Goodbye! Milan Kundera
Renowned writer Milan Kundera died at the age of 94.
Milan Kundera, a Czech-born French writer who became a world-renowned writer after starting his writings as a political dissident in communist Czechoslovakia, died in Paris at the age of ninety-four.
Kundera’s death was confirmed by both his publisher in France and Czech media on Wednesday 12 July. He died on Tuesday, July 11.
Among Kundera’s best-known works is his novel The Unbearable Tenderness of Existence, which opens with the scene of Soviet tanks rolling into Prague in 1968. The same Prague where Milan Kundera lived and from where he moved to France in 1975.
Against this background and with a deeply personal observation of the political conditions and events of his time, Milan Kundera’s literary themes range from love and exile to politics and personal experiences, and with great intensity.
Kundera was formerly a citizen of Czechoslovakia, but when the Communists were ousted from power in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Kundera’s homeland was divided and adopted a new name: the Czech Republic. But by then Kundera had made a new beginning for himself in the life of exile.
A new life, a new homeland and a new identity centered on his flat in the French capital Paris and from where he continued his literary creative journey. During this period, Kundera began writing in French instead of Czech.
After beginning a life in exile in France, he rarely visited the Czech Republic even when the Iron Curtain dividing East and West Germany came down in Europe.
The special thing about Kundera’s novel 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, published in 1984, is that it has been translated into many languages of the world like many of his other literary works and writings, and in 1988, a very popular film was also made, but the novel itself was never published in the Czech Republic until 2006, even though the novel had been available in the Czech language since 1985.
The death of the Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera was also confirmed by the Milan Kundera Library in Brno, the city of the present Czech Republic and his birthplace.
Internationally renowned as a novelist, poet, and essayist, Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, the second largest city in the present-day Czech Republic, and educated in Prague.
In 1975, Kundera, who left the then communist state of Czechoslovakia and settled in France, spent the last 48 years of his life in France, which is almost half of his life.
Kundera’s literary journey to fame began with his novel The Joke, published in 1967, in which the main character is a young man who is attacked by an innocent boy. He was expelled from both the Communist Party and the university for joking.
Leading international literary critics have been saying about Kundera that he deserved and should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he did not get it.
Milan Kundera, who was once stripped of his Czech citizenship, became a French citizen in 1981. In 2019, he was also given back his Czech citizenship.
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