![]() ![]() His letter is intercepted by the authorities who fail to see the funny side of things. “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.” Himself often humorous and irreverent, Ludvik attempts to draw the attention of a woman he is wooing by sending her a “joke” designed to shock her too-serious self into laughter – a joke in the form of a polemical statement written upon a postcard: Ludvik, the protagonist of the story, is a student and dedicated Communist party worker in a Czechoslovakia in the process of being formulated after the 1948 Revolution. ![]() The themes that he would develop to a much greater degree in later works (particularly Life is Elsewhere) are found here in a somewhat protean form: the hopelessly entangled relationships between youth, love, lyricism and revolution, backgrounded by a State veering towards totalitarianism. The Joke was Milan Kundera’s first novel. ![]()
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