2023-07-12 11:27:49
The novelist, playwright and poet Milan Kundera, born in Brno (present-day Czech Republic, at that time Czechoslovakia) but nationalized French in 1981, died at 94 on Tuesday, July 11, as reported by Czech public television and verified with his press agent the French newspaper Le Monde.
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The writer published in 1984 what is considered his best work and a bestseller, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an existential novel about life as a couple.
Kundera used scathing humor as a weapon against despair, something that has been seen since his first novel, The joke (1967). In it, he draws on his experience as a member of the Communist Party, from which he was expelled in 1950. The work, in which he mocks Stalinism, was held for six months in the country’s censorship control before being published, but was ultimately left unchanged. nothing of the original text, as explained by the author.
The novelist began his career in art as a musician. His family was part of the Czech cultural elite and his father was a prominent musicologist and pianist, as well as director of the Brno Music Academy. Therefore, Milan Kundera also studied piano, musicology and musical composition. He then transferred his studies to the field of aesthetics and literature, and later to the cinema. He was kicked out of college and took up playing the piano and trumpet in jazz clubs. He later began to write poems and even tried painting.
He did not start writing novels until he was 38 years old. The joke was followed life is elsewhere (1969), which won the Médicis prize when it was published in France four years later.
In 1979 he published the book of laughter and oblivion a novel written in different styles, as I had already tried in Life is elsewhere in which different characters criticize the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Due to that book, his Czechoslovak citizenship was withdrawn, so Kundera, exiled in France, applied for French citizenship, which he obtained in 1981. Recently, in November 2019, the Czech Republic granted him citizenship again as a symbolic gesture and repairer of what happened 40 years before. Kundera did not attend the delivery of the certificate, but his wife, Věra Hrabankova, did.
The writer’s relationship with his country of origin was complicated, abandoning Czech as a literary language and even refusing to review the translations of his works in French that were made into this language. But in 2022, with the transfer of 40 boxes containing his books, awards, paintings and personal documents (letters and photographs) from Paris to Brno, in order to create a publicly accessible archive at the Moravian Library, the wife of he explained in an interview on public radio that the city of Brno “had never behaved badly with Milan, unlike Prague”. He also said that, contrary to what was believed, he “never had any hostile feelings towards his country.” Kundera was considered the most famous Czech writer since Franz Kafka.
Kundera’s works divided into three periods: that of comic-serious works (1967 to 1981); a second period of innovation in structuresa, in which the The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1979 to 1988) and short novels in French, such as The ignorance (2000) y the party of insignificance (2014), between 1995 and 2014. In February of this year, Tusquets published in Spanish and Catalan his essay A hijacked West (translation from French by Mayka Lahoz and Jordi Martín Lloret, respectively) which contains two texts: his speech before the Writers’ Congress in 1967, in which he advocated the autonomy of culture and the freedom of creators, and A hijacked West (1983), an article on the weight of barbarism in history and in the lives of human beings. The publication of that article at the time sparked a heated debate in European cultural publications and warned, in a premonitory way, of the threats from Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) against the rest of Europe.
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