“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
Czech-French writer Milan Kundera dies
Writer Milan Kundera in Prague in 1968
Milan Kundera achieved world fame with his novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. The writer has now died at the age of 94, as confirmed by a spokeswoman for the Moravian State Library in Brno, citing his wife.
Milan Kundera, one of the most important European writers of his generation, is dead. The Czech and French citizen died at the age of 94, as the Moravian National Library in Brno (Brno) announced on Wednesday, citing his wife Vera. Kundera had lived in Paris for decades. His books have been translated into all world languages and sold millions of copies. He received numerous awards such as the “Prix Médicis”, the Order of Knights of the French Legion of Honor and the Jerusalem Prize.
Kundera achieved world fame in 1984 with his novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. Hollywood filmed the tragic love and exile story between the waitress Teresa and the doctor Tomas, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis.
Kundera was born on April 1, 1929 in Brno, Moravia. He came from an educated family. His father was rector of a music college, his mother a teacher. His cousin Ludvik was a surrealist writer. Kundera enthusiastically joined the Communist Party at the age of 18, like many of his generation. He wrote poems on Stalin.
Milan Kundera – four decades in exile
He celebrated his first major success in prose with loose stories about “ridiculous love”. They showed unequal lovers in grotesque situations. Kundera dealt with Stalinism in his novel “Der Joke”. He later became a prominent representative of the socialist democracy movement “Prague Spring”.
The invasion of the Warsaw Pact countries in August 1968 ended the dream of “socialism with a human face”. In an important essay at the time, Kundera argued that Central Europe had been “kidnapped” from the West after World War II. In 1975 he moved to France with his wife, the television announcer Vera, and in 1979 his Czechoslovakian citizenship was revoked.
Exactly 40 years later, Kundera again became a Czech citizen. The initiative for this went back to the former Francophile Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who had visited the author in Paris. In many of his books, Kundera devoted himself to his central theme, life in exile. The 2000 novel “The Ignorance” is about the difficulties of the returnees.
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He was denied the Nobel Prize in Literature
Kundera liked to spice up his novels with philosophical excursions – from Janacek’s music to the meaning of laughter. He saw himself as a defender of the European novel. “The novel is a meditation that goes to the bottom of existence through imaginary figures,” he once wrote.
Kundera was always concerned with the big questions of identity, history and existence. He was often traded as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but it never came to be. He was charged with allegations based on a police report that he had betrayed an anti-communist spy in 1950. He himself denied this.
A critical biography of Kundera’s early years as a writer under socialism was published in Prague in the summer of 2020. However, his late work was positively received, from “The Immortality” to “The Identity” to the “Festival of Insignificance”.