The Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, one of the greatest voices in world literature, died Tuesday afternoon at the age of 94 in Paris, his publisher Gallimard announced to AFP on Wednesday.
The author of Joke (1965) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) “died in the afternoon of Tuesday July 11, 2023,” Gallimard said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, I can confirm that Mr. Milan Kundera has passed away […] following a long illness,” Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library, told AFP in her hometown of Brno.
A sarcastic painter of the human condition, Kundera was one of the rare authors to have entered the prestigious editions of La Pléiade (in 2011) during his lifetime.
Born Czech, stripped of this nationality before regaining it later, but French since 1981, he was one of the most influential French-language novelists in the world.
When he was still Czech, Milan Kundera published two novels, Joke (1965, praised in particular by the French poet Aragon) and laughable loves (1968), texts drawing up a bitter assessment of the political illusions of the generation of the Prague coup which, in 1948, enabled the Communists to come to power.
Blacklisted in his country after the Prague Spring, Kundera went into exile in France in 1975 with his wife Vera, a star presenter on Czech television.
Naturalized French, he will therefore choose French as the language of writing, to mark his break with a native country which stripped him of his nationality in 1979, then returned it to him in 2019.
In France, he publishes Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting… In 1984, appeared what some consider his masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Beinga wonderful love novel and ode to freedom, both serious and casual, whose subject is nothing less than the human condition.
Refraining from expressing himself in the media, wishing that people talk about his work and nothing else, Kundera lived discreetly in the center of Paris, with his wife Vera.
He had been the victim of macabre hoaxes several times on social networks where his death was announced before the hour.