Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera (1929. 4. 1. ~ 2023. 7.11.)
A Czech and French novelist. He is also classified as a post-modernist writer.
Born in Czechoslovakia, he went into exile in France after 1975 and acquired French citizenship in 1981. He graduated from the Film Department of Prague Academy of Arts and served as a professor at the same university. He originally wrote in Czech, but switched to French in 1993. He personally translated his previous Czech works into French between 1985 and 1987. Therefore, the French version is also considered the definitive version, and most of Kundera's works translated into Korean are based on the French translation. Kundera himself even stated that his novels should be classified as French literature.
During his time in Czech, Kundera was a reformist Marxist. He joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1948 but was expelled in 1950 for alleged anti-party activities. He was reinstated in 1956 but expelled again in 1970. During this period, Kundera participated in the Prague Spring of 1968, and this experience led him to write his masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera's works were banned in his homeland, Czechoslovakia, until the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which led to the collapse of the Czechoslovak Communist regime.
On December 3, 2019, the Czech government restored his Czech nationality. Although Kundera had previously refused, it is said that he was persuaded by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš during a personal visit in 2018. This was 40 years after he was stripped of his nationality in 1979. He currently holds only Czech nationality, and holds citizenship of both France and Czech. Most of his novels and essays have been translated and published domestically.
He died of natural causes at his apartment in Paris, France on July 11, 2023.
○ Human life is only once. The reason we can't decide which of our decisions are good or bad is because we only have one choice in a given situation. We don't have a second, third, or fourth life to compare different decisions.
○ Uncertainty is one of the most beautiful aspects of life.
○ People take things lightly because they don't consider the increasingly heavier process of life.
○ True adventure comes when it's not necessary to be found.
○ What really matters is not how you think about something, but what you think.
○ As long as we are alive, we are independent and free beings.
○ To become free, humans must endure the pain of decisions and choices.
○ Truth can fight against all lies about our lives.
○ Love is a force that gives depth and weight to human life.
○ Do not worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
○ The only way to fight death is to live.
○ Humanity's struggle against power is also a struggle of memory against oblivion.
○ The first step to eliminating a nation is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, eliminate its culture and history. And then someone writes new books, creates a new culture, and makes a new history. Soon, that nation begins to forget who it is and what it was in the past.
○ Human time does not go in a circle. It goes straight ahead.
○ People always cry out that they want to create a better future. That is not true. The future is an indifferent space that no one cares about. The past is full of life, it annoys us, provokes us, insults us, and tempts us to destroy it or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
○ Perfection is impossible in a single life.
○ A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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