What is Kundera talking about in his life elsewhere?

"Life Elsewhere" is a portrait of a young artist. Kundera used his unique writing style to create an image of Jaromil, depicting the passionate but short life of this young poet, which has many characteristics of "developmental novels". As far as its subject matter is concerned, the representation of an artist (or intellectual) is an important field of literature of this century, because only complex characters can bear to represent our complex era. In this work, the author's analysis of the poet's creative process is subtle and sophisticated. Of course, the creative process not only refers to the process of writing, but more broadly refers to the entire growth process of a poet. In the author's own words, this novel is "an analysis of what I call the lyrical attitude." It was with this creative intention that the book was originally titled "The Lyrical Age." What the author wants to express and explore is the passion of the human soul, its origin and its results. Therefore, this book is also a modern psychological novel, showing the growth of a poet's artistic feeling. The title of each chapter in the book shows a stage of the poet's life. His childhood, boyhood and youth, how he read, how he fell in love, how he dreamed, etc. The overall picture of the era and the activities of others are far away, and the focus of all observations is focused on the protagonist and related to his inner activities. Like a stream of passion, flowing through the rubble of time, the scenery on both sides is not important. What is important is whether the stream will flow into the fertile fields or the desert. In other words, what the author is concerned with here is the psychological and spiritual development of the poet. In order to sneak into the most secret corners of the characters' consciousness, the author adopts a narrative method that we can call an objective stream of consciousness: time and space are intertwined (things that happened in different places at different times often appear in the same narrative), The interweaving of reality and fantasy (Chapter 2 "Xavier" is completely a dream within a dream), the jumps in the plot, the suddenness and incoherence of thinking, and the deliberately vague statement of the subject, all of which make this book closer to poetry than to poetry. novel. If we remove these lyrical elements from the book, there will be little content left in this work. This form allows us to get closer to the poet's inner activities and feel how the poet's passion is generated and burned.

After Milan Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, he created "Living Elsewhere", a masterpiece full of modernism. In the work, he made the protagonist - a sensitive young poet Jaromil The inner world is described in detail and the description techniques are also unique, especially the surrealist technique of one dream within another, which allows us to once again appreciate the essence of modern novels. It also involves a lot of symbolist poetry. Although we have not been exposed to his avant-garde films, from his works, we always feel like a camera capturing the movement of events. "Living somewhere else" itself is a beautiful, vital sentence. Rimbaud used it as a poem, Milan Kundera used it as the title of his novel, and we hope to turn it into a beautiful ideal life.