(Paris) Milan Kundera, whose dissident writings in communist Czechoslovakia turned him into an exiled satirist of totalitarianism, has died in Paris at the age of 94, Czech media reported on Wednesday.
Kundera’s famous novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, opens heartbreakingly with Soviet tanks driving through Prague, the Czech capital that was the author’s home until he moved to France in 1975. Weaving together themes of love and exile, politics and the deeply personal, Kundera’s novel was critically acclaimed, earning it a wide readership among Westerners who have embraced both his anti-Soviet subversion and the eroticism that ran through many of his works.
“If someone had told me when I was a child: one day you will see your nation disappear from the world, I would have considered that nonsense, something that I could not imagine. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation has some kind of eternal life,” he told author Philip Roth in an interview with The New York Times in 1980, the year before he became a naturalized Frenchman.
In 1989, the Velvet Revolution ousted the communists from power, and Kundera’s nation is led as the Czech Republic, but by then he had found a new life – and a full identity – in his apartment on the left bank of Paris.
To say that his relationship with his native land was complex would be an understatement. He returned to the Czech Republic rarely and incognito, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. His last works, written in French, have never been translated into Czech. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which brought him such success and was adapted for the cinema in 1988, was not published in the Czech Republic until 2006, 17 years after the Velvet Revolution.
Kundera’s wife, Vera, was an essential companion for a reclusive man who shunned technology – she was his translator, his secretary and ultimately his buffer against the outside world. It was she who fostered his friendship with Roth by serving as a language go-between, and — according to a 1985 profile of the couple — it was she who took his calls and handled the inevitable demands of a world-famous author.
Kundera’s writings, including his debut novel The Joke, were banned in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, when he also lost his job as a film professor. He had been writing novels and plays since 1953.
Kundera refused to appear on camera, rejected any annotation when publishing his complete works published in 2011, and did not allow any digital copies of his writings.
His loyalty to print meant that it was possible for readers to find reviews and biographies of Kundera to download, but not his works themselves.
Despite his fierce protection of his privacy — he gave only a handful of interviews and kept his biographical information to a bare minimum — Kundera was forced to revisit his past in 2008, when the Czech Institute for study of totalitarian regimes produced documentation indicating that in 1950, as a 21-year-old college student, Kundera told the police about someone in his dorm. The man was eventually convicted of espionage and sentenced to 22 years hard labor.
The researcher who published the report, Adam Hradilek, defended it as the product of extensive research into Kundera.
Kundera said the report was a lie, telling Czech news agency CTK it was “the murder of an author”.
First novel by Milan Kundera that Louis Aragon prefaced by hailing a “major work”, The joke was completed in 1965 and published in Czechoslovakia in 1967 during the ideological détente, shortly before the Prague Spring. It has met with great success.
During the communist dictatorship of the 1950s, a student plays a bad joke on his partner which results in his exclusion from the university and his enrollment in a disciplinary battalion. Years later, he accidentally meets the wife of his friend who has slyly organized his downfall. In revenge, he manages to seduce her. When he tells her the truth, she tries to kill herself. But she accidentally takes laxatives instead of barbiturates.
In this polyphonic novel (there are four character-narrators), Kundera draws inspiration from his personal story, himself being fired for the first time from the Communist Party in 1950, and chooses humor and the grotesque, in accordance with tradition. literature from Central Europe, to demonstrate the way in which History crushes political illusions and individual destinies.
Life is Elsewhere, crowned by the Foreign Medici Prize in 1973, established Milan Kundera as one of the best Czech writers of his generation. It was only published in the Czech Republic in 2016.
It tells the story of a surrealist poet pursued by a castrating mother who will not be able to free herself either through artistic creation or through revolutionary action and who will die an absurd death. Like his hero Jaromil, Kundera devoted himself in his youth to “the poetic muse” before carrying out what he called his “antilyrical conversion” which led him to the existential novel.
Written in 1982 and published by Gallimard in 1984, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is considered Kundera’s masterpiece. It was not until 2006 that he appeared in his native country.
From Paris, where he has been exiled since 1975, he has written the story of two couples from the intellectual and artistic bourgeoisie of Prague around the Soviet invasion of the city.
Tomas is a fickle surgeon, his wife Tereza, a photographer distressed by her husband’s infidelities; Sabine, mistress of Tomas, a free-spirited pleasure artist and Franz, a Swiss professor stuck in an unhappy marriage and in love with Sabine.
From these seemingly simple stories, the novelist questions the notion of the eternal return and presses the existential paradox: do we suffer from the dramatic weight of our existences or is it the insignificance of our lives that weighs us down?
After discovering with horror the liberties taken by the French translation of The joke, Milan Kundera will devote a large part of his work to revising his translated work. He will entirely resume the French versions of The joke, Laughable loves, Life is elsewhere, The farewell waltz, The book of laughter and oblivion and The unbearable lightness of being.
In 1995, The Slowness appeared, the first work in a cycle of four short and very sober novels, written directly in French. A small event in the literary world, this novel, a critique of Western civilization obsessed with speed, opened the doors to the international literary scene. It also earned him his first bad reviews.
Here are the important dates of the Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, who died Tuesday at the age of 94:
