As The Unbearable Lightness of Being author Milan Kundera dies, why was his first novel ‘The Joke’ banned?

Milan Kundera, who is best known for his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died aged 94. A spokesperson for the Milan Kundera Library, which is situated in Milan’s native city of Brno, confirmed that he had died after a ‘prolonged illness.’

The New York Times reported that Milan's "run of popular books began with “The Joke” which was published to acclaim in 1967, around the time of the Prague Spring, then banned with a vengeance after Soviet-led troops crushed that experiment in “Socialism with a human face” a few months later. He completed his final novel, “The Festival of Insignificance” (2015) when he was in his mid-80s and living comfortably in Paris.”

In 1998, the actor Daniel Day-Lewis starred opposite Juliette Binoche in the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being that was directed by Philip Kaufman. The Guardian reported in 2009 that “Day-Lewis once remarked that the film he most regretted making was The Unbearable Lightness of Being because he was forced to speak English with a Czech inflection, and this kept him at an arm's length from the material.”

Milan Kundera, who was born in 1929, in Brno, reportedly first wanted to become a musician. As well as studying composition in Prague, he graduated from the film faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts.

Milan Kundera saw both the Nazis invade and annex Czech lands in 1939, as well as witnessing the communist capture of Czechoslovakia, which took place in 1948. He began as an enthusiastic communist and joined the party when he was 19. After being expelled, he was readmitted in 1956. 

The Times reported that in 1979 Milan was stripped of his Czechoslovakian citizenship “and his exile in France became permanent-he became a French citizen-after the French publication of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” The Times goes on to say that “There was some late reconciliation with his homeland in 2019 when Kundera and his wife had their Czech citizenship restored.”

Some of Milan Kundera’s most famous quotes from ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost”

“If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all”

“If you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes”

I also personally love this particular quote by Milan Kundera about novels: “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.”