The great Milan Kundera is dead. The Franco-Czech cosmopolitan of 20th-century writers died on Tuesday at the age of 94, Czech media reported on Wednesday. The author, who was born in Brno on April 1, 1929, entered world literature at the latest with his international bestseller “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. ORF 2 shows the portrait “Milan Kundera – The Irony of Being” in memoriam on Monday (11:15 p.m.).
In his novels, Kundera traced the great and small mysteries of human existence. Both fans and critics appreciate his prose style, which is as clear as it is ironic. Ultimately, however, it was Philip Kaufman’s 1987 film adaptation of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” that finally paved the way for Kundera to international fame. The erotic and tragic love story between the surgeon Tomas and the waitress Teresa against the background of the suppression of the Prague Spring touched many people – and is set against the background of his own story.
Kundera himself, once a member of the Communist Party, fell out of favor after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He has lived in France since 1975, where he later taught at the Universities of Rennes and Paris. In 1979 he was stripped of Czechoslovakian citizenship and in 1981 he received French. From 1993 Kundera wrote his books in French. He maintained only limited contacts with his former homeland and also did not allow translations of his books into Czech. Only at the age of 90 did he regain Czech citizenship. In his first novel “Der Joke” from 1967, he described how an innocent joke in a surveillance state can end in tragedy.
In 2020, Kundera donated his private library and archive to the Moravian National Library in Brno, which was finally inaugurated this year. In the same year, a new biography about the star author caused a lot of discussion, as its author Jan Novak took a critical look at the political life of Kundera before he emigrated. As early as the end of 2008, Prague newspapers published the revelation that Kundera had betrayed a western spy to the communist police as a student in 1950. In a rare statement, Kundera spoke of an “assassination attempt on an author”. In “The Ignorance” (2001), Kundera addressed the emigrant’s feeling of no longer belonging.
Kundera’s early works, such as the intimate poems of the “Monologues” from 1957 or the play “The Key Owners”, which won the Czech State Prize in 1963, are not part of the canon. Kundera’s last novel, “The Festival of Insignificance”, was also published in German in 2015. Reviews ranged from “the late work of a great author” to “boring, lifeless, made up and empty”.
He was repeatedly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In any case, his status as a classic of world literature has been cemented since his work was published in the prestigious French edition “La Pleiade” (Seven Stars). During their lifetime, only a few other authors have received this honor, which can be presented in a display case with a leather binding and gold edging. He received numerous awards such as the “Prix Médicis”, the Order of Knights of the French Legion of Honor and the Jerusalem Prize. In Austria, too, Kundera’s oeuvre was valued, for which he received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, among other awards. The Austrian Secretary of State for Culture Andrea Mayer (Greens) mourned the loss of a writer of “European rank”: “His unmistakable and unrestricted commitment to Europe and his expression of respect for democracy and freedom are at a time when the self-image of these values is endangered , indispensable.”
Czech politicians have also reacted with sadness to the author’s death. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that he had reached entire generations of readers on all continents with his work and gained world fame. Ex-Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who made a valuable contribution to the return of Czech citizenship to Kundera, recalled “a great person who made the Czech Republic famous with his work like no other”. The EU Parliament commemorated the late writer with a minute’s silence. Kundera embodied European unity and denounced communist totalitarianism, said the applicant, French MEP Bernard Guetta. The House of Representatives in Prague also held a minute’s silence. Kundera’s publisher Jo Lendle said goodbye with the words: “Milan Kundera’s work shows people in their beauty and in their terror. The literature of the 20th century would be incomplete without him.”
2023-07-13 07:29:38
#Writer #Milan #Kundera #died #age
