I Loved Milan Kundera in Part Because His Pain was Familiar

In my youth, I fell for the 'bad boy' of the literary world but as I got older I saw firsthand that being a revolutionary comes with a lot of heartache

By Leah Eichler,

Milan Kundera died this week at age 94 and the free flow of obituaries reminded me of how enamoured I was with dissident writers when I was young. Other girls had Judd Nelson, I had Solzhenitsyn. There was something about the bad boy writer that really appealed to me. Dark, brooding, artistic, using his pen to take on the world. Swoon.

I…