Author Milan Kundera, Known for ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ Dies at 94

• Kundera’s works explored the human condition with dark themes.
• His most renowned novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” was published in 1984.
•  He obtained Czech nationality in 2019 after years of strained ties.

Milan Kundera, author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” died at the age of 94, according to the Milan Kundera Library on Wednesday.

“Unfortunately, I can confirm that Mr Milan Kundera passed away yesterday (Tuesday) after a prolonged illness,” Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for his native city of Brno’s library, told news sources.

“He died at home, in his Paris apartment,” she said.

Since his exile from Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia in 1975, the novelist, poet, and essayist has lived in France.

He was recognised for dark, challenging books about the human condition that were laced with sarcasm and reflected his experience of being robbed of his Czech nationality for resistance.

Kundera, who was born on April 1, 1929 in the second Czech city of Brno, educated in Prague.

He created poetry and short stories as well as translating works by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

Kundera also taught at a film school, where one of his students was future Oscar winner Milos Forman.

In 1967, he wrote his breakout novel “The Joke,” about a young man expelled from university and the Communist Party for making an innocent joke.

Kundera, a former Communist, fell out of favour with the authorities when the 1968 Prague Spring reform movement was crushed by Soviet-led soldiers.

Kundera lectured at the University of Rennes after moving to France.

After the release of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” in 1979, Kundera’s Czech nationality was revoked.

In 1981, he became a French citizen.

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” by far his most renowned piece, was published in 1984 and adapted into a film starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis in 1987.

The novel is a morality tale about individual and societal freedom and passion, set against the Prague Spring and its aftermath in exile.

Kundera only obtained Czech nationality in 2019 after being chastised for his deteriorating relationship with his birthplace and his choice to prohibit the translation of his French books into Czech.

It occurred 30 years after former Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution of 1989, and 26 years after the country’s peaceful division into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.

This year, on the occasion of his birthday, the Moravian Library in Brno launched the Milan Kundera Library on one of its floors, showing a portion of his collection of author copies in dozens of languages into which his books have been translated.

Kundera was regularly tipped to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he never did.

“Not only Czech literature, but world literature has lost one of the greatest contemporary writers, as well as one of the most translated writers,” Tomas Kubicek, director of the Kundera library, told Czech state television.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, who was born in Brno, said Kundera’s work “appealed to whole generations of readers across all continents.”

“He leaves behind not only remarkable novelistic work, but also outstanding essayistic work,” Fiala wrote on Twitter.

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