CZECH-FRENCH writer Milan Kundera, best known for his poetry, essays and books including The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, has died aged 94.
“Unfortunately I can confirm that Milan Kundera died yesterday after a long illness,” said Anna Mrazova, a spokeswoman for the library in her hometown. Brno.
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“He died at home, in his house Paris house,” he said.
A poet, poet and essayist live in it France since leaving Communist Czechoslovakia in 1975.
He was known for his dark, provocative essays on social issues and sprinkled with jokes about being dispossessed of the Czech Republic because of his refusal.
Kundera, who was born on April 1, 1929, in the second city of Czechoslovakia, Brno. Prague.
He began translating the works of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writing poems and short stories.
He taught at a film school, where his students included an Oscar-winning director Milos Forman.
His best-selling book, The Joke, about a boy who was expelled from the university and the Communist Party for an innocent joke was published in 1967.
Kundera, a former communist, was expelled from the party twice, first for “anti-communism” in 1950, and later for falling out of favor with the authorities for calling for free speech and equal rights for all.
After the Prague Spring the reform movement was crushed Led by the Soviets army in 1968 and lost hope that things would change, Kundera went to teach in France.
Rarely speaking to the public, Kundera was exiled from Czechoslovakia in 1979, following the publication of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
He became a French citizen in 1981.
By far his most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was published in 1984 and turned into a film starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis in 1988.
The novel is a moral tale of freedom and passion, both individual and collective, that confronts the Prague Spring and its aftermath to slavery.
Criticized for defamation in his native country and for banning the Czech translation of his French books, Kundera rediscovered his Czech version in 2019.
It had been 30 years since the former Czechoslovakia lost Moscow-Communist rule in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, and 26 years after the country peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.
On his birthday this year, the Moravian library in Brno opened a Milan Kundera library in one of its buildings.
It was often said that Kundera would have liked to win the Nobel Prize for literature, but he did not.
“Not only Czech literature, but also international literature has lost one of the most famous authors of today, and one of the most translated authors,” Tomas Kubicek, director of the Kundera library, told Czech TV.
European policy makers in Strasbourg He was silent for a minute today as he remembered the legend of writing.
Born in Brno, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said Kundera was able to “attract readers on all continents” with his work.
“They leave high notes and high notes,” added Fiala Twitter.