So it's a joke in the actual sense of the word. This joke starts the development of the story in the novel. So it was a joke which was written in this letter. It was a little letter sent by a student to his fiancee or to his girlfriend yes, which was censored. (Silence) Milan Kundera The title of the book 'The Joke' has many meanings, firstly it's an actual joke. His last novel was Ignorance (2000), written in French but first published in Spanish. His works, through his novels and also his essays ( The Art of the Novel, 1987), set up subtle meditation on the cultural origins and the modernness of European civilisation. The publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 1984 and its adaptation by Philip Kaufman in 1988 gained him international recognition, as confirmed by the 1990 publication of Immortality. From then on, he wrote in both Czech and French (Slowness, 1995), taught at the Paris's EHESS, and became a naturalised citizen in 1981.

In 1975, the publishing year of The Joke, a novel that was immediately seen as being critical of totalitarianism, he exiled himself in France and was stripped of his nationality in 1979. But his erratic relations with the Communist Party, with which he affiliated himself in 1948 before being crossed from their list in 1950, reintegrated in 1956 and definitively banished in 1970 because of his role in the Prague Spring, earned him the censorship of his work during the Soviet repression. He gained recognition very early on for his innovative poetry ( Monologues, 1957). Born in 1929 to a family of intellectuals and artists (his father was a musicologist and pianist), Milan Kundera studied literature, aesthetics and then cinema at a Prague university.

The Joke by Milan Kundera