Czech writer Milan Kundera, who explored being and betrayal over half a century in poems, plays, essays and novels including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died aged 94 after a prolonged illness, Anna Mrazova, spokesperson for the Milan Kundera Library, has confirmed.
Famously leaving his homeland for France in 1975 after earlier being expelled from the Czechoslovakian Communist party for “anti-communist activities”, Kundera spent 40 years living in exile in Paris after his Czech citizenship was revoked in 1979. There he wrote his most famous works, including Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and later left behind his mother tongue to write novels in French, beginning with 1995’s La Lenteur (Slowness) and his final novel, 2014’s The Festival of Insignificance. He was often cited as a contender for the Nobel prize in literature.
“Like all great writers, Milan Kundera leaves indelible marks on his readers’ imaginations,” Salman Rushdie told the Guardian. “‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Ever since I read this sentence in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, it has remained with me, and illuminated my understanding of events all over the world.
“Later, a second idea of his, that the novel descended from two parents, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, gave me a valuable way to think about my own literary parentage – definitely on the Shandean side of the family tree,” the novelist added. “A third concept, that of the ‘lightness of being’, warned us that life allows us no revisions or second drafts, and this could be ‘unbearable’, but it could also be liberating.”
Born on 1 April 1929 in Brno, Kundera studied music with his father, a noted pianist and musicologist, before turning to writing, becoming a lecturer in world literature at Prague’s film academy in 1952. Despite rejecting the socialist realism required of writers in 50s Czechoslovakia, his literary reputation grew with the publication of a series of poems and plays, including an ode to the communist hero Julius Fučík, Poslední máj (The Last May), published in 1955. He later rejected these early works, saying that he was “working in many different directions – looking for my voice, my style and myself.”
An enthusiastic member of the Communist party in his youth, Kundera was expelled from the party twice, once after “anti-communist activities” in 1950, and again in 1970 during the clampdown that followed the 1968 Prague Spring, of which he was one of the leading voices, publicly calling for freedom of speech and equal rights for all. His first novel, 1967’s Žert (The Joke), was inspired by the period and became a great success. A polyphonic examination of fate and rationality set around a joke about Trotsky that a student writes to impress a girl, the novel vanished from bookshops and libraries after Russian tanks arrived in Wenceslas Square. Kundera found himself blacklisted and fired from his teaching job. Working in small-town cabarets as a jazz trumpeter, he found artistic freedom at last – the impossibility of publication had, in a way, lifted the burden of censorship from his shoulders.
After losing hope that Czechoslovakia would ever reform, he moved to France in 1975, lost his Czech nationality in 1979 and became a French citizen in 1981. Championed by his friend Philip Roth, who published Kundera as part of his series Writers from the Other Europe, it was the publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 1984 that confirmed his status as an international star. Set in the heady atmosphere of Prague in 1968, the novel follows two couples as they struggle with politics and infidelity, examining the tension between freedom and responsibility. Philip Kaufman’s 1988 film adaptation, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, ensured Kundera’s ascension into the literary stratosphere.
However, the author was never satisfied with Kaufman’s simplifications of the novel’s multilayered structure. He became increasingly mistrustful of the media, arguing: “An author, once quoted by a journalist, is no longer master of his word … And this, of course, is unacceptable.”
Speaking to Roth in 1980 in the New York Times, Kundera lamented that he felt “the novel has no place” in the world, saying “the totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions”.
He continued: “It seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.”
Nesmrtelnost (Immortality), Kundera’s last novel written in Czech, was published in 1988. This philosophical novel of ideas opened the way for three short novels written in French – La Lenteur (1995), L’Identité (1998) and L’Ignorance (2000) – meditating on nostalgia, memory and the possibility of a homecoming.
Accused in 2008 of betraying a Czech airman working for US intelligence more than 50 years earlier, Kundera broke his media silence to issue a furious denial to the Czech news agency CTK, saying he was “totally astonished” and calling the allegations “the assassination of an author”. An open letter signed by Roth, Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee and other eminent writers noted that, despite the claims of the magazine that published the accusation, “a witness statement by an eminent Prague scientist clears [Kundera] of any guilt. Too often, the press has spread this defamatory rumour without taking care to report the evidence refuting it.”
A final brief novel, La festa dell’insignificanza (The Festival of Insignificance), appeared in Italian translation in 2013. It divided reviewers when it appeared in English, some praising its crisply elegant humour and others judging that it marked the end of “a series of retreats into mere cleverness”.
After 40 years away, apart from brief and low-key visits to their homeland, Kundera and his wife Vera’s Czech citizenship was finally restored in 2019, a year after they met with the Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš, who described the meeting as a “great honour”. A year later, Petr Drulák, the Czech Republic’s ambassador to France, delivered Kundera’s citizenship certificate, describing it as “a very important symbolic gesture, a symbolic return of the greatest Czech writer in the Czech Republic.” He said Kundera was “in a good mood, just took the document and said thank you.”
