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Kundera, along with other Czech artists and writers such as Václav Havel, was involved in the 1968 Prague Spring, that brief period of reformist optimism that was eventually crushed by pro- Soviet forces. In his first book, The Joke , he gave a satirical account of the nature of totalitarianism in the Communist era.
Because of his criticism of the Soviets and their 1968 invasion of his homeland, Kundera was black-listed and his works were banned shortly after the Soviet invasion. In 1975, Kundera fled to France. There he wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , (1979) which told of Czech citizens opposing the Soviet regime in various ways. A strange mixture of a novel, a short story collection and a group of the author's musings, the book set the tone for his post-exile works.
In 1984, he released The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is his most popular work. The book chronicled the life of a Czech couple's difficulties adjusting to life with each other and to the Soviet occupation. In 1988, American director Philip Kaufman released a moderately successful film version of the novel.
In 1990, Kundera released Immortality. The novel, his first written in French, was more cosmopolitan than his others with a more explicit philosophical (and less political) content and would set the tone for his later novels.