Why are Kundera's novels built in seven parts of such unequal length?

The seven he declined to explain, calling it an archetype of form rather than a game with a lucky number. His asymmetry is the usable half. Proportion is something a reader feels without counting, the way the beauty of a Bach largo comes out of its arithmetic, and a book whose sections all run to one size leaves that sense with nothing to do. Seven parts of equal length, he wrote, would stand there like seven bulky wardrobes side by side. So one part sprawls and the next is over almost before it has started, and the short one is often where the weight of the book has been put.

Why do the erotic scenes read like research?

Because he sets them up as research. Tomas is after what The Unbearable Lightness of Being calls the millionth part, the fraction of a woman that no other woman has, and he expects it to show itself in the moment she stops performing. The appetite carries a question. That is the transferable part. It works on any appetite you like, since a character who wants something for a stated reason turns each attempt into evidence, and a reader starts reading for the finding rather than the outcome. Strip the reason out and you have a bedroom scene. Leave it in and you have a chapter that can be proved wrong.

What is litost doing in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting?

Holding a whole part of the novel together. Kundera stops to define a Czech word he claims cannot be carried into another language, a state of torment that comes over you at the sudden sight of your own misery, and then he pays for the definition with a boy and a girl swimming a river. She is the stronger swimmer. She has done nothing except swim well. He hits her when they reach the bank, and the reader now owns a word that arrived with its worked example attached. Definition is construction here. From that page on the book uses the word as shorthand and spends nothing further on explaining it. Try the same on a behaviour you have watched for years and your own language has no single word for.

How does he write about a police state without writing a political novel?

He handles history the way a stage designer handles a set. A few items stay because the action cannot proceed without them. The rest goes. What he keeps is small and exact. In The Joke, Ludvik watches a hall of fellow students raise their hands to expel him, and what the scene records is the ease of it, arms going up without effort or hesitation, which yields a definition of a person as a creature capable in any situation of consigning a neighbour to death. Solzhenitsyn worked in the opposite direction and put the whole apparatus on paper camp by camp, where the completeness is the achievement. Kundera keeps almost nothing. His argument is that historians already write the history of societies, so a novelist should take what they throw out. He takes the officially organised killing of the dogs. And he takes a young poet who runs from the great erotic occasion of his life because of a shabby pair of undershorts.

Why do his scenes cut straight into each other?

The rule came from Janáček, whose instruction to himself was to destroy the machinery, meaning the exposition and development and transitions by which a piece can be assembled without one idea in it. Janáček put hard juxtaposition where a transition belonged. Kundera did the same thing to the novel, holding that only the sentence with something to say has earned its place. His second reason owes nothing to taste. He called it an anthropological limit. By the time you reach the end of a book you should still be able to remember its beginning, and every paragraph that exists to move a character from a station to a flat is spending memory the ending is going to need.

How does the comedy survive subjects like show trials and exile?

It survives by getting worse. Kundera keeps two shapes for a novel, the counted architecture of the big books and flat-out farce, and The Farewell Party is the farce, running on coincidences a serious novel would be embarrassed to use. He defended the embarrassment. The early novel had not yet signed its pact with plausibility, so Cervantes could put everyone who mattered into one tavern by pure chance without a reader minding, and what a writer takes from that licence is a way of laying a catastrophe bare in its full insignificance. Ludvik spends fifteen years planning his revenge in The Joke and takes it by sleeping with the wife of the man who destroyed him. The man is delighted. He has been trying to get rid of her for years, so the revenge lands on empty air, and the joke from page one has become the shape of a life.

Fiction

Milan Kundera Writing Style

Born April 1, 1929 – Died July 11, 2023

Analysis by Draftly's editorial team · Updated August 15, 2026

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Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Milan Kundera: voice, themes, and technique.

Klement Gottwald came out onto a Prague balcony in February 1948 to address the crowd, bareheaded in the snow, and Clementis took off his own fur hat and put it on him. Clementis was hanged a few years later. The propaganda section brushed him out of the photograph. The hat stayed. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting opens there, with a man deleted and an object he left behind sitting on somebody else's head.

Kundera trained as a composer into his twenties and the training stayed. A part is a movement, he wrote, and the chapters are measures. The Art of the Novel lays his own books out in a table, part by part, with a tempo marking against each one, and he wanted those parts to come out at deliberately different lengths.

His people are made of words rather than histories. Tomas gets no childhood and no face. What he gets is a pair of terms, lightness and weight, and a life built to put them under load. Tereza arrives with her own short list, body and soul and vertigo and weakness, and vertigo is defined along the way as the intoxication of the weak, the wish to fall. About the young poet in Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera said the book reports what went on inside his own head rather than the boy's.

None of that needs Prague. Settle the three or four words your book will keep testing. Give a character an attitude precise enough to define, then refuse yourself his biography. Count your parts, mark their speeds, and cut the paragraphs whose only errand is to walk somebody from one room into the next. The Czech history is the part that will not travel, and it is also the part he pared down hardest.

How to Write Like Milan Kundera

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Milan Kundera.

1
Cut your abstractions down to four
Take a pen to your draft and circle the abstract nouns. Most of them are furniture. Keep only the ones two of your characters would fight about across a table, and get the list down to four or five, because a row that short can be carried in a reader's head while a page of themes is a wish. Then test each survivor for whether it can lose. A word that gets confirmed by every scene it touches has stopped being a question and turned into a message, and it will flatten the book underneath it. Kundera's words are the sort you can hear people argue about in a kitchen. Forgetting. Laughter. The border.
2
Define an attitude, then refuse yourself the childhood
Watch one person in the draft until you can name what they do instead of what was done to them. Kundera watched Tereza until the word vertigo arrived, and he defined it for himself as the intoxication of the weak and the wish to fall, and that definition is the entire specification for a woman the book never gives a past. Broch, whom he admired, hands a reader one fact about Esch. The man has big teeth. Write your own definition in a sentence, delete the backstory you were keeping in reserve to explain it, and see whether the character stands up without the explanation. If she does, a reader will build the rest unaided, which is what Kundera meant when he said he had pictured Kafka's K. as an ice-hockey player from his own neighbourhood and still saw him that way.
3
Give every part a tempo before you draft it
Two ratios fix the speed of a section and one of them is easy to miss. The first is the number of chapters against the number of pages, so a part diced into short chapters over a few pages runs fast. The second is the size of the part measured against the real time it covers. The same handful of short chapters that hurries a decade along will slow an afternoon to a crawl, because each break stops the clock and holds one hour up to the light. Write your part list on a single page. Put a marking beside each entry, the way a score is marked, then order the parts for contrast rather than for plot. The loudest, fastest part of The Unbearable Lightness of Being sits immediately before its quietest.
4
Delete the joins and see who complains
Print one chapter and cross out every arrival, departure and explanation of how anyone got anywhere. Push the remaining scenes up against each other. Read it cold the next morning and mark the places where you genuinely lost your footing, which will be fewer than you feared, and usually one, and usually fixable with a proper noun in the first line. Kundera opens chapters in a new town, a new year and a new marriage without a word of travel between. The joins are the cheapest prose you will ever write and the most tempting, because writing them feels like progress and they can be produced while half asleep.
5
Ask whether a magazine could print the chapter alone
Pick the section you are proudest of and ask whether a magazine could print it on its own. If the answer is yes, it is a guest in your book rather than a part of it. Kundera set two conditions on a novel that runs several kinds of writing at once, and this is the first: pull out any one voice and the whole thing should fall over, the way a Bach fugue cannot spare a line. The second condition is harder on an essayist. No voice may dominate and no voice may be accompaniment, which is the fault he found in Broch, whose novelistic thread took more room than the rest and quietly outranked it. His own model is a part of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that runs an anecdote, a memoir, a piece of criticism, a fable and a straight narrative side by side, and nothing binds the five together except one question about what an angel is.

Milan Kundera's Writing Style

Breakdown of Milan Kundera's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

The characteristic sentence states a proposition and dares you to disagree with it. Plain word order, a concrete subject, a verb doing ordinary work, and no ornament at all, because the load is carried by the nouns he has spent the book defining. Milan Kundera's writing style gets called aphoristic, which fits the sentences and misses the reason they are shaped that way: a claim can be argued with and a flourish cannot, and his structure needs each claim to be available for damage in a later part. He wrote his last novels in French and had the French versions of the Czech ones remade under his own eye. The prose he ended up with is easy to read aloud and hard to paraphrase, which is an unusual combination and a deliberate one.

Vocabulary Complexity

His words are ordinary until he takes one aside and gives it a technical meaning that holds for the length of that book only. Vertigo means the intoxication of the weak. Kitsch means a world with the unpleasant parts edited out. Litost he refuses to translate at all, on the grounds that it cannot be done. Around these terms he keeps the vocabulary domestic, bodies and food and hats and money, so the defined word arrives against a plain background and stays visible. A reader can write out the glossary of any of his novels on an index card, and the fact that this is possible is the clearest evidence of how the books were put together in the first place.

Tone

Amused and grave at the same time, and the amusement is the part with teeth. Kundera took the word agelaste from Rabelais for the person who cannot hear a joke, and he treated that deafness as the condition behind most political cruelty, which puts laughter on the side of accuracy rather than relief. He liked an old proverb about man thinking and God laughing. The register on the page stays level over a hanging and over a bad dinner party alike, and the levelness is what stops the comedy from turning into cruelty, because a narrator who does not raise his voice for the atrocity has not raised it for the vanity either. Readers who want to be told how to feel find him cold. He is refusing to do their part of the work.

Pacing

Time in his books is spent in wildly different currencies from page to page. Tomas loses a career in a paragraph, going from surgeon to window cleaner to driver in the sort of summary another novelist would have made the spine of the book, while a single conversation about whether to leave the country gets a chapter to itself. Fifteen years in The Joke pass in the gap between two parts. Then the final section slows down to a dance in a hotel and a dog that cannot walk. The rule underneath is that duration follows the argument rather than the events, so the pages pile up wherever a word of his is being tested and thin out wherever a life is merely proceeding.

Dialogue Style

Instead of writing the quarrel, he sometimes prints the dictionary. A part of The Unbearable Lightness of Being called Words Misunderstood is laid out as a short glossary of the terms Franz and Sabina both use daily, woman, fidelity, music, darkness, parades, cemetery, strength, living in truth, with his meaning and hers set out one after the other. They are in love and speaking the same language and every word is a different word. The effect on the rest of his dialogue is that talk carries no reliable information about agreement, and two people can finish an exchange satisfied and further apart than when they started, which is the situation he thinks most conversations are actually in.

Descriptive Approach

Rooms in his novels are barely furnished, and this is the stage designer's economy applied down at eye level. A pig on the collective farm in the last part of The Unbearable Lightness of Being has a name, Mefisto, and gets more physical attention than most of the interiors in the book. Tereza's suitcase is heavy and we are told so twice, because the weight is the point and the pattern on the fabric is not. What gets described tends to be an item somebody is wearing or carrying wrongly, since that is where an object reports on a social position, and a shabby pair of undershorts can end a love affair before it starts. Everything else stays unlit.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Milan Kundera uses across their work.

Part titles that hand over the categories

Look at the contents page of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the book has already told you what it is about. Lightness and Weight. Soul and Body. Words Misunderstood. The Grand March. Two of the titles turn up twice, so the second occurrence arrives as a measurement of the first, and a reader who has been through part two reads part four with a set of expectations the book intends to disappoint. The same trick runs through The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where two parts share one name and two more share another. The cost sits at the front. You need your categories settled before a contents page can do any of this for you, which is why he fixed the list of words first and cut the parts afterwards.

The chapter as one move

His chapters are short and each one holds a single move, an exchange, a decision, sometimes one image and a line of comment. That is what makes the tempo adjustable, since a part built out of small pieces can be re-timed by moving them, and nothing has to be rewritten because no chapter carries a join into the next. Cortázar took the same block construction and handed the order to the reader, printing a table of instructions with two routes through Hopscotch. Kundera keeps the order for himself and fixes it to the millimetre. Both need the same discipline underneath. A block has to be finished enough to survive being moved, which means resisting the sentence at the end that reaches forward into what comes next.

One sound, two sources

In the part of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting about angels, Kundera separates a behaviour from its cause. There is a laughter that comes from the devil, at the discovery that the world has no meaning, and a laughter that comes from the angel, at the discovery that the world is beautifully arranged. The two make the same noise. Once a reader has been told that, a laughing character stops being legible, and every subsequent laugh in the book has to be worked out from the situation instead of read off the face. Any signal will take this treatment. Give one behaviour two incompatible sources, state both, and you have retired a piece of shorthand that most novels lean on without noticing.

One stretch of years, four incompatible uses

The Joke gives the same fifteen years to four people who cannot agree about them, and they are not four perspectives on one truth. They are four incompatible uses for the same events. Ludvik needs the years to have been a crime committed against him, Jaroslav needs them to have been the survival of a folk tradition, Kostka needs them to have been providence, and Helena needs them to have been a love story. The events hold still while the meaning shifts under them. What makes it work is that each narrator is right about something the others cannot see, so a reader ends up holding four accounts and no verdict, which is the condition Kundera thought a novel existed to produce.

The outcome given away early

Sabina gets a letter in the middle of The Unbearable Lightness of Being telling her that Tomas and Tereza are dead, killed when a truck came off the road. Hundreds of pages remain. He has spent the suspense on purpose. The last part goes back to a time before the accident and gives itself over to a dog with cancer and a dance in a village hotel, which it could not have done with a reader still waiting to find out what happens. Killing the question of the outcome is what frees the ending to be about the weight of a life rather than its plot. The technique is expensive and it only pays where the book has another question running underneath the first one.

The borrowed name given a body

Tereza turns up at Tomas's flat with a heavy suitcase and a copy of Anna Karenina under her arm, and the book is a badge, her way of announcing that she belongs to a world of soul and not of bodies. Later they buy a puppy and call it Karenin. The allusion has stopped being a reference at that point, because it has acquired four legs, a routine, a bad leg and eventually a tumour, and the last part of the novel is its dying. That is the whole method with a borrowed name. An allusion sitting on the page is a compliment paid to a writer you admire, and an allusion given a body is something that can be lost.

Literary Devices Milan Kundera Uses

Literary devices that define Milan Kundera's style.

Variation form

A book in variation form does not build one action toward one ending. It states a question and then plays it again in other keys, which is why The Book of Laughter and Forgetting can run seven parts whose people mostly do not meet and still hold. Coherence arrives from the theme instead of the cast. Kundera argues that unity of action can be made deliberately fragile, or dropped, provided the thematic binding is tight enough to take the strain, and he points back to the licence Sterne took when he treated a novel as a grand game. What it buys is compression. A writer can drop a character the moment their variation has been played, rather than dragging them through three hundred pages because the plot needs a body.

The character announced as an invention

Partway through The Unbearable Lightness of Being the narrator stops and tells you the people in it were not born of a mother. Tomas came out of a German saying about how a thing that happens once might as well not have happened, and Tereza came out of a stomach rumbling. This should wreck the book and it does the reverse, because the question a reader was carrying quietly turns over. You stop asking whether any of it happened. You start asking whether a person could be like that, which is the only question the novel was ever able to answer, since existence for Kundera means what a human being is capable of rather than what the record shows.

The theme-word

Kundera borrowed the tone row from Schoenberg to describe the handful of fundamental words a novel keeps returning to, and he said the book stands on those few categories the way a house stands on its pillars. A theme-word is not a symbol. A symbol stands for something, while a theme-word is an open question compressed into a noun, and it earns its keep by being examined from a different angle in each part until the reader can no longer use it carelessly. The row of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is forgetting, laughter, angels, litost and the border. Whenever a novel abandons its themes and settles for telling the story, he wrote, it goes flat, and the flatness is measurable as the moment a reader stops asking what a word means and starts skimming for what happens.

The gesture that owns the person

Immortality begins at a swimming pool. A woman of about sixty finishes her lesson, turns at the edge of the water and waves to her instructor, and the wave belongs to a girl of twenty. The narrator sees a charm that has outlasted the body it was issued to, and Agnes is born out of the gesture on the spot. Kundera then turns the usual assumption inside out: there are far more people in the world than there are gestures, so a gesture cannot be the property of an individual, and it is nearer the truth to say the gesture uses the person. Build a character this way and you start from something you have actually seen, which is a better foundation than a biography you have made up.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Milan Kundera.

Writing the definitions and skipping the arithmetic

The sentences that get quoted are the ones that name a thing, and they are the easiest part of him to counterfeit. They are also the part that depends most on everything around it. A definition in Kundera lands at a fixed point in a counted structure, after the scene that has made the reader want a word for what they saw, and before the parts that will test the word and damage it. Lift the definitions out of that and you have a commonplace book. Readers can tell the difference within a page, because a maxim with nothing under it asks to be admired, and one that has been paid for asks to be used.

Letting the essayist outrank the story

Kundera set the rule for this himself and then applied it to a writer he loved. Broch put a novel, a story, a piece of reportage, a poem and an essay into one structure, which he called the discovery, and Kundera called it unfulfilled, because the novelistic line took more room than the others and outranked them in every way that counts, leaving four voices as accompaniment. That is the failure imitators reach fastest. The reflective voice is the most enjoyable one to write. It comes out at speed. Inventing people is somebody else's problem. Within thirty pages the characters are examples, the scenes are illustrations, and a reader who wanted a novel is reading a lecture with names in it.

Borrowing his words instead of finding your own

Lightness, weight, kitsch, litost. Those are load-bearing in his books because his books were built to test them, and they arrive on a borrowed page already decided, which is the opposite of what they do at home. A theme-word has to be capable of turning on the writer. The reason litost works is that Kundera wanted to know what it was, went looking, and found a boy hitting a girl who had swum well, an answer that costs the concept something. Pick a word you have already lost an argument about. If you can predict what your book will conclude about it, choose a different one, because the row of words is your list of open questions and a closed question makes a dead part.

Letting the regime supply the seriousness

A dictatorship in the background will make almost any manuscript feel weightier than it is, and the weight is on loan. Kundera admits history only where it produces a position a person could not otherwise be put in. Tereza listens to a recording of Dubcek back from Moscow, and what the broadcast delivers is not the politics but the pauses, a man gasping for breath between his own sentences, and out of that comes weakness as a category the rest of the book can use. That is the standard. If the tanks are doing the work your scene should be doing, the reader will remember the century and forget your people, and a page of research about the century is available to them elsewhere.

Books

Explore Milan Kundera's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Milan Kundera's writing style and techniques.

Why are Kundera's novels built in seven parts of such unequal length?: The seven he declined to explain, calling it an archetype of form rather than a game with a lucky number. His asymmetry is the usable half. Proportion is something a reader feels without counting, the way the beauty of a Bach largo comes out of its arithmetic, and a book whose sections all run to one size leaves that sense with nothing to do. Seven parts of equal length, he wrote, would stand there like seven bulky wardrobes side by side. So one part sprawls and the next is over almost before it has started, and the short one is often where the weight of the book has been put.
Why do the erotic scenes read like research?: Because he sets them up as research. Tomas is after what The Unbearable Lightness of Being calls the millionth part, the fraction of a woman that no other woman has, and he expects it to show itself in the moment she stops performing. The appetite carries a question. That is the transferable part. It works on any appetite you like, since a character who wants something for a stated reason turns each attempt into evidence, and a reader starts reading for the finding rather than the outcome. Strip the reason out and you have a bedroom scene. Leave it in and you have a chapter that can be proved wrong.
What is litost doing in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting?: Holding a whole part of the novel together. Kundera stops to define a Czech word he claims cannot be carried into another language, a state of torment that comes over you at the sudden sight of your own misery, and then he pays for the definition with a boy and a girl swimming a river. She is the stronger swimmer. She has done nothing except swim well. He hits her when they reach the bank, and the reader now owns a word that arrived with its worked example attached. Definition is construction here. From that page on the book uses the word as shorthand and spends nothing further on explaining it. Try the same on a behaviour you have watched for years and your own language has no single word for.
How does he write about a police state without writing a political novel?: He handles history the way a stage designer handles a set. A few items stay because the action cannot proceed without them. The rest goes. What he keeps is small and exact. In The Joke, Ludvik watches a hall of fellow students raise their hands to expel him, and what the scene records is the ease of it, arms going up without effort or hesitation, which yields a definition of a person as a creature capable in any situation of consigning a neighbour to death. Solzhenitsyn worked in the opposite direction and put the whole apparatus on paper camp by camp, where the completeness is the achievement. Kundera keeps almost nothing. His argument is that historians already write the history of societies, so a novelist should take what they throw out. He takes the officially organised killing of the dogs. And he takes a young poet who runs from the great erotic occasion of his life because of a shabby pair of undershorts.
Why do his scenes cut straight into each other?: The rule came from Janáček, whose instruction to himself was to destroy the machinery, meaning the exposition and development and transitions by which a piece can be assembled without one idea in it. Janáček put hard juxtaposition where a transition belonged. Kundera did the same thing to the novel, holding that only the sentence with something to say has earned its place. His second reason owes nothing to taste. He called it an anthropological limit. By the time you reach the end of a book you should still be able to remember its beginning, and every paragraph that exists to move a character from a station to a flat is spending memory the ending is going to need.
How does the comedy survive subjects like show trials and exile?: It survives by getting worse. Kundera keeps two shapes for a novel, the counted architecture of the big books and flat-out farce, and The Farewell Party is the farce, running on coincidences a serious novel would be embarrassed to use. He defended the embarrassment. The early novel had not yet signed its pact with plausibility, so Cervantes could put everyone who mattered into one tavern by pure chance without a reader minding, and what a writer takes from that licence is a way of laying a catastrophe bare in its full insignificance. Ludvik spends fifteen years planning his revenge in The Joke and takes it by sleeping with the wife of the man who destroyed him. The man is delighted. He has been trying to get rid of her for years, so the revenge lands on empty air, and the joke from page one has become the shape of a life.

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