Discovered truth about Red tyrants
CZECH writer Milan Kundera achieved literary acclaim and global fame in the 1980s with his satirical depictions of life under communist totalitarian rule. His 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness Of Being portrayed the 1968 Prague Spring liberal reform movement through the eyes of unfaithful lovers and became an international publishing sensation.
Kundera fled Czechoslovakia for France in 1975 after criticising its ruling Communist party. Stripped of his citizenship in 1979, he became a naturalised French citizen two years later and remained in exile for 40 years.
His novels blending eroticism and philosophy were translated into more than 20 languages and helped educate Western readers about Eastern Europe.
Fiercely private, Kundera eschewed self-reflection. “Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being,” he once said. “To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.”
He was born in the city of Brno to concert pianist and teacher Ludvik, who studied under the composer Leoš Janácek, and his wife Milada (née Janosikova).
He wrote poems in school and studied at Charles University in Prague, becoming a lecturer.
Initially a fervent Communist supporter, he was expelled for seven years by the party in 1950. This inspired the writing of his first novel, The Joke, published in 1967, which opens with a young man being punished for making fun of communist slogans.
It became hugely popular and, as he became more politically outspoken, Kundera was fired from his teaching post and his writing was banned in Czechoslovakia.
Falling back on his father’s musical tutorship, he then became a jazz trumpeter.
Later, once established in France, he started writing in French and
even prevented some of his novels from being translated into Czech.
The winner of the 1985 Jerusalem Prize for Literature, he never won the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite repeated nominations.
His other works included 1979’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and 1988’s Immortality. His final novel, The Festival of
Insignificance, was published in 2014. Despite his preference for privacy, he wrote a public letter in 2008 to deny he had surrendered a Czech pilot as a US spy.
Kundera and his wife, Vera Hrabankova, who he married in 1967, had their Czech citizenship restored in 2019. He died following a long illness.