Milan Kundera is a prose writer and novelist about whom Czech Radio writes that an author born in Czech literature became an author of world literature. For a time he lived in French exile, from which, according to a programme of Vltava, he distanced himself from his first works.[1]
Beginnings and Laughable Loves
According to a quotation from a telephone interview from 2008, his very first short story, I, the Mournful God, was written in 1958, at the age of 29. By then he had been working for a second year on the play The Owners of the Keys and wrote the story in a day or two to rest.[1] Czech Radio adds that this was how the prose writer Kundera was born.[1]
The author now regards the collection Laughable Loves as the beginning of his work. According to the radio programme, it arose from the realization that adulthood means being able to step back from the world and see its inevitable absurdity.[1] In French exile he then removed from his work everything that preceded Laughable Loves: three poetry collections, the play The Owners of the Keys and the essay The Art of the Novel. He does not deny his authorship but does not consider them part of his work.[1]
The collection originally contained ten short stories; the author discarded three, among them I, the Mournful God. For the radio adaptation, however, he released it, so the radio version is one story longer than the last book form that the author produced.[1]
Radio adaptation
According to Czech Radio, the road to the radio form of Laughable Loves began in 1992 in the author's flat on the rue Littré in Paris. Kundera then read excerpts from the novel Immortality and the short story The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire. Converting the whole collection into audio form was completed after sixteen years.[1] The author, the Brno literary and drama department of the radio, the Vltava station and the publishing house Atlantis collaborated on the project. It was directed by Antonín Přidal.[1]
The author required that nothing be heard in the unabridged stories except the narrating voice. The stories were read by Igor Bareš, Ladislav Lakomý, František Derfler, Jan Kolařík and Antonín Přidal.[1] Vltava broadcast The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire in the author's own reading for his milestone birthday and made the other stories available on its website. The programme is dated 15 April 2014.[1]