Written by Mai Fahmy
Posted on: Friday, July 14, 2023 – 9:41 PM | Last update: Friday, July 14, 2023 – 9:41 PM
The international writer Milan Kundera has passed away from our world at the age of 94, and he is considered one of the most prominent and important writers and authors of novels that achieved great international fame. Kundera is a writer and philosopher of Czech origin. He was born in April 1929 into a middle-class family to a Czech father and mother. His father is Ludvik Kundera, a musicologist and president of the Jancik University of Literature and Music in Brno.
Milan learned to play the piano from his father, then studied music, cinema and literature. He graduated from Charles University in Prague in 1952 and worked as an assistant professor and lecturer at the Faculty of Film at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts.
Milan published his first works during his studies, which were poetry pieces, articles and plays, and he joined the editorial department of a number of literary magazines.
Kundera joined the Communist Party in his country in 1948, and was dismissed from it in 1950 for a period on charges of carrying out activities hostile to the party. He returned after that 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 published his first novel, The Joke, in 1967, after which the novels that established his unique and distinctive literary project followed.
Kundera lost his job in 1968 after the Soviet Union entered Czechoslovakia, after his involvement in what was called the “Prague Spring” and was forced to emigrate to France in 1975 after the criticisms raised by his writings of the totalitarian regime that was ruling his country at the time, and his books were banned from circulation for five years, and in 1979 His country’s government revoked his citizenship, but he obtained French citizenship two years later.
Milan Kundera worked as an assistant professor at the University of Rennes, Brittany, in France, and obtained French citizenship in 1981 after applying for that after his Czechoslovak nationality was revoked in 1978, as a result of his writing the book “Laughter and Forgetting.”
The defining point in Kundera’s life was the publication of his famous novel “An Unbearable Lightness Being”, which made him a well-known international writer for its philosophical reflections, which falls within the category of the idea of the eternal return of Nietzsche, in which Kundera faces delusions: the illusion of the great march, the illusion of moving forward, The illusion of innocent love.
In 1995, Kundera decided to make French the language of his literary tongue through his novel “Slowness”, in which he excelled in the literary language.
Milan Kundera was offered to restore his Czech nationality nearly 44 years after he was stripped of it, but he did not show his resolve for it, and some interpreted this as doubts that accompanied Kundera about his vision of the homeland throughout his life as an obsession, and his concept of him was not decisive to the extent that he tolerated the procedures with open arms. Routine, in order to regain his mother’s nationality, the homeland formed a very vague idea for him, according to what he stated during his interview with the newspaper “The New York Times” in 1984.
Milan Kondiar presented many creations, many of which achieved international fame, most notably “Funny Loves, 1963, The Joke, 1965, The Book of Laughter and Oblivion (novel), 1978, Eternity (novel), 1988, Slowness, An Unbearable Lightness Object, 1984, Banquet of insignificance. Its translations into Arabic were issued by the Arab Cultural Center.
Kundera has won accolades for his style of depicting subjects and characters floating between the mundane realities of everyday life and the lofty world of ideas.
Kundera was crowned the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction Literature in 1991, and Kundera won ten awards throughout his busy literary career, including the Franz Kafka Prize in 2020, the International Prize for Cino del Duca, the Order of the Legion of Honor with the rank of Knight, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.
