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Czech-born writer Milan Kundera, who shot to fame with a novel about the fragility of life, has died aged 94 at his home in Paris, according to Czech media.
Author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is set against the heavy backdrop of the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring, Kundera emigrated to France in 1975. He became a French citizen in 1981 and wrote his last novels in French.
Kundera was best known as a fiction writer who used satire to discuss life and its absurdities. His early writings also focused on the tragicomedy of totalitarianism, the difficult relationship with his native country and the control exerted by Moscow over Czechoslovakia and its neighbours.
“In central Europe, the eastern border of the west, everybody has always been particularly sensitive to the dangers of Russian might,” Kundera wrote in a 1983 essay.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kundera rarely returned to the Czech Republic. He fought off claims made in 2008 by the weekly Czech publication Respekt, which accused him of having been an informer for the Communist party in the 1950s.
Kundera joined the Communist party as a teenager and his early poetry writings espoused socialist views. He was first expelled from the party in 1950, then reinstated in 1956 before getting thrown out for a second time in 1970, two years after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and put an end to the political liberalisation driven by the reformist leader Alexander Dubček.
Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, was based on his own expulsion from the party and used dark humour to draw a scathing portrayal of Czech life under Communism. It was published in 1967 in Czechoslovakia but banned the following year. Several other Kundera works remained blacklisted during Communist rule. He was stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979, four years after he went into exile in France.
The Czech Republic reinstated Kundera’s citizenship in 2019 and he then received the country’s prestigious Franz Kafka prize, one of many literary awards he won throughout his career.
Part of his correspondence and personal archives last year were transported back to his birthplace, Brno, to a new Milan Kundera library section that was inaugurated in April by the Czech culture minister.
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