Biography paints author in bearable lightness

With the recent Chinese language publication of the biography of Milan Kundera, A la recherche de Milan Kundera ("in search of Milan Kundera"), readers now have a new way, aside from his best-sellers, to better understand the 93-year-old Czech-born writer, who has been absent from the public eye for nearly four decades.

Kundera has been influencing generations of Chinese readers since his writing was first introduced to the country in the late 1980s.

One of his representative works, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has sold more than 3 million copies since the Shanghai Translation Publishing House released its Chinese version in 2003, the publisher says.

Writer Xu Zechen, 44, winner of one of China's highest literary honors, the Mao Dun Literature Prize, says that Kundera's works have deepened Chinese authors' understanding about literature, together with those of the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

"Kundera updated our concept of novels," Xu says.

Jing Kaixuan, translator of the 1987 version of Kundera's Farewell Waltz and the 1989 version of Life Is Elsewhere, said during a 2014 interview that it's the philosophy in Kundera's works that makes him a world-class writer. He notes that Kundera touches upon many issues of great value and discusses them in depth.

Kundera also inspires Chinese readers to turn their attention to Central and Eastern European literature and thoughts as an alternative to Western modernist works, Jing said. He himself has translated several works of Czech writer Ivan Klima.

Kundera was born in Brno in the former Czechoslovakia, today part of the Czech Republic, in 1929. He learned to play the piano at a young age from his father, a renowned pianist, but in college majored in literature and aesthetics, before transferring to film direction and script writing.

He rose to fame with his first full-length novel, The Joke, published in 1967.

A year later, in his home country, all of his works were banned and he was expelled from his teaching position at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

In 1975, Kundera went into exile in France with his wife Vera, teaching for a living while continuing his writing. He was stripped of his Czechoslovakian citizenship in 1979 and, in 1981, became a naturalized French citizen. In 1993, Czechoslovakia became two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

His Czech citizenship was restored in 2019 and the following year, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize for Literature, given by the Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague.

Kundera shuns publicity and has turned down media appearance requests since the mid-1980s.

However, A la recherche de Milan Kundera, by Le Monde reporter Ariane Chemin, reveals hitherto unknown stories about the writer, and events surrounding allegations he was a "police informer".

A 2008 Czech magazine article reported that, according to a police report, in 1950, Kundera had denounced Czech pilot and political dissident Miroslav Dvoracek, which resulted in the latter being sent to prison for 14 years.

Kundera denied the claims, stating that he didn't even know him. Eleven internationally recognized writers, including Nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk and Marquez, came to his defense in November 2008.

Chemin managed to interview his wife Vera, as well as people of various occupations and background who were linked to the couple, indicating a high level of authenticity and credibility, the publisher says.

Translator of the biography, Wang Dongliang, French language professor at Peking University, won the literature translation award of the prestigious Lu Xun Literature Prize in 2007, for translating Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Released in 1979, it was the author's first published work following his exile to France.

The publication of Chemin's biography is just one of many recent Kundera-related projects that the Shanghai Translation Publishing House has underway.

New versions of 15 of his works will be published this year, with the first five of them already launched, according to Lin Yunyu, from the Shanghai publisher.

Notably, Kundera has also licensed the digital copyrights of these works to the publishing house. It's the author's first cooperation of this kind with a Chinese publisher.

E-books of his representative works, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Joke and Ignorance, have been available on major e-book platforms such as Kindle, WeChat Read and iGet since May 10.

An audiobook of The Unbearable Lightness of Being was also launched on multiple domestic audio-sharing platforms, such as Ximalaya FM.

According to Liang Yongan, a retired literature scholar of Fudan University who recorded an introduction for the audiobook, this novel is not far from the nonmaterial lives of contemporary youths, who have difficulty in recognizing values in the globalized era.

Liang's posts on video-sharing platform Bilibili with his observations about young people from a literary perspective are popular with Chinese youngsters. One video of his, about love and marriage, received more than 5 million hits.

The Shanghai-based publishing house has been leveraging its digital copyrights for a group of important authors, including Japanese-born British Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, his countryman Haruki Murakami and Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986).

Last year, it simultaneously published a print, e-book and audiobook of Ishiguro's latest work, Klara and the Sun.

"We've been attaching great importance to copyright protection and operation, so that the copyright holders will develop confidence in the Chinese market," says Zhu Lingyun, deputy editor-in-chief of the publisher.

She adds that the publisher has hired a team to supervise and crack down on piracy, and it has strong legal support to protect the rights of the authors and translators.

According to Zhu, the publisher started exploring digital publishing in 2012.Their foreign counterparts used to be unfamiliar with market conditions in China, which resulted in negotiations for digital copyright licensing frequently reaching deadlock.

However, they have managed to gain the trust of the copyright holders, who come from various cultural backgrounds, and by the end of last year, 95 percent of its copyright purchases included digital rights licensing.