By Agence France-Presse: Milan Kundera, the creator of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” whose darkish, provocative novels delved into the enigma of the human situation, has died, a spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library in his native metropolis of Brno stated on Wednesday. He was 94.
“Unfortunately I can confirm that Mr Milan Kundera passed away yesterday (Tuesday) after a prolonged illness,” she advised AFP.
Through his attribute satire and poetic prose, Kundera sought to specific all that’s compelling and absurd about life, drawing on his personal experiences of being stripped of his Czech nationality for dissent.
Life, he stated in his work of criticism “Art of the Novel” (1986), “is a trap we’ve always known: we are born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die.”
YOUNG REBEL
Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, within the city of Brno, in what was then Czechoslovakia. His father was a well-known pianist. He studied in Prague, the place he joined the Communist Party, translated the French poet Apollinaire and wrote poetry of his personal.
He additionally taught at a movie college the place his college students included the long run Oscar-winning director Milos Forman.
Although he professed faithfulness to communism, the impartial spirit of Kundera’s writing quickly acquired him into bother.
He was expelled from the get together in 1950, re-joined in 1956 and was expelled a second time in 1970 after the Prague Spring reform motion — wherein he was seen as enjoying a job — was crushed.
LOCKED OUT
Kundera’s first novel “The Joke”, a piece of darkish humour in regards to the one-party state printed in 1967, led to a ban on his writing in Czechoslovakia whereas additionally making him well-known in his homeland.
In 1975, he and his spouse Vera went into exile in France, the place he labored for 4 years as an assistant professor on the University of Rennes. They have been stripped of their Czech nationality in 1979.
In his adopted residence, the place he turned a citizen in 1981, his status and success grew as translations of his novels appeared, resembling “Life is Elsewhere” (1973) set in Czechoslovakia a couple of poet entrapped by the Communist regime.
“The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (1979) playfully explored by means of seven interlinked narratives the character of forgetting in politics, historical past and every day life.
The novel was “brilliant and original,” stated the New York Times in 1980, “written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out.”
Kundera was an creator “fascinated by sex, and prone to sudden, if graceful, skips into autobiography, abstract rumination, and recent Czech history,” stated the Times reviewer, John Updike.
By far his most well-known work, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was printed in 1984 and was a movie starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis in 1987.
The novel is a morality story about freedom and keenness, on each a person and collective stage, set towards the Prague Spring and its aftermath in exile.
NO GOING BACK?
Kundera’s critics say he turned his again on fellow Czechs and dissidents following his exile in France.
In 2008, a Czech journal accused him of being a police informer below Communist rule, which he denied as “pure lies”.
In 2013, Kundera printed his first novel after a 13-year hiatus.
“The Festival of Insignificance”, about 5 pals in Paris, acquired combined opinions, with The Atlantic noting its “near-impenetrable irony” and The Guardian deeming it a “stinker”.
What Kundera “has to tell us seems to have less relevance”, stated the New York Times. “You can’t help wondering what his evolution would have been like if he had stayed, or stayed longer, in Czechoslovakia.”
In 2019, the Czech Republic restored his nationality and in 2023 the Milan Kundera Library opened in his hometown of Brno.
