ABSTRACT

It is not, perhaps, surprising that the border should function as a potent symbol in the work of the Czech novelist, Milan Kundera. The dissemination and reception of his work have been mediated by the closings and openings of the Czech border since the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 by Soviet tanks. When we remind ourselves of the well known facts about his life and work - that his books were banned in Czechoslovakia from 1969, and that voluntary exile at a teaching post in France became irrevocable once his Czech citizenship was rescinded after the publication of The Book o f Laughter and Forgetting in 1979 - we can see that there are fraught relations between the carefully policed borders separating western Europe from the eastern bloc, and the meanings produced by Kundera’s texts. These relations dictate such fundamental issues of literary reception as language (Kundera’s novels are known primarily in translation, rather than his native Czech), audience (in terms of composition and expectation), and the media construction of Kundera as a dissident novelist.2