In his groundbreaking novels “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (1980) and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1984), the Czech-born Milan Kundera wrote about his country under the shadow of the Soviet Union, reinventing the form of the novel while examining the osmosis between the personal and the political there, and the subversive roles that humor and irreverence can play in a totalitarian state.