PARIS (AP) — Milan Kundera, whose dissident writings in communist Czechoslovakia transformed him into a satirical exile from totalitarianism, has died in Paris at the age of 94, Czech media reported Wednesday.
Kundera’s renowned novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” opens harrowingly with Soviet tanks rolling through Prague, the Czech capital that was the author’s home until he moved to France in 1975. Weaving together themes of love and exile, politics and The Deeply Personal, Kundera’s novel garnered critical acclaim, earning him a large readership among Westerners who embraced both his anti-Soviet subversion and the eroticism that pervades many of his works.
“If someone had told me as a child: One day you will see your nation disappear from the world, I would have considered it nonsense, something I could not imagine. A man knows that he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life,” he told author Philip Roth in a New York Times interview in 1980, a year before he became a French citizen. naturalized.
In 1989, the Velvet Revolution ousted the communists from power and Kundera’s nation was reborn as the Czech Republic, but by then he had made a new life and a full identity in his penthouse on the Left Bank of Paris.
To say that his relationship with the land of his birth was complex would be an understatement. He returned to the Czech Republic on rare occasions and incognito, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. His final works, written in French, were never translated into Czech. The unbearable lightness of being, which earned him much praise and was made into a film in 1988, was not published in the Czech Republic until 2006, 17 years after the Velvet Revolution, although it had been available in Czech since 1985 from a compatriot who founded a publishing house in exile in Canada. It topped the best-seller list for weeks, and the following year Kundera won the State Prize for Literature for it.
Kundera’s wife, Vera, was an essential companion to a lonely, technology-avoiding man: his translator, his social secretary, and ultimately his barrier against the outside world. It was she who fostered his friendship with Roth by serving as a language broker and, according to a 1985 profile of the couple, it was she who took his calls and handled the inevitable demands of a world-famous author.
Kundera’s writing, whose debut novel “The Joke” begins with a young man who is sent to the mines after downplaying communist slogans, was banned in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, when he also lost his job as a teacher. cinema. He had been writing novels and plays since 1953.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” follows a dissident surgeon from Prague to exile in Geneva and back home. Due to his refusal to submit to the communist regime, the surgeon Tomás is forced to become a window cleaner and uses his new profession to arrange sex with hundreds of clients. Tomás finally lives out his last days in the countryside with his wife, Tereza, and his lives become more dreamlike and tangible as the days go by.
Jiri Srstka, Kundera’s Czech literary agent at the time the book was finally published in the Czech Republic, said the author himself delayed its release there fearing it was poorly edited.
“Kundera had to reread the entire book, rewrite sections, make additions, and edit all the text. So, given his perfectionism, this was a long-term job, but now readers will get the book that Milan Kundera thinks should exist,” Ststka told Radio Praha at the time.
Kundera refused to appear on camera, refused any annotation when his collected works published in 2011 were published, and did not allow any digital copies of his writing. In a June 2012 speech before the National Library of France, which a friend reread on French radio, he said he feared for the future of literature.
“It seems to me that time, which continues its merciless march, begins to endanger books. It is because of this anguish that, for several years, I have had a clause in all my contracts that stipulates that they must be published only in the traditional form of a book, that they must be read only on paper and not on a screen, ”he said. saying. “People walk down the street, they no longer have contact with those around them, they don’t even see the houses they pass by, they have wires hanging from their ears. They gesticulate, they must, they don’t look at anyone and nobody looks at them. I wonder, don’t they read books anymore? It is possible, but for how much longer?
His loyalty to the printed word meant that readers could find reviews and biographies of Kundera to download, but not his works themselves.
Despite his fierce protection of his private life (he only gave a handful of interviews and kept his biographical information to a minimum), Kundera was forced to review his past in 2008, when the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes of the Republic Checa produced documentation indicating that in 1950, as a 21-year-old student, Kundera told police about someone in his bedroom. The man was eventually found guilty of espionage and sentenced to hard labor for 22 years.
The researcher who published the report, Adam Hradilek, defended it as the product of an extensive investigation into Kundera.
“He has sworn his Czech friends to silence, so even they are not willing to talk to journalists about who Milan Kundera is and who was,” Hradilek said at the time.
Kundera called the report a lie, telling the Czech news agency CTK that it amounted to “the murder of an author.”
In a 1985 profile, among the longest and most detailed on record, examining Kundera’s life in Paris, the author foreshadowed how much even that admission must have hurt him.
“For me, indiscretion is a cardinal sin. Anyone who reveals the intimate life of another person deserves to be flogged. We live in a time when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and the meaning of it, ”she told the writer Olga Carlisle. “Life when one cannot hide from the eyes of others, that is hell.”
