Milan Kundera, the Czech literary giant and author of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ has died at the age of 94.
Kundera became one of the 20th century’s most influential novelists but spent much of his life away from the limelight. The Moravian Library in Brno said he died in Paris on Tuesday.
“Milan Kundera, a Czech-French author who is among the world’s most translated authors, died on July 11, 2023 in his Paris apartment,” the library said in a statement.
The author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Kundera was known for his witty, tragicomic tales, which were often intertwined with deep philosophical debates and satirical portrayals of life under communist repression.
Born in April 1929 in Brno, in then Czechoslovakia, Kundera was part of an generation of Czech writers, film makers and intellectuals who came of age immediately after World War II.
Like many others, he joined the Communist Party as it took power shortly after the war and initially believed in its ideology. He was expelled from the party in 1950 for criticizing the regime, but had his membership restored a few years later.
As a successful writer and a respected academic, he became an influential critical voice within the party during the period of liberalization in the late 1960s that became known as the Prague Spring. He published his first novel, “The Joke,” in that period.
That book is a satirical look at revenge set in the totalitarian country and became a bestseller at home and abroad. And it was this book, and Kundera’s activities during the Prague Spring, that blacklisted his books and cost him his job
In August 1968, a Soviet invasion abruptly ended the dream of a more democratic version of socialism. By the early 1970s, Kundera’s books were banned and removed from libraries. He lost his teaching job and was barred from publishing.
He was declared an enemy of the regime and was relentlessly harassed by the communist police. His phone was tapped and eventually, Kundera was forced to emigrate and was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship.
He spent the rest of his life in exile in Paris, becoming a French citizen in 1981.
It was in Paris that Kundera’s literary career truly blossomed, with the publication of his three most acclaimed works, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Immortality.”
He returned rarely to the Czech republic and when he did, he traveled incognito, booking into hotels under a pseudonym. While his Czech citizenship was restored in 2019, he was by then a French author whose home was in France.
