“This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself.”

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About Milan Kundera

Czech and French novelist

Milan Kundera was a Czech and French novelist. He is known for his fiction and for a career shaped by exile, first in France and later through French citizenship. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975 and became a French citizen in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, and he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.

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Books by Milan Kundera

Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí

1997

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Kniha smíchu a zapomnění

1987

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Valčík na rozloučenou

1976

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L'Ignorance

2003

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La lenteur

2006

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