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    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "Nobody will Laugh"
    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "Nobody will Laugh"
    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "Nobody will Laugh"
    Ebook43 pages32 minutes

    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "Nobody will Laugh"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "Nobody will Laugh", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMar 22, 2018
    ISBN9781410388612
    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "Nobody will Laugh"

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      A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "Nobody will Laugh" - Gale

      17

      Nobody Will Laugh

      Milan Kundera

      1969

      Introduction

      Czech writer Milan Kundera, author of the classic postmodern novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), foregrounds concerns with love and self-understanding in much of his fiction. He began his career under the Communist system, with his native Czechoslovakia part of the USSR's Eastern Bloc, but gradually came to reject that system in favor of intellectual independence. For him, this led to life as an exile in France.

      Kundera's concerns with romance and an ironic view of the self are foregrounded already in the title of his collection Laughable Loves, in which one of the stories redoubles the irony—to begin with, most people in love do not find it laughable—with its own title, Nobody Will Laugh. The story is, in fact, replete with humorous overtones and circumstances, although the narrator, a Mr. Klima, is not exactly left laughing in the end. An extraordinary time in Klima's life starts when, shortly after his successful publication of a study in an important arts journal, he receives a letter from an intellectual admirer hoping for a favor. How Klima responds to this request—and further reacts to the consequences of his responses—speaks to how easily (and amusingly) people can misjudge the import of their own actions. The story's collection, Smesné lásky, was originally published in Czech in three volumes in the mid-1960s and then as a single volume in 1969. The English translation by Suzanne Rappaport, Laughable Loves, was issued in 1974.

      Author Biography

      Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, to Ludvik Kundera, a pianist and music professor, and Milada Kunderová in the city of Brno, in Moravia, a region in central Czechoslovakia (now in the eastern Czech Republic). Ludvik Kundera had studied under and collaborated with famed composer Leos Janacek. As a boy, Kundera learned to play piano from his father and also followed him into the academic field of musicology. By age sixteen, Kundera had published Czech translations of verse by Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and in 1946, he published a surrealist poem of his own in the journal Mladé archy (Young notebooks).

      Upon finishing his secondary-school studies in 1948 Kundera matriculated at Charles University, in the Czechoslovak capital of Prague, studying literature and aesthetics. That same year, he joined the Communist Party, which had just taken control of the nation's government. Czechoslovakia was behind the Cold War's Iron Curtain, under the sway of the Soviet Union. In 1950, Kundera and another writer, Jan Trefulka, were expelled from

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