The Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera died at the age of 94 on Tuesday July 11, 2023. Blacklisted by his country after the Prague Spring in 1968, the novelist went into exile in France and settled in Rennes, in 1975, with his wife Véra.
He was one of the intellectual figures of dissidence in Czechoslovakia invaded in 1968 by Soviet tanks that came to quell the Prague Spring and the desire for freedom of an entire country. Writer Milan Kundera died at the age of 94 in Paris on Tuesday July 11, 2023.
The author of Jokeof Immortalityof The Unbearable Lightness of Beingor even Farewell Waltz, went into exile for four years in Rennes where he landed in 1975 with his wife Véra. It was thanks to an invitation from the University of Rennes 2, which offered him a professorship in comparative literature, that the writer left Prague for good.
In Rennes, the couple moved to the top floor of the emblematic Tour des Horizons, in the district of Bourg-L’Evêque. Of this arrival in Brittany, few traces except in this interview granted to Release in which Milan Kundera recounts his departure from Czechoslovakia. “We passed through some very beautiful French cities and then we entered the first ugly, but really ugly, city of the trip. It was Rennes”. A confidence that he punctuates with a laugh, according to the national daily. Was it pure joke on his part? Because, much later, he will declare that “Rennes was his best time in France”.
Milan Kundera obtained French nationality in 1981. It is moreover in French that he chose to write a work full of fantasy, disenchanted and funny, translated into forty languages and crowned with numerous literary prizes. Books that scrutinize the human condition, marked by the writer’s own disappointments. “Leaving my country, I left a lot of things, he said. I left my friends there, the landscapes to which I am very attached, in which I am rooted, I dream almost every night of the landscape of my homeland. But I believe that this emigration does not mean oblivion, on the contrary”.
Stripped of his Czech nationality in 1979 for his writings and his political positions, before finding it in 2019, the novelist had been able to return several times to his country with which relations remained complex.
2023-07-12 11:09:48
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