Czech television said today, Wednesday, that the famous Czech writer Milan Kundera died at the age of 94. He is considered one of the most prominent writers in the living world, and the authors of a number of novels that achieved great international fame.
Milan Kundera, a French writer and philosopher of Czech origin, was born on April 1, 1929, to a Czech father and mother. His father, Ludvik Kundera, was a musicologist and rector of the Cancic University of Literature and Music in Brno. Milan learned to play the piano from his father, and later studied music, cinema and literature. He graduated in 1952 and worked as an assistant professor and lecturer at the Film College at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. He published poetry, articles and plays during his studies, and joined the editorial department of a number of literary magazines.
He joined the Communist Party in 1948, and he and writer Jan Travolca were dismissed in 1950 due to noticing individual tendencies in them, and after that he returned in 1956 to the ranks of the party, then he was dismissed again in 1970.
In 1953 he published his first collection of poetry, but it did not receive enough attention, and Kundera was not known as an important writer until 1963 after publishing his first collection of short stories, Funny Loves.
Kundera lost his job in 1968 after the Soviet Union entered Czechoslovakia, after his involvement in what was called the Prague Spring. He was forced to emigrate to France in 1975 after his books were banned from circulation for five years. He worked as an assistant professor at the University of Rennes in Brittany (France), and he obtained French citizenship in 1981. After he applied for this after his Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1978, as a result of his writing the book “Laughter and Forgetting.” Under the weight of these circumstances and developments in his life, Kundera wrote his famous novel “An Unbearable Lightness Being”, which made him a well-known international writer for its philosophical reflections, which fall within the category of the idea of Nietzsche’s eternal return.
In 1995, Kundera decided to make French the language of his literary tongue through his novel “Slowness.”
