2023-07-12 20:35:24
The French president had a few words for this Franco-Czech author, considered one of the great figures of world literature, who died on Tuesday at the age of 94.
Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday hailed the free spirit”, the “irony” and the “genius” of Milan Kundera, a Franco-Czech writer who died in Paris on Tuesday at the age of 94.
“Milan Kundera has left us. A free spirit, he found refuge in France and embraced universal horizons in his writings”, wrote the President of the Republic on Twitter.
“His irony and his genius have made his works classics of our time”, he concludes. “To his wife and loved ones, to his readers, my heartfelt condolences.”
The death of Milan Kundera was announced this Wednesday to AFP by its publisher Gallimard. Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library in her hometown of Brno, spoke of the author’s “long illness”.
Entered during his lifetime in La Pléiade
A sarcastic painter of the human condition, Kundera was one of the greatest voices in world literature. He was one of the rare authors to have entered during his lifetime in the prestigious editions of La Pléiade (in 2011).
Born Czech, stripped of this nationality before regaining it later, but French since 1981, he was one of the most influential French-language novelists in the world.
When he was still Czech, Milan Kundera published two novels, La Joke (1965, praised in particular by the French poet Aragon) and Risibles amours (1968), texts drawing up a bitter assessment of the political illusions of the generation of the Prague coup. which, in 1948, allowed the Communists to come to power.
Blacklisted in his country after the Prague Spring, Kundera went into exile in France in 1975 with his wife Vera, a star presenter on Czech television.
Naturalized French, he will therefore choose French as the language of writing, to mark his break with a native country which stripped him of his nationality in 1979, then returned it to him in 2019.
In France, he published La Valse aux adieux, Le Livre du rire et de l’oublie… In 1984, what some consider to be his masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, appeared love novel and ode to freedom, both serious and casual, whose subject is nothing less than the human condition.
Abstaining from expressing himself in the media, wishing that people talk about his work and nothing else, Kundera lived discreetly in the center of Paris, with his wife Vera.
#Emmanuel #Macron #salutes #free #spirit #irony #genius