One of the finest writers in history, the Franco-Czech author Milan Kundera passed away following a long-term illness, on Tuesday in Paris at the age of 94.
Kundera was known for his sardonic themes which highlighted life’s trials and tribulations, was one of the select few writers to be named to the renowned La Pléiade series during his lifetime (in 2011).
In France, he published “The Farewell Waltz” and “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” to name but a few of his works. In 1984, he published what some consider to be his masterpiece, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” a powerful romance novel and ode to freedom–at once serious yet light-hearted–whose subject is nothing less than the very existence of the human condition. “Life Is Elsewhere” was another masterpiece to his credit, the setting of which was Czechoslovakia immediately preceding, during, and after World War II.
Born in the Czech Republic and stripped of his Czech nationality before later regaining it–though a French national since 1981–he was one of the most influential French-language novelists in the world.
When he was still a Czech, Milan Kundera published two novels, “The Jock” (1965, hailed by the French poet Aragon), and “Laughable Loves” (1968), texts that take a bitter look at the political illusions of the generation that saw the Prague coup in 1948 bring the Communists to power.
Following the Prague Spring, Kundera was blacklisted in his own country and, along with his wife Vera–a prominent Czech television personality–subsequently departed for exile in France.
He opted to write in French after becoming a French citizen via naturalization, breaking with his own nation which had removed his nationality in 1979 and then reinstated it no fewer than forty years later.