A great loss for world literature, the Czech-born author, Milan Kundera, died today in Paris at the age of 94.

The sad news was broadcast by the Czech TV and confirmed by the representative of the Moravian Library, Anna Mrazova: “Milan Kundera died yesterday in Paris after a long illness.”

He was born on April 1, 1929 in Brno, former Czechoslovakia, and lived in France since 1975. He became particularly known for his works The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The joke.

He wrote in both Czech and French, and had personally edited all the French translations of his books, giving them the force of an original rather than a translated work.

Due to censorship, the circulation of his works was banned in his hometown until the fall of the communist government during the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

He came from a middle-class and highly cultured family. His father, Ludwig Kundera (1891-1971), was an important musicologist and pianist, a student of the great composer Leoš Janáček. Milan was taught piano by his father and later studied musicology and composition. Thus, musicological influences often appear in his work, as in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Beingin which he inserts a stave with Beethoven melodies as an expressive means of a certain psychological state.

Kundera completed his secondary education in Brno in 1948 and then studied Literature and Aesthetics at the Charles University School of Arts in Prague. After two academic cycles, he transferred to the Film School of the Prague Theater Academy and initially attended lectures on directing and screenwriting.

He belonged to a generation of young Czechs who, having little to no friction with the pre-war Czechoslovak Republic, had their ideology drastically affected by World War II and the German occupation.

Already in his teenage years, Kundera was enrolled in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia with active social and political activity, which in 1950 led to the abrupt cessation of his academic studies. In the same year, Milan Kundera and the writer Jan Trefulka were expelled from the Communist Party. with the category of “anti-party activities”.

Later, in 1962, Trefulka will describe the event in his novel Happiness Rained On Them, while in 1967 Kundera himself will be inspired and base the main theme of his novel there The joke.

Upon graduation in 1952, Kundera was hired by the Film School as a lecturer in World Literature. In 1956 he rejoined the Communist Party and was expelled a second time in 1970. Along with other communist reform writers such as Pavel Kohut, he was partially involved in Prague Spring of 1968. This brief period of reformist action was violently suppressed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

Kundera remained for a few more years close to the reformist Czech Communism and at the same time clashed fiercely through the press with his fellow countryman Vaclav Havel. Kundera’s reasoning basically suggested that calmness should prevail, stating that “no one is imprisoned for their views, yet” and claiming that “the significance of the Prague Autumn may ultimately turn out to be more historically significant than that of the Prague Spring ».

Kundera eventually gave up his reformist vision and moved to France in 1975. He taught for a few years at the University of Rennes and became a French citizen in 1981.

Literary course

Initially Kundera wrote in the Czech language but from 1993 onwards he used French. Between 1985 and 1987 he undertook the editing of the French translation of his original works with the result that they have the status of an original work. Kundera’s books have been translated into many languages.

Although his early poetic work is considered strongly pro-communist, his novels do not fall into ideological classifications.

Political commentary is completely absent (except for deeper philosophical reflection) springboarding his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He himself had repeatedly emphasized his literary identity as a novelist rather than a political writer.

Milan Kundera had drawn his influences not only from Renaissance writers such as Boccaccio and Francois Rabelais but also from Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Denis Diderot, Robert Musil, Witold Gombrowitz, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger and perhaps more strongly. from Miguel de Cervantes, whose legacy he felt he most identified with.