Czech writer Milan Kundera died in Paris at the age of 94

French naturalized Czech writer Milan Kundera, one of the giants of world literature, author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Existence”, died at the age of 94 in Paris.

Perennial Nobel Prize candidate Kundera “died at noon on Tuesday, July 11, 2023,” his publisher Gallimard said in a statement Wednesday.

“Unfortunately, I can confirm that Mr. Milan Kundera passed away yesterday (Tuesday) after a long illness,” Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library in the Czech city of Brno, told AFP.

A sarcastic portrait of the human condition, Kundera is part of a small line of writers, such as Russia’s Vladimir Nabokov, who decided to switch languages ​​midway through his literary career.

Marked by the communist totalitarianism that subjugated his country for a good part of the 20th century, Kundera began his literary career with a collection of poems in Czech “Čovjek je moj vrt”.

He switched to French in the mid-1980s, after which he settled in Paris, where he lived with his wife Vera for the rest of his life.

Disgraced in his own country

Born on April 1, 1929 in Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic, Kundera published his discovery novel “The Joke” in 1967.

He was stripped of his Czech citizenship after falling out of favor with his country’s authorities during the Prague Spring, a 1968 reform movement that was militarily suppressed by the Soviet Union.

He adopted French citizenship in 1981, and returned his Czech citizenship only in 2019.

He is one of the few living writers included in the prestigious French literary collection La Pléiade, Gallimard.

The novel that established him internationally was “The Unbearable Lightness of Existence”, published in 1984, a sarcastic portrait of the human condition and one of the most influential contemporary novels.

As a Czech author, he published “A Joke” and “Book of Loves” (1969), a set of texts that form a bitter review of the political illusions of the generation of the Prague coup that allowed the Communists to come to power in 1948.

As with many other exiles, the relationship with his country was complex, even after the return of democracy to the Eastern European bloc.

Some Czech intellectuals reproached him for his lack of public activity in favor of his native culture.

Kundera was a widely known and translated writer (in more than 50 languages), but very discreet.

He regularly returned to the Czech Republic and his hometown, but mostly incognito.

Kundera’s work is “deep, human, intimate and far-reaching research at the same time,” responded French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne. His Czech counterpart, Petr Fiala, noted that it “reached generations of readers on all continents.”