2023-07-12 11:20:52
The Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, died on Tuesday July 11 at the age of 94, the spokesperson for the Milan Kundera Library announced on Wednesday, in his hometown of Brno. “Unfortunately, I can confirm that Milan Kundera died yesterday (Tuesday) after a long illness,” Anna Mrazova told AFP. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1929, the author became French in 1981. He was one of the most influential French-language novelists in the world. A sarcastic painter of the human condition, Kundera was one of the rare authors to have entered the prestigious editions of La Pléiade (in 2011) during his lifetime.
When he was still Czech, Milan Kundera published two novels, “La Joking” (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, enabled the Communists to come to power. A former communist himself, the freethinker Kundera gradually fell out with the Czechoslovak authorities and decided to live in exile after the crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement by armies led by the Soviet Union in 1968. In 1970, he was expelled from the Union of Czechoslovak Writers.
His Czech nationality regained in 2019
Blacklisted in his country after the Prague Spring in 1968, Kundera went into exile in France in 1975 with his wife Vera, a star presenter on Czech television. But his country of origin keeps an eye on his writer since he will remain under surveillance of the StB, the Czechoslovak intelligence services. Naturalized French, he will therefore choose French as the language of writing, to mark his break with a native country. Following the publication of book of laughter and oblivion, in 1979, the Czechoslovak authorities withdrew his citizenship. He had to wait until 2019 to regain his Czech nationality.
Kundera was also paradoxically for many years the world’s least known writer in his country with regard to his works published in France. Abandoning his native language to write in that of his adopted country, the novelist did not authorize, for the sake of perfectionism according to him, the translation into Czech of his works such as “The slowness”, “The identity”, “Ignorance” or “The Feast of Insignificance”. In 2020, a very controversial biography of Milan Kundera made a lot of noise in the Czech Republic reported Courrier International. The writer was accused of having collaborated with the former communist regime, proof that the man of letters divides in his country of origin. Already in 2008, the Czech magazine Respekt published an interrogation report dated March 14, 1950 according to which Milan Kundera allegedly denounced one of his fellow citizens, Miroslav Dvořáček. Several writers had defended Kundera.
In France, he published “The Farewell Waltz”, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”. In 1984, what some consider to be his masterpiece, “The Unbearable Lightness of L ‘being’, a wonderful love novel and ode to freedom, both serious and casual, whose subject is nothing less than the human condition. Refraining 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. He had been the victim of macabre hoaxes several times on social networks where his death was announced before the hour.
“Kundera had chosen France to never stop being free”
Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak wrote a tribute on Twitter: “Immense sadness. Milan Kundera had chosen France to never stop being free. Over the pages, he helped us to discover who we are, to find a way in the absurdity of the world. With him, one of the greatest voices of European literature is extinguished.”
Huge sadness. Milan Kundera had chosen France to never stop being free. Throughout the pages, he helped us to discover who we are, to find a way in the absurdity of the world. With him, one of the greatest voices in European literature died. pic.twitter.com/2bmF77AWL9
– Rima Abdul Malak (@RimaAbdulMalak) July 12, 2023
His works have been awarded several times. He received the Prix Médicis Etranger in 1973 for Life is Elsewhere, the Grand Prize for Literature from the French Academy for all of his work in 2001, and the BnF Prize in 2012. If his name has been mentioned several times, he never received the Nobel Prize in literature.
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