I chose to write about the topic of Milan Kundera for the Turkish Literature group. He was born in 1929 in Czechoslovakia but ended up living in exile in France for most of his life. Milan is a writer that not only writes in Czech but in French as well. Until 1989 the book of Kundera were banned to be read in Czechoslovakia because of their Communist government, but after the Velvet Revolution the books were allowed to be bought and read again. He was born to a middle class family and not only loved to write but learned how to play the piano from his father. He would later to go on to study musicology and musical composition from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. When he was a teenager he became a part of the Communist Party however he wanted to reform Czechoslovakian communism. Even though he went to many schools and got a good education he was still very committed to the communist party and doing things for that as well.

Many of his earlier works were strictly written about communism. Although he wanted to be considered as a novelist many people had a hard time considering him and such as only saw him as a political writer. As time went on however the considerable amount of political talk started to diminish from his writings. One of the most interesting facts that I found, was that his writing influenced the future thoughts and philosophy of Nietzsche. The first novel he wrote called The Joke was banned and people in Czechoslovakia were not allowed to purchase or read the book. He criticized the Soviet invasion and the start of Communism there which caused for this book to be banned. His second book was written in France called The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. This was a story of different people and their opposition to Communism. Much of the writing includes his thought and what was going on while he was in exile.

Much of his writing is about immortality and characters that he makes up and always seems to be concerned with the physical appearences of the characters. He believes that the connection between what he writes and the imagination of the readers is closely related. He wants his writings to be thought of deeply and wants the readers own imagination to help mold the stories that he writes. He was also known to not only write one novel at a time but start many so that he could develop his ideas as he wrote on other novels. This would help him not only have one idea for a book but vary what his thoughts were. I think that this is a good idea and would help a writer who wanted to overlap and get all of his opinions and ideas into all of his books. He sounds like he knew what he believed in and he stuck to that and didn't let others change his opinions. From the sounds of his books it seems as though it was about people that a reader could relate to and truly understand.