“The unbearable lightness of being”: Milan Kundera is dead

Czech-French writer Milan Kundera has died at the age of 94 after a long illness. This was announced on Wednesday (July 12) by Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library.

The shy author Kundera became a star of the literary scene with his novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in 1984. The bestseller, whose title became a household word, was also filmed by Philip Kaufman with a large cast. Kundera retired to France in the early 1990s and has been writing in French ever since.

Kundera was born on April 1, 1929 in Brno, Czech Republic. His father was a pianist and rector of the Brno Music Academy, which is why a career in the music world was envisaged for the later author. However, Kundera showed talent in writing poetry and prose and worked as a translator early on. After studying music literature, he first switched to film and also studied scriptwriting and directing.

He soon became a professor at the Prague film faculty, albeit for world literature. Here he shaped an entire generation of filmmakers who ultimately wrote film history with the so-called Czechoslovak New Wave. In literary magazines, Kundera became known for her expressive and profound essays. In addition to poetry and prose, he also published plays. From the very beginning, Kundera’s works dealt critically with socialist realism. As in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, which was only officially published in the Czech Republic in 2006 after it was first published in Czech in Canada in 1985, love is seen in his writings as the great challenger of any form of political and social regression.

In his novels, such as “The Joke” from 1965 (also filmed in 1969) and “Life is Elsewhere” (1969), Kundera describes with great empathy and from the perspective of the individual how the hopes of the individual are destroyed by a totalitarian regime , which cannot admit any form of individuality. His novels use the means of avant-garde literary experiments as well as they can be understood as philosophical (everyday) considerations.