"The theme of my novels is not a criticism of society. Life is Elsewhere is set in 1948, the time of Stalinism gone mad. But my ambition was not to criticize the regime! To criticize it in 1969, when I was writing the novel, would have been carrying wood into the forest. The theme of the novel is existential: it is the theme of lyricism. The revolutionary lyricism of the Communist terror interested me because it shed an unsuspected, unmasking light on man's eternal lyrical inclination."
Milan Kundera: Author's Note [December 1992] in the novel Immortality, Atlantis 2006, p. 376.
Milan Kundera wrote Life is Elsewhere in Czech in 1969; it was first published in French as La vie est ailleurs by Éditions Gallimard in 1973; in the same year the novel won the French Prix Médicis literary prize. It was first published in Czech by Sixty-Eight Publishers, Corp. in Toronto in 1979.
Czech edition