‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ author Milan Kundera dies at 94

PARIS—Milan Kundera, the renowned but reclusive author whose dissident writings transformed him into an exiled satirist of totalitarianism and explorer of identity and the human condition, has died in Paris. He was 94.

Kundera died last July 11, his long-standing publishing house Gallimard said in a one-sentence statement on Wednesday. It confirmed that he died in Paris, where he has lived for decades, but provided no further information.

The European Parliament held a moment of silence upon news of his passing. Kundera held both French and Czech nationality, which he lost and then regained.

Kundera was a man of few words whose novels were translated into dozens of languages, but he abhorred the publicity that came with it, refusing interviews.

“I dream of a world where writers are obliged by law to keep their identity secret and use pseudonyms,” he wrote in the 1986 essay, “The Art of the Novel.” Kundera used the sentence to respond to questions put to him in 2011 by Le Monde des Livres, agreeing to an “interview” via responses from his works.

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’’ Kundera’s best-known novel, 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.

New identity

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—and a complete identity—in his apartment on Paris’ Left Bank.“Milan Kundera was a writer who was able to reach generations of readers across all continents with his work and achieved world fame,” Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala tweeted in the Czech language. “He left behind not only a remarkable work of fiction, but also an important work of essays.” He offered condolences to Kundera’s wife Věra, who guarded her reclusive husband from the intrusions of the world.

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 works, eventually written in French, were belatedly translated into Czech.

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’’ which won him such acclaim and was made into a film in 1988, was not published in the Czech Republic until 2006, 17 years after the Velvet Revolution, although it was available in Czech since 1985 from a compatriot who founded a publishing house in exile in Canada. Kundera ultimately won the State Award for Literature for it.

The writings of Kundera 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’s name was often floated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the honor eluded him.

Future of literature

Jiri Srstka, Kundera’s Czech literary agent at the time the book was finally published in the Czech Republic, said the author himself delayed its release there for fear it would be badly edited.

Kundera refused to appear on camera, rejected any annotation when his complete published works were released in 2011, and, earlier, would not allow any digital copies of his writing, reflecting his loyalty to the printed word. Today, however, a Kindle version of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is among his books offered on Amazon and Google Books.

In a June 2012 speech to the French National Library—reread on French radio by a friend—he said he feared for the future of literature. “It seems to me that time, which continues its march pitilessly, is beginning to endanger books. It’s because of this anguish that, for several years now, I have in all my contracts a clause stipulating that they must be published only in the traditional form of a book, that they be read only on paper and not on a screen,” he said.

In 2021, Kundera donated his private library and archive to the public library in Brno, where he was born and spent his childhood. The Moravian Library holds a vast collection of Kundera’s works. Donated items include editions of Kundera’s books in Czech and some 40 other languages, articles written by and about him, published reviews and criticism of his work, authorized photographs and even drawings by the author. —AP