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Prague: Czech writer Milan Kundera, author of the novel “The unbearable lightness of beingWho lived nearly five decades in Paris after emigrating in disillusionment from his homeland, which was ruled by the Communists, died at the age of 94.
The Moravian Library in the Czech city of Brno, which houses Kundera’s personal collection, said he died in his Paris apartment on Tuesday after a long illness.
Kundera has won international awards for his portrayal of subjects and characters who float between the mundane realities of everyday life and the lofty world of ideas.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said his works had “reached entire generations of readers across all continents” while President Petr Pavel called him a “world-class writer”.
“His destiny in life symbolized the eventful history of our country in the twentieth century,” Pavel said. “Kundera’s legacy will live on in his business.”
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said Kundera was “a writer and a voice that we will miss.”
“Milan Kundera’s work is at once a profound exploration, human, intimate and distant,” she said.
Kundera was born in Brno in 1929 but emigrated to France in 1975 after being ostracized for criticizing the 1968 Soviet invasion of communist Czechoslovakia that crushed the liberal reformist Prague Spring movement.
He rarely gave interviews, believing writers should speak through their work, and lived out of the public eye.
Fellow Czech writer Karel Hvizdala told Czech television that he had seen his friend last November and he was already in poor health.
He said: “I remember that on his hospital bed, which he had at home with him, he had only one book – Albert Camus’s The Plague.”
hidden contradictions
Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, was published in 1967 and presented a scathing portrait of the Czechoslovak communist regime and the ruling party of which he was still a member.
He eventually gave up hope that the party could be reformed in a democratic direction, and moved to France. Four years later, he was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship.
He told the French daily Le Monde in 1976 that calling his works politics is an oversimplification, thus concealing their true significance, but that his books often take on a political tone.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) was a story written in seven parts that demonstrated the power of totalitarian regimes to erase bits of history and create an alternate past—a work the New York Times called “genius” in its review. .
His most famous book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), focused on the Prague Spring and its tumultuous demise with Czechs despairing at the grip of totalitarianism retreating into an obscure private life or emigration to the West.
It was made into a movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche and directed by Philip Kaufman in 1988, and received two Academy Award nominations.
Oxford University professor Timothy Garton Ash, an author and historian focusing on Central Europe, said Kundera “did much to inculcate the idea and culture of Central Europe in the world’s imagination”.
Kundera once told an interviewer that he considered himself French, not an immigrant. He later wrote novels in French.
Le Monde called him a “tireless advocate of the novel” in reporting his death.
Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, said, “He is undoubtedly the most impersonator of European writers on the subtle contradictions of our world.”
After the 1989 Velvet Revolution that peacefully overthrew the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and ushered in pro-Western democracy, Kundera rarely made public visits home but would quietly visit friends and family.
He regained his Czech citizenship in 2019.
The Moravian Library in the Czech city of Brno, which houses Kundera’s personal collection, said he died in his Paris apartment on Tuesday after a long illness.
Kundera has won international awards for his portrayal of subjects and characters who float between the mundane realities of everyday life and the lofty world of ideas.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said his works had “reached entire generations of readers across all continents” while President Petr Pavel called him a “world-class writer”.
“His destiny in life symbolized the eventful history of our country in the twentieth century,” Pavel said. “Kundera’s legacy will live on in his business.”
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said Kundera was “a writer and a voice that we will miss.”
“Milan Kundera’s work is at once a profound exploration, human, intimate and distant,” she said.
Kundera was born in Brno in 1929 but emigrated to France in 1975 after being ostracized for criticizing the 1968 Soviet invasion of communist Czechoslovakia that crushed the liberal reformist Prague Spring movement.
He rarely gave interviews, believing writers should speak through their work, and lived out of the public eye.
Fellow Czech writer Karel Hvizdala told Czech television that he had seen his friend last November and he was already in poor health.
He said: “I remember that on his hospital bed, which he had at home with him, he had only one book – Albert Camus’s The Plague.”
hidden contradictions
Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, was published in 1967 and presented a scathing portrait of the Czechoslovak communist regime and the ruling party of which he was still a member.
He eventually gave up hope that the party could be reformed in a democratic direction, and moved to France. Four years later, he was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship.
He told the French daily Le Monde in 1976 that calling his works politics is an oversimplification, thus concealing their true significance, but that his books often take on a political tone.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) was a story written in seven parts that demonstrated the power of totalitarian regimes to erase bits of history and create an alternate past—a work the New York Times called “genius” in its review. .
His most famous book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), focused on the Prague Spring and its tumultuous demise with Czechs despairing at the grip of totalitarianism retreating into an obscure private life or emigration to the West.
It was made into a movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche and directed by Philip Kaufman in 1988, and received two Academy Award nominations.
Oxford University professor Timothy Garton Ash, an author and historian focusing on Central Europe, said Kundera “did much to inculcate the idea and culture of Central Europe in the world’s imagination”.
Kundera once told an interviewer that he considered himself French, not an immigrant. He later wrote novels in French.
Le Monde called him a “tireless advocate of the novel” in reporting his death.
Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, said, “He is undoubtedly the most impersonator of European writers on the subtle contradictions of our world.”
After the 1989 Velvet Revolution that peacefully overthrew the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and ushered in pro-Western democracy, Kundera rarely made public visits home but would quietly visit friends and family.
He regained his Czech citizenship in 2019.
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