Milan Kundera, Czech dissident author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, dead at 94

Milan Kundera, whose dissident writings in communist Czechoslovakia transformed him into an exiled satirist of totalitarianism, has died in Paris at the age of 94.

Kundera’s French publishing house Gallimard and the Czech library housing his personal collection confirmed the death.

“Milan Kundera died yesterday in Paris after a long illness,” Anna Mrazova, spokesperson of the Moravian Library (MZK), said Wednesday.

Kundera’s renowned novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, opens wrenchingly with Soviet tanks rolling through Prague, the Czech capital that was the author’s home until he moved to France in 1975. Weaving together themes of love and exile, politics and the deeply personal, Kundera’s novel won critical acclaim, earning him a wide readership among Westerners who embraced both his anti-Soviet subversion and the eroticism threaded through many of his works.

“If someone had told me as a boy: One day you will see your nation vanish from the world, I would have considered it nonsense, something I couldn’t possibly imagine. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life,” he told the author Philip Roth in a New York Times interview in 1980, the year before he became a naturalized French citizen.

In 1989, the Velvet Revolution pushed Communists from power and Kundera’s nation was reborn as the Czech Republic, but by then he had made a new life in Paris.

Rare public appearances

To say his relationship with the land of his birth was complex would be an understatement. He returned to the Czech Republic rarely and incognito, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. His final works, written in French, were never translated into Czech.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being follows a dissident surgeon from Prague to exile in Geneva and back home again. For his refusal to bend to the Communist regime the surgeon, Tomas, is forced to become a window washer, and uses his new profession to arrange sex with hundreds of female clients. Tomas ultimately lives out his final days in the countryside with his wife, Tereza, their lives becoming both more dreamlike and more tangible as the days pass.

The novel won him acclaim and was made into a film in 1988 starring Daniel Day-Lewis, but was not published in the Czech Republic until 2006, 17 years after the Velvet Revolution.

Kundera’s wife, Vera, was an essential companion to a reclusive man who eschewed technology — his translator, his social secretary, and ultimately his buffer against the outside world. It was she who fostered his friendship with Roth by serving as their linguistic go-between, and — according to a 1985 profile of the couple — it was she who took his calls and handled the inevitable demands on a world-famous author.

The writings of Kundera, whose first novel The Joke in 1967 opens with a young man who is dispatched to the mines after making light of communist slogans, were banned in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, when he also lost his job as a professor of cinema. He had been writing novels and plays since 1953.

Kundera refused to appear on camera, rejected any annotation when his complete published works were released in 2011, and would not allow any digital copies of his writing. In a June 2012 speech to the French National Library — which was re-read on French radio by a friend — he said he feared for the future of literature.

“People walk in the street, they no longer have contact with those around them, they don’t even see the homes they pass, they have wires hanging from their ears,” he said.

Angrily denied report involving spy

Born in the Moravian capital of Brno on April 1, 1929, to a musicologist who studied under the composer Leos Janacek, Kundera began writing poems in high school and studied at Charles University in Prague after the Second World War.

Like many young men of his age he joined the Communist party but was later expelled. During the 1960s he taught at a film academy where his students included Milos Forman, who was among the creators of the Czech New Wave films.

Despite his fierce protection of his private life — he gave only a handful of interviews and kept his biographical information to a bare minimum — Kundera was forced to revisit his past in 2008, when the Czech Republic’s Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes produced documentation indicating that in 1950, as a 21-year-old student, Kundera told police about someone in his dormitory. The man was ultimately convicted of espionage and sentenced to hard labour for 22 years.

The researcher who released the report, Adam Hradilek, defended it as the product of extensive research on Kundera.

“He has sworn his Czech friends to silence, so not even they are willing to speak to journalists about who Milan Kundera is and was,” Hradilek said at the time.

Kundera said the report was a lie, telling the Czech CTK news agency it amounted to “the assassination of an author.”

Translated into more than 20 languages, Kundera won several literary prizes, including the Prix Europa-Littérature for the ensemble of his work.

In 1973, his Life Is Elsewhere won France’s coveted Prix Medicis for best foreign novel, and The Farewell Party, a modern-day sexual farce set in an east European spa published in France in 1976, won Italy’s Premio Mondello.

His first novel as an émigré was The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), a story written in seven parts that showed the power of totalitarian regimes to erase parts of history and create an alternate past. The book cemented Kundera’s reputation as a leading novelist with critics before the greater success of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The Czech Republic restored Kundera’s citizenship in 2019. It had been banned by the former regime 40 years earlier.