Milan Kundera, the writer of The Unbearable Lightness of Being has died

The writer Milan Kundera has died. The announcement came from Czech Television. He was born in Brno on April 1, 1929. Czech novelist and essayist, he was 94 years old. The writer, author of novels that changed twentieth-century literature, starting with the best known The unbearable lightness of being he was one of the greatest representatives of the novel of the late twentieth century, nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for literature, without ever winning it.

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Famous throughout the world for his works translated into about forty languages, Kundera was a very reserved author, with very few public appearances. The official biographical information about him was limited to the following statement: «Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia. He moved to France in 1975 ». His first big success was The jokeof 1967. Followed by The farewell waltzthen in 1984 from the global success de The unbearable lightness of being.

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Last public appearance
His last public appearance dates back to January 27, 1984, when he was a guest of Bernard Pivot, presenter and literary critic of “Apostrophes”, at the time the most popular cultural program on French television. From that moment on, the writer has not given any more interviews and with his wife Vera Hrabankova he formed “the most silent couple in Paris”, as he told the magazine Paris Match one of his neighbors, the journalist Philippe Labro. France Cultureparaphrasing his best-known book, called it “the unbearable power of silence”.

History
Kundera studied literature and music in Prague. His father Ludvík (1891-1971) was director of the Brno Music Academy JAMU and a well-known pianist. From an early age Kundera studied music, especially the piano, and the passion for music will often return to his literary texts. He publishes his first poems while still a teenager, thanks to his cousin Ludvík, a few years older than him, a multifaceted figure in Czech culture, a poet who came out of the “surrealist” offshoot of the RA group during the Second World War, prose writer, painter, translator from German and scholar of Dadaism, at the time already a collaborator of various literary magazines.

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Member of the Communist Party since he was a student, he was expelled twice (in 1950 and in 1970) for his ideas extraneous to the official lines of the ideological canon imposed by the regime of real socialism. In 1968 he sided with the reform movement of the so-called ‘Prague Spring’: after the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia Kundera was no longer able to publish and in 1970 he was fired, losing his teaching post. Having obtained a temporary expatriation permit for France, in 1975 he settled in Paris, teaching first at the University of Rennes and then at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in the French capital.

Since 1969 his works were prohibited in Czechoslovakia and since then he has not granted anyone the rights to translate into the Czech language. For this reason Kundera was criticized at home even in the circles of dissent of Charta ’77. It will be necessary to wait until 2006 for Kundera to give permission for the novel to be published The unbearable lightness of being also in the Czech Republic, through an anastatic edition of the one published in Czech in Toronto as early as 1985.

Milan Kundera made his debut as a poet (“Man is a big garden“, 1953), followed by “The last May” (1955). In the collection of poems “Monologues” (1957, reworked in 1964 and 1965) goes beyond the mold of the time with a vision of love explored in its dramatic and erotic dimension. He made his debut as a playwright in 1962 with “The owners of the keys“, set in the period of the fascist occupation. The comedy “Two ears, two weddings” (1968) could not be performed. Kundera’s main vocation is however that of storyteller.

The First Book of Stories”Ridiculous loves” (1963), and the following “Second notebook of ridiculous loves” (1965) and “Third notebook of ridiculous loves” (1968) had a notable echo; in 1970 he reworked them in a volume that takes up the first title. His first novel, “The joke” (1967), is a violent and painful satire of the Czechoslovakian reality in the years of the personality cult. Some themes of the stories often reappear in the subsequent novels: the joke or other minute and often casual event represents the trap of the story, the painful aspects of ‘love, regret, oblivion. The titles of the novels (banned in the then Czechoslovak Republic and published abroad) are eloquent: “Life is elsewhere” (1973, awarded the Prix Médicis Etranger), “The farewell waltz” (1975), “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (1978), “The unbearable lightness of being” (1984), “Immortality” (1990). In the nineties he began to write in French: the works belong to this last phase “Slowness” (1995), “Identity” (1997), “Ignorance” (2001).

The structure of Kundera’s novels recalls that of a musical composition, due to the use of counterpoint, variations and leitmotifs; the syntax and lexicon are simple, metaphors are rare. The novel is considered by Kundera as a means of choice for examining and getting to know the characters, the great themes of human existence “through experimental egos”. For a long time he devoted himself to theoretical reflections on this literary genre. In 2009 for Adelphi (its reference Italian publisher) the complex was released “A meeting“, on the physiognomy of the novelist and his hidden, vital, painful physiology.

Among his essays “Wills Betrayed” (1992) and “The curtain” (2005). From 2013 is “The Feast of Insignificance“, which can be considered a synthesis of all his work: a strange synthesis, a strange epilogue; a strange laugh, inspired by our age which is comical because it has lost all sense of humour.

The acknowledgments and the missed Nobel
Present in the full Nobel Prize for many years and without ever receiving it, Milan Kundera has obtained numerous awards: in 1973 the Prix Médicis, in 1978 the Mondello Prize, in 1981 the American Common Wealth Award for his career, in 1985 the Jerusalem Prix, in the 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, 1987 the Nelly-Sachs-Preis, 1990 the Legion of Honor of the French Republic, 1991 the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, 1994 the Jaroslav-Seifert-Prize, in the 1995 the Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic, in 2000 the Herder Prize, in 2001 the Grand Prix of literature of the French Academy. In 2011, his works were collected in two volumes, edited by François Ricard, in the “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, a prestigious collection by Gallimard where living authors are only rarely admitted. A year ago Kundera donated all of his books and his private archive to the regional library of Brno, his hometown.