Abstract
The study is devoted to the early fundamental starting points of Milan Kundera's work from the 1950s to the 1960s. According to the later authorial stylisation, the novelist is born from the ruins of his lyrical world.
This assertion creates an impression of a direct, linear authorial development, in which somewhere at the beginning is Kundera's poetry, which the author later abandons in favour of the novel upon reaching an age of artistic maturity. However, if we follow the actual course of Kundera's poetics, we find that this conception does not correspond with the dynamics of the author's development.
This it not only because in the creative phase in which the author wrote poetry, he also wrote his first prose texts, but also because his work as a novelist is dependent upon lyrical devices (metaphors, the evocation of inner experiences etc.). For this reason, in this study I shall focus on defining three creative principles - lyrical, dramatic and novel writing.
These poetic principles are not exclusively bound to the corresponding genres. The resulting form of the literary work is determined by their mutual relationship, proportions and configuration (whether this concerns poetry, drama or the novel).