Milan Kundera: Czech writer dies aged 94

Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera has died aged 94, public broadcaster Czech Television reported on Wednesday.

The award-winning author was known for novels that delved into the individual’s thoughts, feelings and beliefs, as well as sex and relationships.

In his masterpiece “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, Kundera told the story of a love triangle against the backdrop of the Prague Spring. The epic turned Kundera into an international literary star when it was published in 1984.

By then, the dissident Czech novelist had been living in exile in Paris for nearly a decade. His books were banned in Czechoslovakia, and after the Soviet-backed Communist government stripped him of his citizenship in 1978, he remained the country’s most famous exiled writer.

After the Velvet Revolution, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the creation of the Czech Republic, the writer never returned to live in his homeland. “There is no such thing as a dream of returning,” he once said in an interview with the German weekly Die Zeit. “I took my Plague with me; the smell, the taste, the language, the landscape, the culture.”

Kundera’s novels began to be published in the Czech language from the 1990s onwards, but “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was not released in her homeland until 2006.

socialist theater

Born April 1, 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera was not only influenced by Czech culture, but even more so as he excelled as a writer during socialism.

Upon finishing high school, he enthusiastically joined the Communist Party in 1948; two years later he was expelled because of “hostile thinking and individualistic tendencies”. This had consequences: Kundera had to interrupt his studies at the Film Academy, where he studied music and literature and was just starting out.

He made his debut as a writer in 1953 with the poetry collection “Man: A Wide Garden”. In it, he addressed socialist realism, albeit from a communist perspective. He later rejoined the Communist Party – and was again expelled. It was a difficult relationship.

The “individualistic tendencies” that the CP accused him of when he was first expelled became a point of contention in the 1960s. Kundera wrote funny stories and in 1967 his first novel, “The Joke”, was published.

After the violent repression of the Prague Spring in 1968, against which he spoke out, the author became a persona non grata. As a supporter of reformist communism, he was expelled from the Writers’ Association in 1969 and again from the party in 1970; his teaching activities at the Film Academy were suspended, his plays were withdrawn from the repertoire, his publications banned and his books withdrawn from bookstores for sale.

french exile

Kundera continued to write despite the censors. He acknowledged his Communist background in “Life is Elsewehere” (1973) and in “The Farewell Waltz” (original 1972 title, “The Farewell Party”). The author knew that these works would not be published in Czechoslovakia. Instead, they debuted in France, which offered him refuge in 1975 and a teaching assignment in Rennes and then Paris.

From his life in exile, Kundera continued to push forward his literary themes, further using a Czechoslovakian backdrop for his works. As he had already been expelled from the country when “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” appeared in 1978, the socialist leadership in his homeland was left with only the possibility of revoking the writer’s citizenship.

In 1984, Kundera published “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”; the book made bestseller lists around the world and made Kundera a star. The novel was later adapted into a successful film, with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day Lewis in the lead roles.

With the world’s growing interest in life behind the Iron Curtain, it was just the right book at the right time.

Although his later works like “Immortality” (1990) also drew attention, his success was not as great. Some literary critics found these novels too philosophical and essayistic; others praised the author as a pioneering moralist, a critic of Western European civilization and postmodernism.

A traitor?

Once again, socialism caught up with the writer in 2008, when the charge was leveled that Kundera had betrayed a member of the opposition in 1950, who then disappeared for several years in a forced labor camp. A Czech secret police protocol allegedly provided evidence.

But was it really Kundera who made that claim? Or did someone else impersonate Milan Kundera? “I am completely surprised by something I didn’t expect, something I didn’t even know about yesterday, something that didn’t happen,” the writer told a Czech news agency. In fact, his signature is missing from the document.

Kundera stopped commenting publicly on his past and would travel incognito to the Czech Republic to visit his friends. As an act of reconciliation, former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis restored his Czech citizenship in 2019.

One last festival of insignificance

In 2014, after a decade-long break, Kundera published a new novel, “The Festival of Insignificance”. In it, four men stroll through Paris, recounting – in Kundera’s well-known humorous and tragic style – about personal obstacles. The long-awaited book was a success across Europe, although critics were divided. Some praised the novel as a “masterpiece”, while others spoke of an “age-tight work”. Like “The Unsustainable Lightness of Being”, he addressed some of his favorite themes: sexuality, philosophy, with characters reflecting on the irony and insignificance of life.

This article was originally written in German.