Invention of this word is usually credited to the Czech novelist
Milan Kundera, who described it like this in his book The Art Of
The Novel in 1988: “To be without a feeling for art is no
disaster. A person can live in peace without reading Proust or
listening to Schubert. But the misomusist does not live in
peace. He feels humiliated by the existence of something that is
beyond him, and he hates it”. So a misomusist is not a passive
ignorer of culture, but an active opponent of it. Active
opposition to culture has been a characteristic of totalitarian
governments, summed up by a famous saying: “Whenever I hear the
word culture, I release the safety-catch of my Browning!”.
(Often attributed in a different form to Hermann Goering, it was
actually written by the German dramatist Hanns Johst in 1933.)
Presumably Milan Kundera coined the word in Czech, from which it
was carried over into the English translation. He took it from
the Greek misos, hatred, and mousa, learning (the word is also
the source of the name