Milan Kundera, who became a satirist of authoritarianism in exile after publishing dissident works in communist Czechoslovakia, passed away in Paris.
Milan Kundera, a well-known but secretive writer who became an exiled satire of tyranny and an investigator of identity and the human condition through his dissident writings, has passed away in Paris. He was 94. His venerable publishing firm Gallimard announced Kundera’s passing on Wednesday in a one-sentence statement. It stated that he passed away in Paris, where he had lived for many years, but it gave no other details.
Upon hearing of his passing, the European Parliament observed a moment of silence. Kundera had dual citizenship with France and the Czech Republic, which he later regained. Though his books were translated into dozens of languages, Kundera was a man of few words who shunned interviews because he detested the attention that came with them.
He stated in the 1986 article “The Art of the Novel” that he “dreams of a world where writers are required by law to keep their identity secret and use pseudonyms.” By using examples from his writings, Kundera agreed to a “interview” when Le Monde des Livres posed questions to him in 2011. Kundera’s best-known book, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” begins wrenchingly with Soviet tanks rolling through Prague, the Czech capital where he lived until he emigrated to France in 1975. A vast readership of Westerners who admired both his anti-Soviet subversion and the eroticism woven throughout many of his works embraced Kundera’s novel, which combined themes of love and exile, politics and the intensely personal.
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“As a young lad, if someone had said to me, ‘One day you will see your nation vanish from the world,’ I would have thought it was absurd and unimaginable. In 1980, the year before he became a naturalised French citizen, he said in an interview with author Philip Roth for the New York Times, “A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation has some sort of eternal life.”
“Milan Kundera was a writer who attained global fame and was able to reach generations of readers on all continents with his work.” Petr Fiala, the prime minister of the Czech Republic, tweeted in Czech. He has left behind a significant body of writings in addition to a spectacular work of fiction. He expressed his sympathies to Kundera’s wife Vra, who protected her reclusive spouse from outside influences.