Czech writer Milan Kundera, who explored being and betrayal over half a century in poems, plays, essays and novels including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died aged 94 after a prolonged illness.
His dissident writings in communist Czechoslovakia transformed him into an exiled satirist of totalitarianism.
“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 his anti-Soviet subversion and the eroticism threaded through many of his works,” read AP report.
Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979 but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.
Kundera was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, in 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2000 Herder Prize. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia.
Novels
- The Joke (Žert) (1967)
- Life Is Elsewhere (Život je jinde) (1969)
- The Farewell Waltz (Valčík na rozloučenou) (Original translation title: The Farewell Party) (French version “La Valse aux Adieux“) (1972)
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kniha smíchu a zapomnění) (1979)
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being(Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) (1984)
- Immortality (Nesmrtelnost) (1988)
- Slowness (La Lenteur) (1995)
- Identity (L’Identité) (1998)
- Ignorance (L’Ignorance) (2000)
- The Festival of Insignificance (La fête de l’insignifiance) (2014)
Short fiction
Collections
- Laughable Loves (Směšné lásky) (1969)
Stories
- The Apologizer (2015)
Poetry collections
- Člověk zahrada širá (Man: A Wide Garden) (1953)
- Poslední máj (The Last May) (1955) – celebration of Julius Fučík
- Monology (Monologues) (1957)
Essays
- O sporech dědických (About the Disputes of Inheritance) (1955)
- Umění románu: Cesta Vladislava Vančury za velkou epikou (The Art of the Novel: Vladislav Vančura’s Path to the Great Epic) (1960)
- Český úděl (The Czech Deal) (1968)
- Radikalizmus a expozice (Radicalism and Exhibitionism) (1969)
- The Stolen West or The Tragedy of Central Europe (Únos západu aneb Tragédie střední Evropy) (1983)
- The Art of the Novel (L’art du Roman) (1986)
- Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts(Les testaments trahis: essai) (1993)
- D’en bas tu humeras les roses – rare book in French, illustrated by Ernest Breleur (1993)
- The Curtain (Le Rideau) (2005)
- An Encounter (Une rencontre) (2009)
Drama
- Majitelé klíčů (The Owners of the Keys) (1962)
- Dvě uši, dvě svatby (Two Ears, Two Weddings) (1968)
- Ptákovina (The Blunder) (1969)
- Jacques and His Master (Jakub a jeho pán: Pocta Denisu Diderotovi) (1981)
Film adaptations
- The Joke (1968) Directed by Jaromil Jireš, Assistant director Eliska Stibrová, Screenplay Milan Kundera and Jaromil Jireš from the novel by
Milan Kundera. Cinematography Jan Curík.
Articles
- What is a novelist (2006)
- Die Weltliteratur (2007)
Non-fiction
- A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe (2023)
