Milan Kundera, Odyssée des illusions trahies (2022)

One of the most widely read writers in the world, Milan Kundera has made the novel his home. However, he began by exploring other artistic fields: the piano and poetry, through which he exercised his pen as a young singer of the communist ideal. As a professor at the Prague Film Academy, Milan Kundera trained the future leaders of the Czechoslovak New Wave (Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel, Vera Chytilova) and took part in the creative freedom of the 1960s. In 1967, his first novel, "The Joke", was published. It tells the story of the broken destiny of a communist student sentenced to hard labor for an unfortunate joke. But in August 1968, the Soviet tanks crush the "Prague Spring": the writer is fired, banned from publishing and monitored. It is in France that he finds refuge.