“An unbearable lightness being.” The departure of Milan Kundera

2023-07-12 09:56:07

The famous French-Czech writer, Milan Kundera, has passed away at the age of 94, according to what was announced Wednesday by the spokeswoman for the “Milan Kundera Library” in the Czech city of Brno, where the author of “an unbearable lightness” was born.

“Unfortunately, I can assure you that Milan Kundera passed away (Tuesday) after a long illness,” Anna Mrazova said.

Kundera, a French writer and philosopher of Czech origin, was born on April 1, 1929, to a Czech father and mother. His father, Ludvik Kundera, was a musicologist and rector of the Cancic University of Literature and Music in Brno.

Milan learned to play the piano from his father, and later studied music, cinema and literature. He graduated in 1952 and worked as an assistant professor and lecturer at the Film College at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. He published poetry, articles and plays during his studies, and joined the editorial department of a number of literary magazines.

He joined the Communist Party in 1948, and he and writer Jan Travolca were dismissed in 1950 due to noticing individual tendencies in them, and after that he returned in 1956 to the ranks of the party, then he was dismissed again in 1970.

In 1953 he published his first collection of poetry, but it did not receive enough attention, and Kundera was not known as an important writer until 1963 after publishing his first collection of short stories, Funny Loves.

Milan Kundera.

Kundera lost his job in 1968 after the Soviet Union entered Czechoslovakia, after his involvement in what was called the Prague Spring. He was forced to emigrate to France in 1975 after his books were banned from circulation for five years. He worked as an assistant professor at the University of Rennes in Brittany (France), and he obtained French citizenship in 1981. After applying for this after the Czechoslovakian citizenship was revoked from him in 1978, as a result of writing the book “Laughter and Forgetting”.

Under the weight of these circumstances and developments in his life, Kundera wrote his famous novel “An Unbearable Lightness Being”, which made him a well-known international writer for its philosophical reflections, which fall under the idea of ​​Nietzsche’s eternal return.

In 1995 Kundera decided to make French the language of his literary tongue through his novel “Slowness”.

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