Milan Kundera, who passed away this Wednesday at the age of 94, is the most popular czech writer since Franz Kafka and, despite this, had a difficult relationship with his native country, to the point of writing in French and refusing to review the Czech translations of his works.
Milan Kundera (Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1929) has become in the last 30 years an almost invisible author, a silent ascetic secluded in his central Paris apartment, someone who shies away from journalists and public statements.
He was born in Brno into a family of intellectual weighthis father LudvÃk was a famous pianist, and music has had a great influence on his prose.
In Prague he trained as a screenwriter and then taught World Literature and Novel Structure at the Faculty for Film and Television.
Prose writer, poet, playwright and essayist, he began to be known in the 1960s as playwright (“The owner of the keys” and “Bobada”), but ended up consecrating himself as novelist (“The joke” and “The book of ridiculous love”).
Since his first novels, humor, irony and reflection on memory, the passage of time, exile and the fragile human condition have been his hallmarks.
In his essay “The art of the novel” declares himself an admirer of Miguel de Cervantes, whom he considers not only the creator of the novel with his Don Quixote but also of modernity.
He was a great admirer of Miguel de Cervantes
“For me, the creator of the Modern Age is not only Descartes, but also Cervantes,” he once wrote about the man who decisively influenced his work with his humor and narrative art.
“To whom or to what do I feel linked?: to God? to the country? to the people? to the individual? My answer is as ridiculous as it is sincere: I don’t feel attached to anything except for the discredited inheritance of Cervantes”, he assured in that essay.
During the opening process of the “Prague Spring” in 1968, he emerged as one of the representatives of the cultural opposition to the communist regime, which he paid for with his expulsion from the Communist Party and the ban on publishing.
The political satire of Stalinist communism that he portrayed in “The Joke” earned him recognition with the Czech Writers’ Union Award, but with the reinstatement of a government loyal to the USSR, he was banned as a writer.
Kundera went into exile in France in 1975 and published in Czech -in a Toronto publishing house- his best-known works (“The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Immortality”).
He had a difficult relationship with his native country, the Czech Republic.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”a novel that has marked several generations with his reflections on love and the eternal returnhas been his greatest commercial success, although it was only published in 2006 in the Czech Republic.
This work arose after his experience in the West in the 1970s, when Kundera considered that “the weather was never better and at the same time it became so unbearable”as the Czech literary critic Jiri Penas once said.
The Czechoslovak communist regime withdrew his citizenship in 1979 and obtained the gala in 1981.
Kundera accepted a Czech passport again in 2019 and the Czech authorities apologized for the treatment he received from the communist dictatorship.
Since the 1980s he has received numerous awards, from the Médicis, for the best foreign novel published in France, the US Commonwealth, Europe or Jerusalem, in addition, his name has been mentioned on several occasions for the Nobel.
After the Czechoslovak democratic transition, Kundera published “Immortality” in his native country in 1993, which was a friendly literary reunion with his nation, but somewhat ephemeral.
His Czech past has haunted him with some controversy, as if he were a character in one of his own novels.
In 2008 the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes accused of snitching in 1950 to a spy who ended up in prison for 14 years.
The writer then broke his silence – with a statement – to describe the accusations as “pure lies”.