Reading Order
ŽertThe Joke Reading Order
Milan Kundera's The Joke (1967) is a standalone novel in which Ludvík Jahn, expelled from the Communist Party as a student for writing a sardonic postcard, returns fifteen years later to take revenge on the man who denounced him — only to discover that history has already exacted a different kind of revenge. The first of Kundera's great novels and one of the essential works of Central European dissident fiction.
Where to start
The Joke
Complete Žert Book List
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The Joke
Milan Kundera·1967·Ludvík's revenge — four voices, one irony. The novel was banned after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and not republished until 1991. - Buy
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
OptionalMilan Kundera·1979·Seven interconnected narratives about memory, forgetting, and the erotic — the novel Kundera wrote in exile in France; more formally experimental than The Joke. - Buy
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
OptionalMilan Kundera·1984·Tomas and Tereza in Prague during the Soviet invasion — Kundera's most widely read novel, more accessible than The Joke and equally essential. - Buy
Life Is Elsewhere
OptionalMilan Kundera·1973·Jaromil, a poet who becomes an informer for the Communist regime — Kundera's satire of lyric poetry and its complicity with totalitarianism.
Žert — Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to know Czech history to read The Joke?
Some context helps, but it is not required — the novel provides what you need as it goes. The key facts are: after World War Two, the Communist Party took power in Czechoslovakia in 1948; party membership was both a social necessity and an ideological commitment; denunciation of colleagues and friends was common; and in 1968, shortly after the novel was first published, Soviet tanks ended the Prague Spring reform movement and the novel was banned. Kundera includes enough historical texture that readers unfamiliar with Czech history can follow the story; what background knowledge adds is a sharper sense of the specific flavor of Stalinist bureaucracy that Ludvík is navigating.
What is The Joke's four-voice structure?
The novel is narrated in four voices: Ludvík (who carries most of the novel), Helena (the wife of the man Ludvík wants to revenge himself on), Jaroslav (a childhood friend who has devoted his life to Moravian folk music), and Kostka (a Christian who remained untouched by the regime's ideological demands). Each voice has a distinct relationship to the central irony of the novel — that the revenge Ludvík has planned fails not because it doesn't succeed but because it doesn't matter; history has already made it pointless. The four voices allow Kundera to show the same events from perspectives that do not communicate with each other, enacting the mutual incomprehension that the Communist period imposed on private life.
Is The Joke autobiographical?
Partially. Kundera joined the Communist Party in 1948 at the age of nineteen, was expelled in 1950 for "individualistic and sectarian" behavior, rejoined in 1956 after the Khrushchev thaw, and was finally expelled permanently in 1970 following the Soviet invasion. The Joke draws on his experience of the party's arbitrary power and the way ideological compliance distorts personal relationships, but Ludvík Jahn is not Kundera himself — his specific experience (the sardonic postcard, the revenge plot) is fictional. After the Soviet invasion of 1968 banned the novel, Kundera eventually emigrated to France in 1975, where he wrote the rest of his major work.
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