Czech-French writer Milan Kundera is dead. He died on Tuesday at the age of 94, a spokeswoman for the Moravian State Library in Brno confirmed, citing his wife.
His most famous work is the novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. With him, Kundera became known worldwide. He wrote numerous other novels, as well as poetry, essays and plays. For a long time he was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Moravia. His father was a well-known pianist and music college principal and taught his son the piano. Milan Kundera began writing poetry as a high school student. He later went on to study music and literature at Charles University in Prague, but changed majors and studied directing and screenwriting at the Academy of Music and Drama.
As a young man, Kundera, like many other intellectuals in what was then Czechoslovakia, joined the Communist Party, but was expelled at times because he had been critical of the official ideological line and had publicly advocated reform communism.
When the Prague Spring ended violently in 1968 and Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, Kundera was expelled from the Writers’ Union, lost his position at the film school and was banned from publishing.
At the end of the 1970s Kundera went to France and taught literature at the universities of Rennes and Paris. The novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was also written in the French capital in 1984, in which a love triangle is told against the background of the Prague Spring. The book became a bestseller and was made into a film by Philip Kaufman in 1987, starring Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin and Daniel Day-Lewis. Critics praised the novel’s narrative technique, in which political, philosophical and erotic motifs are woven together with wit and elegance. After a Czech-language edition appeared in Canada in 1985, this failed in his home country of the Czech Republic until 2006 due to the lack of Kundera’s permission.