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The Joke (novel)
''The Joke'' ( cs, Žert) is Milan Kundera's first novel, originally published in 1967. It describes how a student's private joke derails his life, and the entwined stories of his lovers and friends grappling with the shifting roles of folk traditions and religion under Communist Czechoslovakia. Plot Like most of Kundera's novels, the book is divided into seven parts; the parts switch among the viewpoints of four characters. Ludvik Jahn was expelled from school and the Communist Party for his irreverence. Jaroslav is an old friend with a cimbalom band which Ludvik had once played in. Helena Zemánková is a radio reporter going to interview Jaroslav, and the wife of Ludvik's old nemesis. Kostka is a Christian foil for Ludvik who spars with his life philosophy. The novel opens with Ludvik back in his hometown in Moravia for the first time in years, startled to recognize the woman cutting his hair, though neither acknowledges the other. He reflects on the joke that changed his life ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera (, ; born 1 April 1929) is a Czech writer who went into exile in France in 1975, becoming a naturalised French citizen in 1981. Kundera's Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, then conferred again in 2019. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores". Kundera's best-known work is ''The Unbearable Lightness of Being''. Prior to the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the communist régime in Czechoslovakia banned his books. He leads a low-profile life and rarely speaks to the media. He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was also a nominee for other awards. He was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, in 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2000 Herder Prize. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor. Biography Kundera was born in 1929 at Purkyňova 6 (6 Purkyně Street) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moravian Traditional Music
Moravian traditional music or Moravian folk music represents a part of the European musical culture connected with the Moravian region of the Czech Republic. Styles of Moravian traditional music vary by location and subject, but much of it is characterized by a specific melodic and harmonic texture related to the Eastern European musical world. According to Czech musicologist Jiří Plocek, Moravia is the area where the European East musically meets the West. Moravian folk bands are mainly centered on a string section and a large cimbalom, which are often complemented by other instruments. Moravian traditional music influenced Czech classical composers, such as Antonín Dvořák, Bedřich Smetana and Leoš Janáček, who was at the forefront of the Moravian folklore movement. Towards the end of the 20th century, Moravian folk music had a noticeable influence on the Czech jazz scene, and folk songs have been adapted into rock bands' repertoires. Today, there are many festivals st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Czech New Wave
The Czechoslovak New Wave (also Czech New Wave) is a term used for the Czechoslovak filmmakers who started making movies in the 1960s. The directors commonly included are Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Ivan Passer, Pavel Juráček, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Jaromil Jireš, Evald Schorm, Hynek Bočan, Juraj Herz, Juraj Jakubisko, Štefan Uher and others. The movement was sometimes called the "Czechoslovak film miracle". Overview The films touched on themes which for earlier film makers in the communist countries had rarely managed to avoid the objections of the censor, such as the misguided youths of Czechoslovak society portrayed in Miloš Forman's '' Black Peter'' (1963) and '' Loves of a Blonde'' (1965), or those caught in a surrealistic whirlwind in Věra Chytilová's '' Daisies'' (1966) and Jaromil Jireš' '' Valerie and Her Week of Wonders'' (1970). The films often expressed dark and absurd humour in opposition to social realist films of the 1950s. The Czechoslovak ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Joke (film)
''The Joke'' ( cs, Žert) is a 1969 Czechoslovak film by director Jaromil Jireš. It is considered one of the last films of the Czech New Wave movement. Based on Milan Kundera's 1967 novel of the same name, ''The Joke'' tells the story of Ludvík Jahn, a man expelled from the Czechoslovak Communist Party for an idle joke to his girlfriend, and the revenge he later seeks through adultery. The film was produced during the political liberalization of the 1968 Prague Spring and contains many scenes which satirize and criticize the country's communist leadership. Amos Vogel wrote that the film was "possibly the most shattering indictment of totalitarianism to come out of a Communist country". Plot The scientist Ludvík Jahn returns to his hometown after two decades away. He is interviewed by Helena, an attractive older woman whom he begins to seduce. Jahn then discovers Helena is married to Pavel, an old rival. Jahn flashes back to his college days and his love for Markéta, a devout ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon (, , 3 October 1897 – 24 December 1982) was a French poet who was one of the leading voices of the surrealist movement in France. He co-founded with André Breton and Philippe Soupault the surrealist review ''Littérature''. He was also a novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt. After 1959, he was a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Early life (1897–1939) Louis Aragon was born in Paris. He was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, believing them to be his sister and foster mother, respectively. His biological father, Louis Andrieux, a former senator for Forcalquier, was married and thirty years older than Aragon's mother, whom he seduced when she was seventeen. Aragon's mother passed Andrieux off to her son as his godfather. Aragon was only told the truth at the age of 19, as he was leaving to serve in the First World War, from which neither he nor his parents believed he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in ''The New Yorker'' starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for ''The New York Review of Books''. His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels '' Rabbit, Run''; '' Rabbit Redux''; ''Rabbit Is Rich''; ''Rabbit at Rest''; and the novella ''Rabbit Remembered''), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both ''Rabbit Is Rich'' (1981) and ''Rabbit at Res ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting
''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'' ( cs, Kniha smíchu a zapomnění, Kniha smíchu a zapomnění) is a novel by Milan Kundera, published in France in 1979. It is composed of seven separate narratives united by some common themes. The book considers the nature of forgetting as it occurs in history, politics, and life in general. The stories also contain elements found in the genre of magic realism. Publication history The original title is '' Kniha smíchu a zapomnění''. It was finished in 1978 and was then published in France under the title ''Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli'' in 1979. The English translation was first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in 1980, and it is credited to Michael Henry Heim. Several sections of the book were printed in ''The New Yorker''. The book was published in Czech by the exile publishing house 68 Publishers Toronto in April 1981. Plot summary Part One: Lost Letters The first section occurs in 1971 and is the story of Mire ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Henry Heim
Michael Henry Heim (January 21, 1943 – September 29, 2012) was a professor of Slavic languages at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was an active and prolific translator, and was fluent in Czech, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian, French, Italian, German, and Dutch. He died on September 29, 2012, of complications from melanoma. Biography Heim was born in Manhattan, New York City on January 21, 1943. His father, Imre Hajdu, was Hungarian, born in Budapest; before moving to the US in 1939 where he was a music composer and master baker. In New York, Imre was working as a piano teacher when he was introduced to Blanche, Heim's mother, whom he married shortly thereafter. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Imre joined the US Army. At the time of Heim's birth, Imre was stationed in Alabama. Heim's father died when he was four, and he was raised by his mother and step-father in Staten Island. In 1966, he was drafted into the US Army during the Vietnam War. When i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Times Literary Supplement
''The Times Literary Supplement'' (''TLS'') is a weekly literary review published in London by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp. History The ''TLS'' first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to ''The Times'' but became a separate publication in 1914. Many distinguished writers have contributed, including T. S. Eliot, Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Reviews were normally anonymous until 1974, when signed reviews were gradually introduced during the editorship of John Gross. This aroused great controversy. "Anonymity had once been appropriate when it was a general rule at other publications, but it had ceased to be so", Gross said. "In addition I personally felt that reviewers ought to take responsibility for their opinions." Martin Amis was a member of the editorial staff early in his career. Philip Larkin's poem "Aubade", his final poetic work, was first published in the Christmas-week issue of the ''TLS'' in 1977. While it has long been regarded as one of the world's pre-emi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Warsaw Pact Invasion Of Czechoslovakia
The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia refers to the events of 20–21 August 1968, when the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was jointly invaded by four Warsaw Pact countries: the Soviet Union, the Polish People's Republic, the People's Republic of Bulgaria and the Hungarian People's Republic. The invasion stopped Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring liberalisation reforms and strengthened the authoritarian wing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). About 250,000 Warsaw Pact troops (afterwards rising to about 500,000), supported by thousands of tanks and hundreds of aircraft, participated in the overnight operation, which was code-named Operation Danube. The Socialist Republic of Romania and the People's Republic of Albania refused to participate, while East German forces, except for a small number of specialists, were ordered by Moscow not to cross the Czechoslovak border just hours before the invasion because of fears of greater resistance if German troops were inv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prague
Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate oceanic climate, with relatively warm summers and chilly winters. Prague is a political, cultural, and economic hub of central Europe, with a rich history and Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architectures. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia and residence of several Holy Roman Emperors, most notably Charles IV (r. 1346–1378). It was an important city to the Habsburg monarchy and Austro-Hungarian Empire. The city played major roles in the Bohemian and the Protestant Reformations, the Thirty Years' War and in 20th-century history as the capital of Czechoslovakia between the World Wars and the post-war Communist era. Prague is home to a number of well-known cultural attractions, many of which survived the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Analgesic
An analgesic drug, also called simply an analgesic (American English), analgaesic (British English), pain reliever, or painkiller, is any member of the group of drugs used to achieve relief from pain (that is, analgesia or pain management). It is typically used to induce cooperation with a medical procedure. Analgesics are conceptually distinct from anesthetics, which temporarily reduce, and in some instances eliminate, sensation, although analgesia and anesthesia are neurophysiologically overlapping and thus various drugs have both analgesic and anesthetic effects. Analgesic choice is also determined by the type of pain: For neuropathic pain, traditional analgesics are less effective, and there is often benefit from classes of drugs that are not normally considered analgesics, such as tricyclic antidepressants and anticonvulsants. Various analgesics, such as many NSAIDs, are available over the counter in most countries, whereas various others are prescription drugs owing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
