15/07/2025
/ Milan Kundera /
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
"Milan Kundera was a Czech-born French novelist. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979 but he was re-granted Czech citizenship in 2019. Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Prior to the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia banned his books. He led a low-profile life and rarely spoke to the media. He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was also a nominee for other awards. Kundera was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, in 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2000 Herder Prize. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia.
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Born: April 1, 1929, Brno, Czechoslovakia
Died: July 11, 2023, Paris, France
Occupation: Novelist
Citizenship: Czechoslovakia (until 1979), Stateless (1979–1981), France (from 1981), Czech Republic (from 2019)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting pt. 1, sec. 2 (1980) (translation by Michael Henry Heim)
