Milan Kundera (April 1, 1929 - July 11, 2023)

Czech and French novelist. He is also classified as a writer of the postmodernism genre.

He was born in Czechoslovakia, but after 1975 he went into exile in France and obtained French citizenship in 1981. He graduated from the film department of the Prague Academy of Arts and worked as a professor at the same school. Originally he wrote in Czech, but from 1993 he wrote in French, and translated his previous Czech works into French himself between 1985 and 1987. Therefore, the French version is also considered the original text, and most of Kundera's works translated into Korean are based on the French translation. Even Kundera himself said that his novels should be classified as French novels.

While living in Czech Republic at the time, Kundera was a reformist Marxist, and joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1948, but was expelled from the party in 1950 on charges of anti-party activities. He was reinstated in 1956, but was expelled again in 1970. During this period, Kundera participated in the Prague Spring of 1968, and based on this experience, he wrote his masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera's works were banned in his home country of Czechoslovakia until the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which led to the collapse of the communist regime.

On December 3, 2019, he regained Czech citizenship by the Czech government. It is said that Kundera had been refusing this reinstated citizenship, but was persuaded by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš when he visited him in 2018. This was 40 years after he was stripped of his citizenship in 1979. Currently, he holds only Czech citizenship, but has both French and Czech citizenship. Most of his novels and essays have been translated and published in Korea.

He died of natural causes at his apartment in Paris, France on July 11, 2023.

○ Human life is only once. The reason we cannot decide which of our decisions are good and which are bad is because we can only make one decision in a given situation. We don't have a second, third, or fourth life to compare our decisions.

○ Uncertainty is one of the most beautiful aspects of life.

○ People take things lightly because they don't consider the increasingly heavy process of life.

○ True adventure comes when you don't need to discover it.

○ What really matters is not how you think about something, but what you think about.

○ 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 stand up to all the lies about our lives.

○ Love is a force that gives depth and weight to human life.

○ Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

○ The only way to fight death is to live.

○ Man's struggle against power is also the struggle of memory against oblivion.

○ The first step in the destruction of a nation is the wiping out of its memory. Destroy the books, eliminate the culture, the history. Then somebody writes new books, creates new culture, invents a new history. And soon the nation forgets what it was and what it has been.

○ Human time does not go back in circles. It goes straight ahead.

○ People always claim that they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is a cold space that nobody cares about. The past is full of life, it annoys us, provokes us, insults us, tempts us to destroy it or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

○ In a single life, there can be no perfection.

○ People who yearn to leave their homes are unhappy.