Milan Kundera has disappeared for the second time. The Franco-Czech writer, one of the greatest feathers in world literature, died on Tuesday afternoon at the age of 94 in Paris, his publisher Gallimard announced to AFP on Wednesday. But the novelist had already made the choice to withdraw from media life the year of the publication of his greatest masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Beingin 1984. His last appearance noticed on the small screen dates back to his arrival in Apostrophe presented by Bernard Pivot on Antenne 2 in January of the same year when he was surrounded by writers Simon Leys and Maurice Nadeau.
As an indication of his future disappearance, he protects himself from the lenses, his two hands joined to hide his face until the departure of the photographers, urged to leave the set of the literary program. Ariane Pathgreat reporter for The worldmet the writer’s wife, Vera, for her book Looking for Milan Kundera published in 2021 by Editions du Sous-sol. The latter explains this gesture of modesty from Kundera: “He is like an old Indian who is afraid that his soul will be stolen from him. »
A ghost of literature
“Other writers have disappeared like Kundera. But he erases his past, as if he was afraid of being searched, analyzes Ariane Chemin. In this sense, he remained this man of the communist system who, by dint of having had to hide secrets, remained suspicious all his life. He is afraid of the diktat of total transparency because he knows that he is the best ally of totalitarianism”.
The journalist embarked on an investigation into this man of letters, who for nearly forty years had become a ghost of literature, after having met him in the streets of Paris. “A micro-chance, like in his novels. He was wrapped in his wife’s arm, like a couple chained in the same destiny. I was surprised : The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of the favorite books of my youth, but I thought that its author was long gone,” she admits. You have to admit that he did everything to be believed.
Controlling his image and his work has been one of the common threads in his life. Blacklisted in his country after the Prague Spring, he emigrated to France in 1975 with his wife Vera, a star presenter on Czech television. He is naturalized French, recognized as a genius author by his adopted country – France -, then renaturalized Czech in 2019. A whole section of his life preceding his arrival in France remains in obscurity.
“Control Freak”
Over the course of the translations, characters have been erased from his texts. He is one of the rare authors to have entered during his lifetime in the prestigious edition of La Pléiade in 2011, but no question that an exegete comes to put his nose there. As a result, “his entire pieces of text have disappeared”, discovered Ariane Chemin. And there is nothing left of his work of developing his novels.
True control freak, according to the journalist, all her drafts and annotations that served to mature her work have long since disappeared. His wife Vera “crushed” all the documents that could have been used to analyze and dissect his writings. However, there will remain the memory of a fabulous novelist, a sarcastic painter of the human condition, who magnificently mixes philosophy with his intrigues.