Czech writer Milan Kundera has died.
He was 94.
The Moravian Library announced the author’s death, writing in a statement, “Milan Kundera, a Czech-French author who is among the world’s most translated authors, died on July 11, 2023 in his Paris apartment,” CNN reported.
The library, which is home to Kundera’s personal collection, said he died after a long illness, Reuters reported.
Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Czhechoslovakia. He was a member of the Communist Party shortly after World War II ended and was a strong believer in the movement, but in 1950 was expelled from the party for criticizing it. Years later, however, his membership was restored.
Still, he was a critical member of the party when it became liberalized in the late 1960s, during the period called Prague Spring.
At the same time, he published his first novel, “The Joke,” a work of satire set in communist Czechoslovakia in which a young man is sent to mines after making fun of communist slogans, The Associated Press reported. The book became a global bestseller.
In 1968, the Soviets invaded his home country and ended his hope of having a democratic version of socialism. In the 1970s, Kundera’s books were banned and he lost his teaching job.
But his opposition to the Soviets didn’t end there. He was declared an enemy of the communists. When the Soviets took full control, Kundera emigrated and lost his Czechoslovakian citizenship.
In 1980, Kundera said, “If someone had told me as a boy: One day you will see your nation vanish from the world, I would have considered it nonsense, something I couldn’t possibly imagine. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life,” the AP reported.
He lived in Paris in exile and became a French citizen in 1981. There, he published his most popular books, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Immortality,” the final one being the last book written in his native language before he switched to writing in French.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was made into a movie in 1988 starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, but despite Kundera being a consultant, the adaptation strayed from the source material. The changes made forced Kundera to ban all further adaptations of his works.
Eventually, Kundera’s Czech citizenship was restored in 2019, but it was too late. He had become a French author living in France, CNN reported.
There had been allegations that he was a communist police informant, a claim that he denied, calling it “the assassination of an author.” Not all believed the allegations, including former Czech president and playwright Vaclav Havel.
Kundera was reclusive, refusing to appear on camera and pushing back against technology by not allowing his works to be made into digital formats, the AP reported.
In a speech to the French National Library in 2012, he wrote:
“It seems to me that time, which continues its march pitilessly, is beginning to endanger books. It’s because of this anguish that, for several years now, I have in all my contracts a clause stipulating that they must be published only in the traditional form of a book, that they be read only on paper and not on a screen.
“People walk in the street, they no longer have contact with those around them, they don’t even see the homes they pass, they have wires hanging from their ears. They gesticulate, they should, they look at no one and no one looks at them. I ask myself, do they even read books anymore? It’s possible, but for how much longer?”
©2023 Cox Media Group
