2023-07-12 11:03:00
PARIS.- He Czech writer Milan Kundera He died this Wednesday at the age of 94. Eternal candidate for Nobel Prize for Literature, recognition that he never obtained, he is the author, among several literary works, of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), a sarcastic portrait of the human condition and one of the most influential novels. In addition to being a playwright, essayist and poet, he had lived in France since 1975. In the mid-1980s he stopped giving interviews to the media.
The news of his death came from the hand of Anna MrazovaLibrary spokesperson Milan Kundera and editor of the independent publication Gallimard in Paris. “Unfortunately, I can confirm that Mr. Milan Kundera passed away yesterday [martes] after a long illness,” the woman told the AFP agency.
At the age of 81, one was one of the authors included in the prestigious La Pléiade collection of the French publisher Gallimard. He arrived in the country after emigrating from the former Czechoslovakia in 1975, then under communist government. The decision to move away from his native country cost him the authorities to strip him of his nationality, something he recovered in 2019. Since 1981 he had French nationality.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Kundera was born in Brno in 1929.second Czech city, and was the son of the musicologist and pianist Ludvik Kundera (1891-1971). Perhaps influenced by his father figure, he studied musicology and musical composition, which was reflected in his extensive literary work. Subsequently, the writer dabbled in the cinema to later focus on literature, both in teaching and in his own works. In the 1950s, and through his writings, he expressed his admiration for communist ideas.
Author of titles like Life is elsewhere, The book of laughter and oblivion, y The ignorancehe left many enemies in his native country – in fact, that he began to write in French was the straw that broke the camel’s back for the nationalists – and in recent decades accusations have emerged that marked him as an informer in the years of the Cold War. In 2008, the Czech weekly magazine Respect published an article stating that Kundera had allegedly tipped off a Western agent two years before the communists came to power in Czechoslovakia. The writer categorically denied the accusations.
The Czech Kundera, in the mid-1980s, already installed in Paris and soon to change his literary languagefrancois lochon/Getty – Gamma-Rapho
It was in the 1960s that Kundera began writing prose. There he made his debut with the stories Funny Lovewhich partly served as the subject of two Czechoslovak New Wave films, no one will laugh y I, the grieving God.
With Czech nationality, he published two novels, The joke (which gave him recognition from the Union of Czechoslovak Writers and caught the attention of the philosopher jean paul Sartre) y The book of ridiculous lovea set of texts that make a bitter review of the political illusions of the generation of the Prague coup that, in 1948, allowed the communists to come to power.
Kundera’s last book written in Czech was the novel Immortality of the early nineties, after which he wrote all his work in French. His Gaulish texts were not published in Czech because the essayist was concerned about the quality of the translation. He only made a single exception with his last work, Slavnosti bezzamnosti, The Feast of Insignificance.
“Immense sadness. Milan Kundera had chosen France to never stop being free. Throughout many pages it helped us to discover who we are, to find a way between the absurdity of the world. One of the greatest voices in European literature dies with him,” French Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak reacted on Twitter.
The author leaves a legacy of 16 works, translated into more than 80 languages.
He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received various awards, such as the Foreign Médicis Prize (1973), the Jerusalem Prize (1985), the Austrian Prize for European Literature (1987), the Vilénica International Literary Festival (1992), the Herder Prize (2000), the National Prize for Czech Literature (2007), the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca (2009) and the Franz Kafka Prize (2020).
AFP and DPA Agencies
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