One of the greatest voices in world literature, Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, died Tuesday afternoon at the age of 94 in Paris, where he had lived for years.
“Immeasurable sadness. Milan Kundera chose France to never stop being free. On all sides, he has helped us discover who we are and find a way into the absurdity of the world. “With him, one of the greatest voices in European literature is dying out,” French culture minister Rima Abdul Malak responded on Twitter.
He “died on Tuesday afternoon, July 11, 2023,” his longtime French publisher Gallimard told AFP on Wednesday. “Unfortunately, I can confirm that Mr. Milan Kundera (…) passed away after a long illness,” Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera library, said in her statement to AFP. Birthplace of Brno, in today’s Czech Republic.
A sarcastic painter of human existence in its political, amorous and erotic dimensions, Kundera was one of the rare authors to be included in the prestigious French collection of La Pléiade during his lifetime and has been translated into fifty languages.
Born in Czechoslovakia and stripped of that nationality before becoming Czech late in life, he had been French since 1981.
AFP
Born on April 1, 1929, the Defender of Freedom who lived through Communism was destined, like his parents, for a career in music. Milan Kundera was initially a music-loving novelist. His first texts, poems in Czech, are written in the form of sonatas.
In the 1960s, Milan Kundera published two novels, La Joke, which was notably praised by the French poet Aragon, and Risibles amours, texts that took a bitter stock of the political illusions of the Prague coup-attempted generation, who died in 1948 enabled the communists to come to power.
Blacklisted in his country after the Prague Spring, Kundera went into exile in France in 1975 with his wife Vera, a star presenter on Czech television.
As a naturalized Frenchman, he will therefore choose French, which he knows perfectly, as his writing language to mark his break with a homeland that stripped him of his nationality in 1979 and gave it back to him in 2019.
In France he notably published “La Valse aux adieux” or “Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli”.
AFP
1984 saw the publication of what some consider his masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a romance and ode to freedom, both serious and casual, whose theme is nothing less than the human condition.
The book will then be made into a film starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis.
Kundera refrained from speaking out in the media since the mid-1980s, wishing that people would talk about his work and nothing else, and lived discreetly in central Paris.
He had repeatedly been the victim of macabre false reports on social networks, where his death was announced an hour ago.
He was regularly asked for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he never won.