's technique, watering down the philosophy, and various readers will buy, while not giving due recognition to the founders; or if they don't buy, it is back to very old-fashioned novels. Julia may prefer previous book or The Joke.]


22. Matija Ivacic. 2021. On Milan Kundera – In a Problematic Manner. "Umjetnost riječi" LXV :3–4. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/165265176/On_Milan_Kundera_In_a_Problematic_Manner
This is a review of Jan Novak, Kundera: Cesky zivot a doba. Praha: Argo & Paseka, 2020. Ivacic says that the biography is marred by Novak's negative attitude to Kundera. It ignores the French phase of Kundera's work. Also "Novak largely relies on documents from the National Security archives, where publicly accessible Milan Kundera's file is stored, bringing to light even the details from Kundera's intimate life, which undeniably exceeds the bounds of common decency (i.e., his love, or more precisely, sex life), which could be characterised as vulgar voyeurism." And "Furthermore, in psychological and sexual profiling of Kundera, Novák largely relies on testimonies of Prague sexologist and once a close friend of Kundera's, Ivo Pondelicek, and unquestioningly accepts them as competent." He was interviewed at 90, which is 50 years or more since events recounted. Another criticism is "Novak's considerations and interpretations of Kundera's prose works almost unambiguously take mimesis as a starting interpretation frame, regardless of the fact that in many cases he expresses aversion towards the mimetic view on literature, typical of Marxist criticism. Novák justifies his analytical approach, based on the conviction that literature reflects outside, historical reality, and thus also the personality and life of the author as a historic person".  Novák is a screenwriter, it seems. Note: names with accents, Ivačić, Novák, Český život, Ponděliček.


23. Fabio S. Magnani. 2021. Milan Kundera's Motorcycles. In Um Motoqueiro Existencialista. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/59334449/MILAN_KUNDERAS_MOTORCYCLES
Presents how the motorcycle figures in different fictions by the author. Also the bicycle is covered. "The Farewell Waltz (1972) features a beautiful nurse who is romantically divided between a famous trumpeter who drives a white limousine and a humble machinist who rides a motorcycle. The motorcycle is used only to represent the different social positions of both rivals." In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,  the bicycle is referred to as a source of subversion and also physical pleasure, prior to sexual intercourse. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the motorcycle encircling Soviet tanks is a symbol of political provocation. This scene involves Tereza. Also Sabina finds the motorcycle part of the world's ugliness. But the motorcycle is her (only?) means of escape to the beautiful countryside, which Magnani describes as ironic. The fullest treatment of the motorcycle is in Slowness, where its speed is used as a means of forgetting. Note, names with accents: Fábio.
See also:
Terence Rajivan Edward. 2026. Motorcycle shops on Boulevard Saint Michel. (A picture.) Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/DbfuAJFAm6u/
Terence Rajivan Edward. 2026. Milan Kundera, motorcycles, and utilitarianism. (An essay.). Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/Dbf_snnMJf_/
(Initial title: is there a paradox of the motorcycle in Milan Kundera?) 

24. Toocheck, Thea J., "The Weight of the Spring: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and the Fate of the  Prague Spring" (2021). Student Publications. 938. https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/938
Starts with information about the Prague Spring. "After his election in January 1968, Alexander Dubcek became the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. As the leader of the nation, he instituted liberal reforms in order to create a program he called socialism with a human face. The reform period of  1968 became known as the Prague Spring." Writers and intellectuals had demanded an end to censorship and freedom of the press. "Art and literature had to display life with a purpose"; Kundera said, "art that was not realistic was said to sap the foundations of socialism." Kafka had been banned. The Prague Spring ended with the Warsaw Pact Invasion, in which Czechoslovakia was invaded to suppress Dubcek's reforms. Heda Kovaly describes how "the Czechs spray-painted Soviet license plate numbers on walls, secretly broadcast radio and television reports, and 
refused soldiers food. They also removed or changed street signs to confuse the Russians." Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is presented as an important representation of events. A quote from the novel: "The representatives of the country had been hauled away like criminals by the Russian army, no one knew where they were, everyone feared for the men’s lives, and hatred for the Russians drugged people like alcohol."  Another quote, regarding Dubcek: "He was so devastated after his six-day detention he could hardly talk; he kept stuttering and gasping for breath, making long pauses between sentences, pauses lasting nearly thirty seconds... one thing was clear: the country  would have to bow to the conqueror. Forever and ever, it will stutter, stammer, gasp for air like Alexander Dubček. The carnival was over. Workaday humiliation had begun." A 1968 essay on Czech Destiny by Kundera is discussed and Vaclav Havel's response: "How much easier it is to tell ourselves how good we were before August and how wonderfully  we behaved in August (when along came the bad guys) than to examine how we actually are  today, who among us remains good and who utterly is not and what we must do in order to be true to our prior achievements." In Kundera's novel, "for writing an editorial condemning the Communists, he [Tomas] is no longer allowed to practice as a surgeon. Instead, he becomes a window washer." Article contains historical information about events afterwards in Czechoslovakia.

25. Maria Popova. 2021. The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Mystery to Ourselves: Milan Kundera on Writing and the Key to Great Storytelling. The Marginalian.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/08/12/milan-kundera-art-of-the-novel-storytelling
She suggests the most terrifying feature of consciousness is: "we can construct models of the real world built upon theories of exquisite internal consistency; that those theories can have zero external validity when tested against reality; and that we rarely get to test them, or wish to test them. Just ask Ptolemy." If clinical it's delusion, if creative art, says Popova. She quotes Kundera's The Art of the Novel on Tolstoy's drafts of Anna Karenina: "The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel."  This wisdom, elaborates Kundera, is the wisdom of uncertainty. She links this to Wisława Szymborska and Richard Feynman. Clarifies Kundera thus: "Great storytelling, then, deals in the illumination of complexity." Says Kundera echoes Adrienne Rich's claim that literary imagination are arts of the possible when he asserts, "A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities." Further connections to James Baldwin, Iris Murdoch, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Ursula Le Guin, Anthon Chekhov, and Jerome Bruner.


26. Maria Popova. 2023. Milan Kundera on Animal Rights and What True Human Goodness Really Means. The Marginalian. Available at:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/10/09/milan-kundera-animal-rights/
Seems mainly composed of quotations. Dostoevsky: "Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals." A Walt Whitman poem. Presents Kundera as challenging Descartes' belief that non-human animals are non-conscious automatons, quoting: "The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse… What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse." Also quotes: "The right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars…" Popova asserts: At the heart of this murderous self-importance is our troubled relationship to power — the power within and between selves, its confused uses and abuses, its role as a mirror for our emotional incompleteness. And then quotes: ""We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotion — love, antipathy, charity, or malice — and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals…Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals." Ends with connections to Samuel Butler, Henry Betson, and St Montgomery - Kepler references earlier.


27. Maria Popova. 2023. Milan Kundera on the Power of Coincidences and the Musicality of How Chance Composes Our Lives. The Marginalian Available at:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/09/11/milan-kundera-coincidenes/
Popova begins with two extreme rival conceptions of reality, one according to which everything is determined by the initial state of the universe - it and the causal laws determined the next state, which determined the next state, and so on, including all you do - and another in which "every event is the product of randomness and probability fluctuations." Our experience of serendipity, of fortunate coincidences, hovers between these two conceptions. Popova takes Kundera to be exploring the significance of this in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed the radio was playing Beethoven." Our lives are deprived of an aesthetic dimension, says Kundera, if we ignore these coincidences meaningful for us. She is also critical: " But his very metaphor undermines the case for pure chance as the conductor of our lives: Music, after all, is not the product of chance but of the composer's deliberate choice in sequencing the notes and silences." Connections made to: Wisława Szymborska (love at first sight), Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (synchronicity), Simone de Beauvoir (closer to the truth), Iris Murdoch (on love and chance), and Borges (on chance and who we are).


28. Mike Sutton.  2024. Milan Kundera's Philosophy of the Novel. Philosophy Now 141:
https://philosophynow.org/issues/161/Milan_Kunderas_Philosophy_of_the_Novel
Identifies Kundera's The Art of the Novel as his major work of literary criticism. Flags what could well be an inconsistency. Kundera refers approvingly to Austrian novelist Herman Broch's claim that the sole reason for existence of the novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. But also Kundera claims "The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx,  it practiced phenomenology (the investigation of the essence of human situations) before the phenomenologists." Presents an interesting attack on the novel. "Much philosophy is essentialist, meaning that everyone and everything is taken to  have a definable set of objective attributes essential to its identity." Assume novels are anti-essentialist in relation to what they depicts - Richard Rorty is referred to as thinking this. But then for essentialist philosophers the novel is unsuitable for philosophy. Sutton says we can reject this view by being anti-essentialist philosophers, such as existentialists (there is no human nature) or postmodernists. Kundera is described as shamelessly postmodern. Rorty and Kundera accept essentialism for science and engineering, but not human affairs, with their moral and emotional aspects. For Kundera, the novel depicts situations but does not morally judge, for example "Is Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or is he the victim of an immoral woman?"  The Prague Spring of 1968 forms a big part of his world and for that reason he is considered a political novelist, even war novelist, but he denies these classifications. It is a backdrop against which personal relationships, with their dilemmas, take place. Sutton depicts the characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as having different lightness or heaviness desires, e.g. Tomas desires lightness but his love for Tereza, the Soviet Regime, and his objections condemn him to heaviness; Franz wants to be heavy but is innately light. Which better: lightness or heaviness? For Sutton, the question is meaningless for the characters are stuck. [Sutton suggests Kundera falls prey to the essentialism he is against here.] Sutton learns from Kundera that good novels are part of the philosophy canon. He quotes Kundera's claim that each novel reveals that things are not as simple as you think. [An impressive review for philosophically-minded general readers, following Kundera's death, I suppose. But ignores misogyny and the anti-Eurocentric opening of Rorty's essay.]


28. Khalid Shakir Hussein. A Corpus-based Stylistic Analysis of Body-Soul and Heaviness-Lightness Metaphors in Kundera's Novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
https://www.academia.edu/29784498/A_Corpus_based_Stylistic_Analysis_of_Body_Soul_and_Heaviness_Lightness_Metaphors_in_Kunderas_Novel_The_Unbearable_Lightness_of_Being
Divides approaches to metaphor into those which regard metaphors as possibly enriching one's conceptual capacities and those which do not accord this role. Detailed theoretical framework and use of WordSmith software. Features this quotation from Kundera: "When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina—what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being." Presents a conventional analysis of the metaphors of heaviness and lightness. A conventional reading says heaviness refers to being low, being slow, being degrading, being unbearable. Lightness refers to being up, being quick, being upgrading, being bearable. (Read by me quickly.)