The wife says goodbye to Milan Kundera. Some maintained for years that their marriage was invalid

Milan Kundera, who wrote e.g. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, in his Paris apartment on Tuesday after a long illness. For more than 60 years, his companion was his second wife.

Milan Kundera spent six decades with one woman, although some say he was not her husband

Kundera was born on April 1, 1929 in Brno. His first wife was the opera singer Olga Haas. The story of her and her mother, a well-known writer, would later inspire Kundera to write “Keyowners”. They got married in 1956, but the marriage did not last long. Later, Haas said that they made a “pact of silence” about the reasons and circumstances of the breakup.

In 1962, Kundera married a second time. He married Vera Hrabankova, a TV announcer. The witness was his longtime friend – Vojtech Jestrab. Apparently, he switched places (and allegedly also ID card) with the groom just before the ceremony, so some half-joking half-seriously afterwards that Kundera’s second marriage is de facto invalid and Jestrab is a bigamist.

The Kunderas had two daughters. After leaving for France, the wife also became a literary agent, editor and translator of the writer. She was also his buffer, separating him from others – she answered telephone calls on his behalf and dealt with other matters that were not to the author’s taste, because he did not want to be public and believed that a writer should express himself through creativity.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being was written in Paris. The writer was not reconciled with his homeland for a long time

Kundera emigrated with his wife to France in 1975 and later even banned the translation of his new books into Czech (the last one written in this language was published in 1990). He was also against adapting his novels to the screen after not liking The Unbearable Lightness of Being from 1988, directed by Phillip Kaufmann and starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis.

In 2019, Kunderova that dissidents hated her husband because before the revolution they feared that Kundera might lead the political opposition. “They elected Havel as the leader of the anti-communist opposition [Vaclava – red.]fearing that Milan, who was much more famous abroad, might want to lead the political opposition himself, “she added. Although she did not hide her longing for her home country, she did not consider returning to the Czech Republic.

Kunderova said she first became aware of the impossibility of their return to the Czech Republic in 2008, when the weekly magazine Respekt published an article which described Kundera as an informant for the communist authorities in the early 1950s. She added that they both experienced it very much, and never heard an apology from the authors of the text or the publisher, although, among others, a letter of protest from writers, including four Nobel Prize winners, appeared in his defense.

In April this year, Kunderowa made Kundera, who had lost his Czech citizenship and only regained it years later in 2019, “reconcile” with his hometown of Brno. Vera had a dream in which Phillip Roth appeared to her, and upon waking she persuaded her husband to donate his 3,000-volume collection to the city’s library. Roth was supposed to have suggested that to her in her dream. – The decision was simple, there was no doubt – then Kunderowa in an interview with the Czech radio. The library was opened on the 94th anniversary of the writer’s birth.