The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting
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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 M ...
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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 Kundera's Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, then conferred again in 2019.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 Stree ...
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Vladimír Clementis
Vladimír "Vlado" Clementis (20 September 1902 Tisovec – 3 December 1952 Prague) was a Slovak minister, politician, lawyer, publicist, literary critic, author and a prominent member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He married Lída Pátková, the daughter of a branch director of the Czech Mortgage Bank in Bratislava, in March 1933. He became a Communist MP in 1935. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia shortly before the beginning of World War II, in 1938, he emigrated to Paris. His criticism of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, contradicted the policies of the Czechoslovak Communist Party exiled to Moscow and triggered an intra-party investigation overseen by Viliam Široký (who came to Paris from Moscow). At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, he was put into prison as a known Communist, and later evacuated to a British internment camp. After his release, he decided to spend the war in London, where he broadcast speeches on the radio calling for ...
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Czech Magic Realism Novels
Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language Czech (; Czech ), historically also Bohemian (; ''lingua Bohemica'' in Latin), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. Spoken by over 10 million people, it serves as the official language of the Czech Re ... ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus' Places *Czech, Łódź Voivodeship, Poland *Czechville, Wisconsin, unincorporated community, United States People * Bronisław Czech (1908–1944), Polish sportsman and artist * Danuta Czech (1922–2004), Polish Holocaust historian * Hermann Czech (born 1936), Austrian architect * Mirosław Czech (born 1968), Polish politician and journalist of Ukrainian origin * Zbigniew Czech (born 1970), Polish diplomat See also

* Čech, a surname * Czech lands * Czechoslovakia * List of Czechs * * * Czech ...
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Novels By Milan Kundera
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historica ...
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1979 Novels
Events January * January 1 ** United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim heralds the start of the '' International Year of the Child''. Many musicians donate to the ''Music for UNICEF Concert'' fund, among them ABBA, who write the song ''Chiquitita'' to commemorate the event. ** The United States and the People's Republic of China establish full diplomatic relations. ** Following a deal agreed during 1978, French carmaker Peugeot completes a takeover of American manufacturer Chrysler's European operations, which are based in Britain's former Rootes Group factories, as well as the former Simca factories in France. * January 7 – Cambodian–Vietnamese War: The People's Army of Vietnam and Vietnamese-backed Cambodian insurgents announce the fall of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and the collapse of the Pol Pot regime. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge retreat west to an area along the Thai border, ending large-scale fighting. * January 8 – Whiddy Island Disaster: The Fr ...
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Damnatio Memoriae
is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. Depending on the extent, it can be a case of historical negationism. There are and have been many routes to , including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; in history the practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 14th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 15th century BC. Etymology Although the term is Latin, the phrase was not used by the ancient Romans, and first appeared in a thesis written in Germany in 1689. Ancient world Today's best known examples of ''damnatio memoriae'' from antiquity concern chiselling stone inscriptions or deliberately omitting certain information from them. Ancient Mesopotamia According to Stefan Zawadz ...
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Social Amnesia
Social amnesia is a collective forgetting by a group of people. The concept is often cited in relation to Russell Jacoby's scholarship from the 1970s. Social amnesia can be a result of "forcible repression" of memories, ignorance, changing circumstances, or the forgetting that comes from changing interests.David Rothenberg, Marta UlvaeusThe new earth reader the best of Terra Nova page 57, 74 Protest, folklore, "local memory", and collective nostalgia are counter forces that combat social amnesia. Social amnesia is a subject of discussion in psychology and among some political activists. In the U.S., social amnesia has been said to reflect "the tendency of American penology to ignore history and precedent when responding to the present or informing the future... discarded ideas are repackaged; meanwhile, the expectations for these practices remain the same." Fits of social amnesia after difficult or trying periods can sometimes cover up the past, and fading memories can actually ma ...
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Politics Of Memory
Politics of memory is the organisation of collective memory by political agents; the political means by which events are remembered and recorded, or discarded. Eventually, politics of memory may determine the way history is written and passed on, hence the terms history politics or politics of history. The politics of history is the effects of political influence on the representation or study of historical topics, commonly associated with the totalitarian state which use propaganda and other means to impose a specific version of history with the goal of eliminating competing perspectives about the past. In order to achieve this goal, memory regimes resort to different means such as ''narrating'' (the construction of a seemingly coherent narrative), ''strategic silencing'' (the masking-out of historical facts that contradict one's own interpretation), ''performing'' (ritualized forms of reifying the narrative) or ''renaming/remapping'' (inscribing the narrative into the monumental an ...
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Propaganda
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. Propaganda can be found in news and journalism, government, advertising, entertainment, education, and activism and is often associated with material which is prepared by governments as part of war efforts, political campaigns, health campaigns, revolutionaries, big businesses, ultra-religious organizations, the media, and certain individuals such as soapboxers. In the 20th century, the English term ''propaganda'' was often associated with a manipulative approach, but historically, propaganda has been a neutral descriptive term of any material that promotes certain opinions or ideologies. Equivalent non-English terms have also l ...
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Karel Hájek
Karel Hájek (22 January 1900, Lásenice – 31 March 1978, Prague) was a Czechoslovak photographer who was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal).Rebecca Madamba (2008) The Schostal Agency: A Finding Aid for the Schostal Agency Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Thesis of the Honours Bachelors of Arts, Studies in Arts and Culture, Concentration in Curatorial Studies, Brock University. Among his best known photographs is the one of Klement Gottwald and Vladimir Clementis on a balcony in 1948 from which Clementis was later erased. Gallery File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-09018-0009, Schnelltriebwagen Berlin-Prag, Louis Fürnberg spricht.jpg, German writer Louis Fürnberg giving a speech in front of the portraits of Klement Gottwald and Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953 ...
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