Milan Kundera insisted that there should be only two sentences as a biographical description in his books: “He was born in Czechoslovakia. In 1975 he settled in France.” The rest didn’t matter, neither the author, nor the details of life, nor his ideas. What counted was his work, classics of the second half of the 20th century such as “The Joke” or “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and essays such as “The Art of the Novel” or “The Kidnapped West”, published in Spanish in the Tusquets- Publisher. A fervent communist in his country at the height of Stalinism, he eschewed ideologies and rejected biographies. The concise biographical note with which he wanted to describe his life already contains the last sentence: “He was born in Czechoslovakia. In 1975 he settled in France. In 2023 he dies in Paris.
Kundera died Tuesday, although the news only broke this Wednesday. He was 94 years old. His health had deteriorated lately and he had lost his memory. He leaves behind his wife Vera. They had no children, but they had a large group of friends and admirers in Paris, where they lived in various apartments in the 6th arrondissement, near the Hotel Lutetia, rue Cherche-Midi and the Jardin du since the early 1980s Luxembourg. Until a few years ago he could still be seen walking these streets, not incognito but with the discretion of someone who was part of the landscape of this corner of the Rive Gauche, the heart of the capital’s literary district. Far from being a recluse, he led a social life, although he had refrained from interviewing the press on principle for almost four decades. It was hidden from everyone’s eyes.
Kundera’s success in the 1980s with translations into dozens of languages and film adaptations opened up a unique narrative world to a large number of readers, a cultured and at the same time readable literature that, after years of experimentation, combined the joy of history with the novelty of ideas. He also discovered, for many, Central Europe on the eve of the defining moment for an entire generation of Europeans: the fall of the Berlin Wall. The author of The Betrayed Testaments was, like his successful contemporaries in Latin America, the heir and reinventer of a great literary tradition – in his case, that of the great European novel with Cervantin roots – and an explorer of the continent that remained hidden for four decades behind the Iron Curtain and subject to Moscow’s totalitarianism.
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Kundera was a European intellectual. A novelist with no homeland and language – or with two homelands and languages, since he wrote his major works in his native Czech, which he abandoned in favor of French in the late 1980s – he claimed Cervantes, Rabelais, Diderot, Kafka and Musil. He never got the Nobel Prize. Revelations of an alleged complaint he had turned down with another writer during his youth in Stalinist Prague may have complicated his options. But like Borges or his friend Philip Roth, he didn’t need it to become a living teacher before he died. Along with Mario Vargas Llosa, he was one of the few authors whose works were published in La Pléiade, Gallimard’s collection of classics, in his lifetime, an honor many consider equal or even superior to the Nobel Prize.
At the end of his life he was reconciled with his native country, where he was awarded the National Prize for Literature in 2008 and the Kafka Prize in 2021. Three years earlier he had regained his Czech nationality, which the communist regime had stripped him of in the late 1970s after settling in France. Milan and Vera donated their books and archives to the Brno library, where the writer was born.
Milan Kundera, in Paris in August 1984. Photo: GETTY | Video: EPV
Literary critic Florence Noiville has just published Milan Kundera. ‘Écrire, quelle drôle d’idee!’ (Milan Kundera. ‘Writing, what a strange idea!’), a first-person literary essay in which he reflects on the physical decline of the novelist, his friend. He says that in December 2020 he visits him at the Récamier street apartment and Kundera asks him in Czech: “And what are you doing?” Seeing that Noiville is making notes in his notebook, he looks at her and she says to him: “Milan, I am writing”. Milan replies: “Write? What a strange idea!” Noiville remarks at the same time: “Language, memory always recede, like the sea at low tide.” On another visit in the summer of 2022, Vera explains that Milan is now dedicated to breaking books, including hers own. “All but one,” says Vera, “who escapes destruction every time.” Is [Albert] Camus. The rebellious man. This book keeps the type. Resist.” In September of the same year, Vera tearfully told Noiville’s husband: “I can’t take it anymore. He doesn’t speak anymore. He doesn’t react anymore. He’s not here anymore.
Noiville and other people who have treated Kundera over the years report that spiritually he has begun to return to his homeland, as if his roots are pulling him after so many years. “Memories come back, maybe it’s nostalgia, a natural movement as you get older,” summarized essayist Christian Salmon, a friend of the Kunderas since the 1980s, two years ago. Ariane Chemin, a journalist at Le Monde and author of the biographical essay À la recherche de Milan Kundera (In search of Milan Kundera), stated around the same time that the return project had been canceled after Czech magazine respect published a 2008 document from the archives showing that in 1950 Kundera denounced an opponent who was eventually sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Between Paris, his physical place of residence, and the Czech Republic “[los Kundera] They’re nowhere,” Chemin said. “This is the tragic side of this story.” The author of “La ignorancia” is an example of those personalities who are more loved outside his country than inside. “Here, people know their past. He was able to rewrite his biography abroad,” said Jan Novák, author of Kundera: Český život a doba (Kundera: his life and Czech times), a 900-page biography published in 2020, from Prague in 2021. “I think he’s a great writer, but he’s a problematic character.”
Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929 to a young country, Czechoslovakia, and to a cultured family in Moravia. His father was a musician, a student of Leoš Janáček; his mother was a secretary at the Brno Conservatory. Young Milan learned music from Pavel Haas, a composer who died in Auschwitz and father of his first wife. In his Paris apartment he kept a photo of Janáček, another of his father and another of the Viennese writer Hermann Broch. As the protagonist of La vida está en otro lugar, Kundera experienced what he called the lyrical age: Stalinist enthusiasm that would haunt him decades later, and militant poetry and theater that he renounced and did not want to incorporate into his works. Complete works in the La Pléiade collection by Gallimard, his publisher. He always wanted to keep strict control over his work and his descendants and for this reason, as his friend Florence Noiville recounts, in his last phase destroyed unfinished manuscripts, private letters and diaries. “See everything from here to here?” Vera tells him while showing him a shelf. “Everything will be confetti.”
But let’s go back to the years of youth: the post-war period, reconstruction and the socialist utopia. Kundera, a professor at the Prague Film School, publishes odes to the people’s heroes, receives a literary prize only the most loyal can receive, and became the closest thing to a regime intellectual from whom he gradually distanced himself. The Soviet invasion of 1968 to crush the Prague Spring put an end to all reformist whims. Kundera is expelled from the party and the film school; his second wife Vera came from television, where she worked as a journalist.
The Joke, a 1967 novel with an already lengthy indictment of the system, and 1973’s La vida está en otro lugar had made Kundera famous in France, the country that welcomed Milan and Vera in 1975. They were the first to live in Rennes, at whose university the writer taught a course entitled “Kafka, His Interpreters, the Roman and Central Europe”. In 1980 they moved to Paris, where Kundera taught the famous literature seminar at the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences. In 1979 he had lost Czechoslovak citizenship; In 1981 François Mitterrand granted him French citizenship. Not wanting to be identified as a dissident, he has been, in this as well as others, the anti-Vaclav Havel since the 1968 debacle: the committed writer and the writer who lives by and for the text; the national hero and the novelist hated in his homeland. From these years comes his rejection of public life. “The police,” he said, “destroy private life in communist countries; Journalists threaten it in capitalist countries.” I didn’t want to be one of those writers who thinks of everything. I didn’t want to be an intellectual.
In an imaginary dialogue with himself, Kundera wrote in The Art of the Novel:
“—Are you a communist, Mr. Kundera?
No, I’m a novelist.
Are you a dissident?
No, I’m a novelist.
Are you from the left or from the right?
-Neither the one nor the other. I’m a novelist.
Speaking to EL PAÍS in 1982, when the fall of the Berlin Wall was still a long way off, he explained: “I don’t feel comfortable playing the role of a dissident. I don’t like reducing literature and art to a political reading. The word dissident means to presuppose a thesis literature, and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s exactly thesis literature. What interests me is the aesthetic value. To me, pro-communist or anti-communist literature is the same in that sense. That’s why I don’t like to see myself as a dissident.
And an unwilling intellectual, he was also one of those who possessed the rare virtue of seeing far, for his words survive the decades to this day. The short essay “A Kidnapped West or the Tragedy of Central Europe”, published in 1983 and now reprinted, is worth tons of statements and columns. The message resonates after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In this essay, Kundera asserted that the lands of Central Europe were neither the East nor an exotic world, but the cultural core of Europe, the “abducted West” of the title. The text began by reciting the director of the Hungarian Press Agency’s appeal to the world in September 1956, when Soviet tanks were crushing Budapest: “We are dying for Hungary and for Europe.” And Kundera wondered: “Perhaps.” [el disidente soviético] When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn denounces communist oppression, is he claiming that Europe is a core value worth dying for? No, “dying for your homeland and for Europe” is a sentence that was not conceivable in Moscow or Leningrad, but in Budapest or Warsaw.” Or I could have added: in Kiev.
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