PROVIDE because the Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote the four most important novels of humanity: “The Joke” (1967); “Life is elsewhere” (1969); “The unbearable lightness of being” (1984); and “La lentitud” (1995), the literary never received a Nobel Prize for Literature, being one of the most important in the world of letters. He passed away on Tuesday at the age of 94 in Paris.
The perennial Nobel Prize candidate was a sarcastic portrayer of the human condition. Kundera is part of a small line of writers, such as the Russian Vladimir Nabokov, who decided to change languages in the middle of his literary career.
“The novelist does not have to answer to anyone, except Cervantes,” this not very prolific author once explained, author of fifteen works, including novels, theater and essays.
Kundera began writing in Czech, but in the late 1970s, after going into exile in France, he decided to switch to French.
He was one of the few writers to have published his work in his lifetime in the French collection “La Pléiade”, traditionally reserved for the classics.
His latest novel, “The Party of Insignificance”, which traces the adventures of four friends who live in Paris, dates back to 2014 and broke a fourteen-year silence.
Little friend of popularity, the writer fled from the media for more than three decades, although he could be seen walking with his wife Vera in his neighborhood in Paris.
“The novelist is one who, as Flaubert said, aspires to disappear behind his work,” Kundera once assured.
Expelled
Born on April 1, 1929 in Brno (Czech Republic) into a family of musicians, Kundera was a polyphonic artist and his writings combine irony, intelligence, and elegant despair.
Before the Prague Spring, in 1968, he was already a leading writer thanks to his novel “The Joke” (1967), a bitter balance sheet of the political illusions of the 1948 generation, and “The Book of Ridiculous Loves “.
He joined the Czech Communist Party in 1948, but was expelled two years later. After studying literature and film, he taught at the Institute for Film Studies in Prague.
His first book of poems, “Man is my garden” (1953), was steeped in Marxism. In fact, in 1958 the Communist Party admitted him back into its ranks, before a new exclusion in 1970.
Finally, in 1975, Kundera went into exile in France with his wife Vera. Naturalized French in 1981, he chose Molière’s language to write, marking the break with his native country, which withdrew his Czech nationality in 1978 and returned it to him in 2019, many years after the end of communism.
The inspiration
Professor at the University of Rennes until 1979, Kundera thought he had put an end to literature with “La farewell” (1973), a novel in which the destinies of eight characters intertwine. But the confrontation with the West inspired him again.
“The unbearable lightness of being” (1984) established him as one of the greatest contemporary writers.
A moral tale about freedom and passion, on an individual and collective level, the story of Tomas, Teresa and Sabina, confronted with the Prague Spring and exile, was adapted to the cinema by the American Philip Kaufman, with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis.
“My ambition is to say what others did not say. If you don’t innovate, you don’t need to write,” said Kundera, who wanted to “reconcile the novel with philosophy and intelligence, make thought enter the novel.”
“Who is Milan Kundera?” was questioned in April 1997 by the Czech magazine Tyden. By then, only four of his books had been published in his country.
A decade later, in October 2008, the Czech weekly Respekt published a violent diatribe against him, accusing him of having denounced opposition figure Miroslav Dvoracek in 1950, sentenced to 22 years of forced labor. The writer flatly denied it. “Pure lies,” he replied.
In 2009 he starred in a new scandal in his country, when he refused the invitation to an international conference on his work in Brno, describing it in a letter to the organizers as a “necrophiliac party”.
discrete author
Kundera was a widely known and translated author (in more than 50 languages), but very discreet.
He regularly returned to the Czech Republic and his hometown, but mostly incognito.
Kundera’s work is “a deep exploration, human, intimate and distant at the same time”, reacted French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne. His Czech counterpart, Petr Fiala, noted that it “reached generations of readers on all continents.”
“Throughout many pages he helped us discover who we are, to find a way through the absurdity of the world. With him dies one of the greatest voices in European literature,” reacted the French Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak.
“When you are young, you are not capable of conceiving time as a circle, but as a path that leads you to ever new horizons: you do not realize that life only contains one theme”, the writer once explained.
French as a language of literary expression
“The joke”
Milan Kundera’s first novel, which the French writer Louis Aragon called an “important work”, was published in Czechoslovakia in 1967 during the period of ideological openness that preceded the Prague Spring, and was a great success.
“Life is elsewhere”
It established Kundera as one of the greatest Czech writers of his generation and won him the prestigious 1973 French Literary Prize Medicis for Best Foreign Novel. The book was not published in his native country until 2016.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
Written in 1982 and published by the French publisher Gallimard in 1984. Written in Paris, where the author lived in exile since 1975, the book tells the story of two couples from the intellectual and artistic bourgeoisie of Prague, shortly before the Soviet invasion. of the city in 1968.
“The slowness”
After discovering to his horror the liberties that had been taken in the French translation of “The Joke”, Milan Kundera devoted much of his work to revising his translated work, completely reworking the French versions of “The Joke”, “The Book of ridiculous loves”, “Life is elsewhere”, “The farewell”, “The book of laughter and oblivion” and “The unbearable lightness of being”. In 1995 he published the book “The slowness”, the first of a cycle of four short and very sober novels, written directly in French. Quite an event in the literary universe that opens the doors of the international scene, but also earns him the first negative reviews of him.
2023-07-13 02:01:30
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