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The Czech authorities restored citizenship to Kundera and his wife 40 years after it was withdrawn from them
Article informationAuthor, Ruth Commerford, Role, BBC News
5 hours ago
Milan Kundera, one of the biggest names in European literature in recent decades, has died in Paris at the age of 94.
The novel “Unbearable Lightness of Being” published in 1984 is the most prominent work of the Czech author. It was published in more than one translation into Arabic, including the translation of Dr. Afif Dimashkieh under the title “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
Anna Mrazova, a spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library in his hometown of Brno, Czech Republic, said he died after a long illness.
Kundera was one of the most prominent symbols of Czech literature, but his harsh criticism of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia made him flee to France in 1975.
Kundera’s novels were loved by a wide segment of the Czech literature audience and readers in the world, due to the combination of poetic and ironic style in their monitoring of what is happening in both the political scene and daily life.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said the late writer’s works had reached “whole generations of readers on all continents and achieved worldwide fame.”
He added that the Czech author’s legacy is not limited to “fictional stories, but also left behind a wealth of important writings and articles.”
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Milan Kundera: The famous French-Czech writer dies at the age of 94
Kundera was born in 1929 to a Czech family, considered one of the artistic and social elite in his country. His father was a piano teacher and student of the famous Czech musician Lush Janacek, so he made sure that Kundera obtained an advanced level musical education and training.
Kundera studied in Prague and became a lecturer in world literature. He also belonged to the ruling Communist Party and was initially an active member.
However, he soon faced political troubles because of his writings, which seemed outside the literary mainstream. His novel The Joke – a satirical black comedy published in 1967 – prompted a ban on his writings in the former Czechoslovakia.
In 1970, he was forced to resign from the party after announcing his support for the Prague Spring movement, which constituted a period in which Czechoslovakia witnessed a measure of political liberalization, before it was crushed by the tanks of the Soviet invasion in 1968.
Kundera’s position caused him to be removed from his teaching position at the university, his novels were withdrawn from public libraries, and their sale was banned until the fall of the communist government in 1989.
The Czech novelist worked for a short time as a trumpet player in jazz bands, before emigrating to France in 1975 with his wife, Vera. Where they initially settled in the city of Rennes and then moved to Paris.
Kundera obtained French citizenship in 1981, two years after he revoked his Czech citizenship, and from then on began writing in French.
He quickly achieved fame in France as a great author after he published his novel “An Unbearable Lightness”, which revolves around four Czech artists and intellectuals and a dog. Soviet tanks in the Czech capital.
In 1987, the novel was brought to the screen in a film starring actress Juliette Binoche and actor Daniel Day-Lewis. But Kundera expressed his dissatisfaction with the film and what he saw as the lack of acceptance of the novel in the modern world.
“It seems to me that people all over the world nowadays would rather judge than understand, and answer than ask,” he told his friend Philip Roth in The New York Times at the time.
He explained, “Therefore, the voice of the novel can hardly be heard due to the clamor of the foolishness of human certainties (referring to ideological ideas that claim certain knowledge).”
His novel became a bestseller when it was finally published in his native country in 2006.
As for his work “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” in 1979, Kundera woven it from seven narrative lines and carried elements of the magical realism trend in literature. In 1988, he published his novel “Eternity”, which is considered one of his most prominent novels.
In 1985 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize – an award given to writers whose works deal with issues of human freedom in society.
Although his name was mentioned several times among the nominees for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he never received this award.
In 2008, he ran into more political trouble when he was accused of betraying a Czech pilot who worked with the CIA.
At that time, Kundera issued an unprecedented denial statement with a sharp emotional tone, published by the Czech news agency “CTK”, which prompted a large number of writers and thinkers to publish an open letter in support of him, including JM Coetzee and Salman Rushdie.
Milan Kundera and his wife did not regain their Czech citizenship until 2019, when the country’s former Prime Minister Andrej Babish issued a decision to restore citizenship to the spouses, nearly forty years after they were stripped of it.
Milan Kundera’s distinctive voice was praised by many, but he was sometimes criticized for portraying women in his work from a male perspective.
There were mixed opinions about his latest novel – published in 2014 – titled “The Festival of Banality”. Originally published in Italian, it was translated into Arabic under the title “Party of Banality”, as some described it as “a battle between hope and boredom.”
2023-07-13 00:26:07
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