The Czech writer Milan Kundera has died this Wednesday in Paris at the age of 94, as announced by public television CT24. Along with Kafka and Havel, he was one of the most famous Czech authors outside his country. An eternal candidate for the Nobel Prize, Kundera’s literature was steeped in history, philosophy and politics and managed to reach the general public thanks to the success of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his best-known novel, published in 1984.
Born in Moravia on April 1, 1929 and son of the pianist and musicologist Ludvik Kundera, he began writing poems, some essays and short stories. He did not opt ??for the novel until 1965 at a time when Czechoslovakia was experiencing a thaw and there was talk of communism with a “human face”. Kundera wrote The joke, which his published in 1967 and sold out in a few days. It is an essential book, which has been read as a critique of Stalinism or as a digression about communist society.
Jean-Paul Sartre said that The joke raises why we should feel love for men. But beyond the historical and philosophical references, the novel is a reflection on human nature: a young man is imprisoned by the communist regime because of a joke played by a classmate. He spends his whole life hating the man who made his life miserable. The encounter between victim and executioner many years later is very revealing.
After that first work of fiction, Kundera proposed to refound the novel from what it was before the 19th century, vindicating Miguel de Cervantes, François Rabelais, Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot, because their literature was not linked to verisimilitude. What the Czech author proposed was to return to freedom, to establish an intense game between the author and the reader through the text and to illuminate the action through history, philosophy and music.
The music, from which he lived when he was repudiated by the Czechoslovak communist regime after the Prague Spring in 1968, is very present in Kundera’s literature, which divides many of his works into seven chapters to which he gives different tempos and variations. He also opts for counterpoint through the use of dichotomies such as love and sex, the body and the spirit, or individualism and history.
Throughout his life he published 13 novels. He wrote his first works, perhaps his best, in Czech during the early 70s. Works like The Ridiculous Love Book (1968), which is a compendium of stories, but ended up being considered a novel; Life is elsewhere (1972), where he reinvents himself as a writer, or La farewell (1973), which he proposed as a last novel and to which he wanted to title an epilogue.
Kundera emigrated to France in 1975 after being ostracized for criticizing the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which ended the “human face” communism the writer had prized. After settling in Paris, he combined writing in Czech and French and introduced concerns between East and West into his literature with The Book of Laughter and Oblivion (1979).
In 1984, and still in Czech, he published The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which quickly became a bestseller and made him known throughout the world. Kundera once again raised the dichotomy between the individual and the collective through the story of Tomás, a doctor who, before the Prague Spring, tries to be happy without being affected by the political and historical environment or by his commitment to people. that surround you. The novel was made into a film in 1987 by Philip Kaufman in a film of the same title with Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche as protagonists.
Already in French, he published La lentitud (1995), La identidad (1998) and La ignorancia (2000) and also several essays such as Los testamentos betrayadas (1992) where he develops his theory on how that modern novel that returns to the origins of the genre should be. . In 2020 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize for his literary career and also regained his Czech nationality, which he had lost after settling in France. Six years earlier, in 2014, he published his last work The Feast of Insignificance. Today he has died at 94, but his literature will prevail as essential to the narrative of the 20th century.
