Ludvík Kundera

He began his studies at Charles University in Prague, but due to the Nazi shuttering of all institutions of higher education inCzechoslovakia, he was forced to abandon his initial course. He completed his education eight years later in Brno.

During World War II he was forced to work in the Third Reich as part of the Totalansatz. Upon his return, and together with Otto Mizera, Zdeněk Lorenc, Vratislav Effenberger and Zbyněk Havlíček, he co-founded the CzechSurrealist group Ra. Kundera made his literary debut in the 1946 with abook of poems, Demons in Us. At that time, he worked for the Brno-based daily Rovnost, and the magazine Host; he had also started translating Christian Morgenstern and Gottfried Benn (from German), and Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard and Guillaume Apollinaire (from French). However, he sometimes strolled intolanguages he could not speak, and experimented with the translation. Healso wrote a number of essays on contemporary literature, including pieces on Bertolt Brecht and the renowned Czech poet František Halas.

Overtime, Kundera became interested in the Dada movement. In the 1980s, he published a break through samizdat anthology of Dada writings and itsinfluence on the Czech literary milieu, called simply DADA.

Kundera has written almost thirty plays for theatre, radio and television, morethan twenty books of poems, dozens of essays and eight books offiction. In 1993, he received the State Prize for Translation. Hiscollected works will have seventeen volumes.

Ludvík Kundera died at the age of 90.