2023-07-12 11:27:00
World-famous Czech writer Milan Kundera, author of ‘Joke’, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ and ‘Ridiculous Loves’ has died. This was announced by Czech TV.
He was born in Brno on April 1, 1929: thanks to his father who was director of the Brno Academy of Music, the JAMU, and a well-known pianist, he studied piano and the passion for music will often return to his literary texts. Always as a young man, he was passionate about poetry and contributed to various literary magazines. But then he graduated from the Film School, FAMU, where he later taught courses in comparative literature.
His membership in the Communist Party dates back to 1948, but after just two years, due to some criticisms he expressed of the country’s cultural policy, he was expelled only to be readmitted in 1956.
His influence grew, and he became an important point of reference in the political discussions of those years. But then in 1968 he openly sided in favor of the so-called “Prague Spring”, and for this he was forced to leave his teaching position and, in 1970, he was again expelled from the party. In 1975 he emigrated to France, where he taught at the universities of Rennes and Paris: he still lived in the country beyond the Alps with his wife Vera Hrabanková.
In 1979, following the publication of the The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, his Czechoslovakian citizenship was withdrawn. In 1981, thanks to an interest from the French president François Mitterrand, he obtained that French. In 2008 a document found in Prague in the Police archives and considered reliable testifies to a denunciation by him, in 1950, against a twenty-year-old engaged in a naive “espionage” operation between West Germany and Czechoslovakia; the young man was later sentenced to 22 years of hard labor. Kundera has always denied any responsibility in the affair.
After the Prague Spring his works were banned in Czechoslovakia; his most recent novels were written in the French language and has not granted the Czech language translation rights to anyone. For this reason, the author has suffered strong criticism at home, even in the circles of dissent, since the publication in 1984 of his most sensational success, The unbearable lightness of being, in France. It will be necessary to wait until 2006 for Kundera to give permission to publish the novel also in the Czech Republic, through an anastatic edition of the one published in Czech in Toronto already in 1985. Among the many awards received by Kundera there are: the 1978 Mondello prize and the 2021 French Academy Literature Grand Prix.
His works
For everyone he was and was not only the author but the very essence of the “unbearable lightness of being”, the novel published in Italy by Adelphi which gave him notoriety and a resounding success, released without too much advertising emphasis in 1984 , followed by “Immortality”, from 1990, in which he addressed the current political and social themes of his country of origin, Czechoslovakia, inserting them into the vast problem of the condition of modern man narrow as he is in its enigmas, material, existential, philosophical.
And in the contradiction of the Unsustainability of existence, contained precisely in the continuous antinomy of a light life ballasted by a heavy burden. How can you be light and suffocated together? Almost a contradiction in terms.
Yet the complexity of that novel made most people understand the importance of having to question the meaning of being within a life that flees and eludes us constantly, because lived prisoners of the frenzy of that meat grinder which is history, with its facts , its events, its accidents, which are never repeated in the same way, equal to themselves.
An always current writer, who speaks to us of freedom and redemption, from the Prague Spring, born as a form of resistance against the Soviet occupation on August 20, 1968, ideally almost up to the war in Ukraine which broke out on February 21, 2022, with the resistance of Kiev against the invasion of Donbass by Putin’s Russia. Like a poet of an eternal present caught in the war-resistance antinomy.
The fight for freedom as a red thread of the “unbearable lightness of being” always torn between acceptance and heresy, between acquiescence and rebellion, between continuing to live where you were born and the impossibility of being able to do so, forced to choose exile, even and not only existential, as he did by moving to Paris in 1975, electing it as his domicile after his Czech citizenship was taken away by the government.
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