PARIS: Czech-born writer Milan Kundera, author of the novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” who lived nearly five decades in Paris after emigrating in disillusionment from his Communist-ruled homeland, has died at the age of 94.
The Moravian Library (MZK) in the Czech city of Brno, which houses Kundera’s personal collection, said he died in his Paris apartment on Tuesday after a long illness.
Kundera won global accolades for the way he depicted themes and characters that floated between the mundane reality of everyday life and the lofty world of ideas.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said his works “reached whole generations of readers across all continents” while President Petr Pavel called him a “world-class writer”.
“With his fate in life, he symbolized the eventful history of our country in the 20th century,” Pavel said. “Kundera’s legacy will live on in his works.”
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said Kundera was “a writer and a voice that we will miss”. “Milan Kundera’s work is at the same time a deep, human, intimate and distant exploration,” she said.
Kundera was born in Brno in 1929 but emigrated to France in 1975 after being ostracised for criticising the 1968 Soviet invasion of Communist Czechoslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring liberal reform movement.
He rarely gave interviews, believing writers should speak through their work, and lived out of the public eye. He wrote later novels in French.
Kundera’s first novel, “The Joke”, was published in 1967 and offered a scathing portrayal of the Czechoslovak Communist regime and the ruling party of which he was still a member.
He ultimately abandoned hopes that the party could be reformed in a democratic direction, and moved to France. Four years later, he was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship.
His best known book, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1984), focused on the Prague Spring and its turbulent demise with Czechs despairing of totalitarianism’s grip retreating into obscure private lives or emigrating to the West.
It was made into a film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche and directed by Philip Kaufman in 1988, earning two Academy Award nominations.
After the 1989 Velvet Revolution that peacefully overthrew Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime and ushered in pro-Western democracy, Kundera only rarely made public visits home but would quietly visit friends and family. He regained Czech citizenship in 2019.
