MetaFilter posts tagged with kundera

Someone is peeling Kundera's onion for him.

lucia__is__dada — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:02:07 -0800

The czech magazine Respekt, known for its investigative reporting, has published a story claiming prize winning author and anti-communist dissident Milan Kundera denounced a young exile who was back in Prague to the communist secret police. “Today at around 1600 hours a student, Milan Kundera, born 1.4.1929 in Brno, resident at the student hall of residence on George VI Avenue in Prague VII, presented himself at this department and reported that a student, Iva Militká, resident at that residence, had told a student by the name of Dlask, also of that residence, that she had met a certain acquaintance of hers, Miroslav Dvořáček, at Klárov in Prague the same day. The said Dvořáček apparently left 1 case in her care, saying he would come to fetch it in the afternoon. (…) Dvořáček had apparently deserted from military service and since the spring of the previous year had possibly been in Germany, where he had gone illegally” a police report says. Dvořáček was "given a sentence of 22 years’ hard labour, a fine of 10,000 crown, forfeiture of all his property and loss of civic rights for ten years". He spent 14 years in labor camps and lives now in Sweden. Milan Kundera denies and is talking about the assassination of an author.

What's an a-political artist to do?

gesamtkunstwerk — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 19:01:24 -0800

David Cerny: frilly pink tanks, babies climbing TV towers, and the president feeding slops to the director of the national gallery out of giant asses. Why, this could only be the NEA gone awry! Actually, it’s Magic Prague, the land of Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, and the artist, like the dissidents of past generations, would rather not do political art , political art. His latest sculpture ridicules the perverse situation in which the country finds itself post Havel: a place where right-wingers like President Klaus and national gallery director Milan Knížák— a past collaborator with secret police, and worse, completely idiotic and banal performance artist — prosper and rub shoulders at the expense of those with a conscience and good taste. Like David Cerny. This isn’t the freshest post, but I’ve been waiting to join Mefi for a long time, and today is the first day I can post.

Mo Nickels — Sat, 08 Sep 2001 16:57:20 -0800

Bisclavret is part of a book I'm reading, "Les Lais de Marie de France." [Modern and original French versions, side-by-side]. Also the tragedy Suréna [French link], by Pierre Corneille, and for a reading group, Genesis from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, as a literary, not religious, text. Last week the group read The Dead from James Joyce's "The Dubliners" and before that Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." What are you reading?