Milan Kundera is dead. The writer was 94 years old

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929 in Brno. The writer and essayist was known e.g. as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Czech television, cited by Reuters, was the first to report the news.

Milan Kundera is dead. His books in the communist homeland were blacklisted

Kundera has been learning to play the piano since he was a child. In 1948 he graduated from high school in Brno, then studied musicology and literature at the Charles University in Prague – but had to interrupt them in 1950 for political reasons. Finally, in 1952, he managed to graduate from the Film and Television Department of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he later worked as a lecturer.

He grew up during World War II when Czechoslovakia was under German occupation. From 1948 he belonged to the Czechoslovak Communist Party, but after two years he was expelled from it for anti-party activities. These events inspired him to write the novel “Joke”, which was a satire on life in a communist state and was published in 1967. A year later, due to criticism of the system, his work was blacklisted in his homeland.

Kundera wrote, but did not allow his books to be filmed. All because of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

Like other Czech intellectuals such as Václav Havel, he was involved in the Prague Spring. That period ended with the intervention of the USSR and other members of the Warsaw Pact (Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Bulgaria) on the night of August 20/21, 1968. In 1975, Kundera emigrated to France. Later, the writer did not allow his subsequent books to be translated into Czech, and from 1990 he wrote only in French.

In 1984, he published his most famous book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was considered a masterpiece of world literature. Four years later, the novel was made into a film, and Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche starred in the main roles – a married couple living in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. “Kundera grabs the reader by the scruff of the neck and shakes him mercilessly, saying, ‘Do you really believe that? Is that what you really are?’ What more could you want from a novel? – wrote the reviewer of “The Independent”, and the director Agnieszka Holland, who is one of the translators of the Czech’s work into Polish, spoke in “Newsweek” about “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and her acquaintance with Kundera:

Back then, in Paris, Milan gave me the manuscript of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I read it with great interest. Not only did it remind me of my experiences in Prague in 1968, but it somehow corresponded incredibly with emigration and Polish August. It seemed to me that this novel contained a sum of experiences that could be valuable for a Polish reader, and I asked Kundera if she would agree to my translation of the novel into Polish. He enthusiastically agreed, and then read the translation very carefully, although he does not speak Polish, so he could not judge its quality.

Interestingly, although the movie based on this book was a huge success, Milan Kundera was not happy with it. Since then, he has refused to bring any of his novels to the screen.