When he was a professor of world literature under the communist regime of the '70s, Milan Kundera advised his students at FAMU, Prague's film school, to do two things: read the Bible before they turned 30 and learn at least one foreign language.

That second suggestion has proved crucial for any Czech who has wanted to read Kundera's most celebrated novels during the past three decades, especially The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his best-known work and the one that catapulted him into the canon of the world's most famous writers. Although originally written in Czech in 1984, Lightness, like many of Kundera's books, was translated into a dozen other languages, but was never released in his home country in Czech.

Now that the first Czech edition of Lightness has hit Prague bookstores, many are asking why it took 22 years to happen.

Kundera's thorny relationship with the Czech literary community is one possible explanation for the long delay — he has lived in France for more than 30 years, and now writes his novels in French. Atlantis, a small Czech publishing house, obtained exclusive rights to Kundera's classic novel of lovers torn between their passion for freedom and for their Soviet-occupied Czech homeland, a tale that inspired a hit film starring Daniel Day-Lewis in 1988. But, for now, the company is not commenting.

"I started with the writing of this text sometime in 1980 or 1981, when the country [then Czechoslovakia] was just a memory," explains Kundera in the book's preface.

Sixty-Eight Publishers, a publishing house for Czechoslovak writers in exile run by writer Josef Škvorecký from 1971–94 in Toronto, actually published Lightness in its original Czech in a small print run in 1985, but only a handful of copies made it through the Iron Curtain.

Lightness, with its famous philosophical opening, centers on the events of 1968's Prague Spring and the brutal Warsaw Pact crackdown that ended in August of that year, ushering in the era of Normalization. The turmoil is recounted through the eyes of two young couples, which formed the basis for American director Philip Kaufman's feature film.

Although Kundera was closely involved in the production, the notoriously reclusive and critical author later spurned the film and swore off any future adaptations of his novels for the screen.

Czech readers seem thrilled at finally having the chance to add Lightness to their bookcases.

"This is the best literary work I have ever read," says a woman named Vlasta in an Internet chat room. "I have gone through the text at least 10 times. Every time I feel miserable, I sit down with this book and read it through again. In my opinion, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of the most important books of Czech literature."

Josef Žák from kosmas.cz, one of the biggest Czech online bookstores, says he expects the novel to become one of the best-sellers of the year.

The Prague literary community is also registering excitement.

Vladimír Novotný, a literature professor, finds Lightness "one of the most stunning texts of Czech postwar literature," but regrets it has come to Czech readers so late. It "comes as a museum exhibit, not as an alive book that could engage more readers. People will look at it as a valued classic; it will be read but cannot grip as it could have right after 1990."

Arnošt Lustig, one of the country's most famous contemporary novelists, says, "I am very happy to hear Kundera's books are coming to the Czech Republic, and I hope that Mr. Kundera will come one day, too; we would love to welcome him here."

Writer in exile

Also a gifted artist and composer, Kundera, now 77, started as a poet but found fame as a novelist in 1967 with The Joke, the tale of a young party member whose career is ruined after he ridicules the regime.

Seven years later, while he was on a trip to Rennes, France, Czechoslovak authorities revoked his citizenship, forcing him into exile.

"The regime that wanted to silence Kundera paradoxically created one of the biggest novelists of the second half of 20th-century European literature," literary authority Břetislav Chvatík wrote in the international postscript

of Lightness years ago.

In France, Kundera continued his university teaching and also focused more on writing, ignoring the call of Czechoslovak dissidents to take part in underground activities. In 1986, Kundera published The Art of the Novel, his first book written in French, and he began calling himself a French writer.

Czech dissidents labeled him a turncoat. (On the backs of his English-translated books, he's still called a "Franco-Czech" writer.)

Atlantis, based in Brno, south Moravia, Kundera's hometown, published the Czech translation of Immortality in 1993, originally written in French, and The Farewell Waltz in 1994, written in Czech but never before released in this country.

Apart from an unauthorized translation of Identity, which appeared on the Internet in June, and four collections of essays, those two books amounted to the sum total of Kundera's work published in the Czech Republic during the past 13 years.

In his introduction to Lightness, Kundera says of the long delay:

"It took me some time to put together the translation because I wanted it to be definitive — without leaving out words or including mistakes."

Novotný, on the other hand, argues that Kundera has finally agreed to publish in Czech to forestall more unauthorized versions from popping up (a pirate Czech version of Lightness has in fact been on the Internet for years).