Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jacques and His Master | 1971 | Milan Kundera | Buy |
Jacques and His Master (1971) is Kundera’s only major dramatic work and his most direct homage to the French literary tradition he would later join as a writer in exile. The play is based on Denis Diderot’s unfinished novel Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, an eighteenth-century philosophical novel that questions fate, free will, and the nature of storytelling itself.
Kundera wrote the play while still living in Czechoslovakia, at a time when his novels had been banned following the Soviet invasion of 1968. The play was not performed in Czechoslovakia until after the Velvet Revolution; its first productions were staged in France. Kundera described it not as a translation but as his “homage to Diderot” – a work that reflects his deep engagement with the French literary tradition and its tradition of philosophical playfulness.
The play retains the embedded-story structure of the original novel, with characters telling tales within tales, but Kundera adds his own framing and variations. It is a relatively short piece and is sometimes performed as part of Kundera retrospectives. Readers interested in his engagement with European literary history and his relationship to French culture will find it a worthwhile complement to the novels and essays.