2023-07-12 11:02:07
czech writer Milan Kundera He died this Wednesday in France at the age of 94, the public radio station Radio Prague reported today.
The prose writer, playwright and poet, who had been writing in French since the 1980s, achieved worldwide fame in the second half of the 20th century with works such as “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”“The joke” and “The feast of insignificance”.
The writer, born on April 1, 1929 in Brno, in the southeast of the Czech Republic, lived in exile in France with his wife Vera since the mid-1970s.
In 1979, the then communist regime withdrew his Czechoslovak nationality, although two years later the then French president, François Mitterrand, He was granted French nationality.
Kundera’s first success was “The book of ridiculous love” in 1969.
Milan Kundera, the writer of memory and exile
Milan Kundera was the most popular Czech writer since Franz Kafka and, despite this, he 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) became in the last 30 years a an almost invisible authora 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 grounds, his father Ludvík was a famous pianist and music has had a great influence on his prose.
In Prague he trained as screenwriter and then he taught classes in World Literature and Structure of the Novel at the Faculty for Film and Television.
Cervantes admirer
Prose writer, poet, playwright and essayist, he began to be known in the 1960s as a playwright (“The Owner of the Keys” and “Bobada”), but ended up consecrating himself as a novelist (“The Joke” and “The Book of Loves”). ridiculous”).
From his first novels, humor, irony and reflection on memorythe passage of time, exile and the fragile human condition have been its hallmarks.
in his essay “The art of the novel” He 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.
“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 his narrative art.
“To whom or to what do I feel attached?: to God? to the homeland? to town? to the individual? My answer is as ridiculous as it is sincere: I don’t feel tied to anything, except to the discredited heritage of Cervantes”he assured in that essay.
During the opening process of the “Prague Spring” in 1968 he became 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” It earned him recognition with the Czech Writers Union Prize, but with the reinstatement of a government faithful to the USSR, he was banned as a writer.
exile in france
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”).
“The unbearable lightness of being”, a novel that has marked several generations with its reflections on love and the eternal return, has been its greatest commercial success, although It was only published in 2006 in the Czech Republic.
This work arises after his experience in the West in the 1970s, when Kundera considered that “the time 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 his citizenship was withdrawn in 1979 and obtained the gala in 1981.
Kundera accepted in 2019 again a czech passport 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 in 1993 in his native country “The inmortality”which meant 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 him of ratting on a spy in 1950 who ended up in prison for 14 years.
The writer then broke his silence – with a statement – to describe the accusations as “pure lies”.
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