Czech writer Milan Kundera dies at the age of 94

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Czech-born author Milan Kundera, who rose to fame with a novel about the fragility of life, has died at the age of 94 at his home in Paris, according to Czech media.

author of The Unbearable Lightness of BeingSet against the heavy backdrop of the Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring of 1968, Kundera moved to France in 1975. He became a French citizen in 1981 and wrote his last novels in French.

Kundera was known as a fiction writer who used satire to discuss life and its absurdities. His early writings also focused on the tragedy of totalitarianism, his difficult relationship with his native country, and the control imposed by Moscow over Czechoslovakia and its neighbors.

Kundera wrote in a 1983 essay, “In Central Europe, on the eastern frontier of the West, everyone has always been particularly sensitive to the dangers of Russian power.”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kundera rarely returned to the Czech Republic. He opposed claims made by the weekly Czech publication Respect in 2008, which accused him of being an informer for the Communist Party in the 1950s.

Kundera joined the Communist Party as a teenager and his early poetic writings espoused socialist ideas. He was first expelled from the party in 1950, then reinstated in 1956 and then expelled for a second time in 1970, two years after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and ended the political liberalization spearheaded by reformist leader Alexander Dubček. Gave.

Kundera’s first novel, Joke, was based on his own expulsion from the party and used dark humor to create a scathing portrayal of Czech life under communism. It was published in Czechoslovakia in 1967 but was banned the following year. Several other works of Kundera were blacklisted during the Communist regime. He was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979, four years after going into exile in France.

The Czech Republic reinstated Kundera’s citizenship in 2019, and he received the country’s prestigious Franz Kafka Prize, one of several literary awards he won throughout his career.

Last year part of his correspondence and personal archives were moved back to his birthplace in Brno, to a new Milan Kundera Library section, inaugurated in April by the Czech Culture Minister.