Milan Kundera, the Czech author who was cast out of the Communist Party and became best known for penning The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died. The 94-year-old passed away Tuesday in Paris "after a long illness," a spokeswoman for the Czech library that kept Kundera's personal collection told Reuters on Wednesday. A rep for his French publisher, Gallimard, confirmed his death to the New York Times. The reclusive author, who rarely gave interviews, had fled from Prague to France in 1975 and eventually became a naturalized French citizen after he was slammed for criticizing his birth nation's Communist Party in his writings.
That backlash started with his first novel, 1967's The Joke, which centers on a narrator who's a Prague college student in the '50s expelled by fellow Communists for a postcard he wrote in jest. That narrative wasn't too far off from Kundera's own life: He was expelled from the Communist Party twice—once in 1950, while attending university, then again for good in 1970 (he'd been reinstated in 1956) after blasting the 1968 Soviet invasion of what was then known as Czechoslovakia, an incursion that ended the Prague Spring. The Joke was simply "a first step in Kundera's path from party member to exile dissident," per Reuters, and the Communist themes continued in his later works, including 1984's popular Unbearable Lightness.
That novel, which ended up reprinted in at least two dozen languages, revolves around Tomas, a Czech surgeon who has issues with Communist leadership and is relegated to becoming a window washer. The book was made into a 1988 movie by the same name, which starred Daniel Day-Lewis as Tomas. Kundera himself observed that his books—which the Times describes as "sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in the workers' paradise of his native Czechoslovakia"—had striking similarities and that their titles "could easily be swapped around." "They reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and, unfortunately, restrict me," he told the Paris Review in 1983. "Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or to write."
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Kundera's last novel, The Festival of Insignificance, was published in English in 2015. Meanwhile, Czech citizenship for Kundera and his wife, Vera, which had been yanked in 1979, was restored in 2019, which the Guardian notes was described by the Czech Republic's ambassador to France as "a symbolic return of the greatest Czech writer in the Czech Republic." Still, his final works were written in French and never translated into Czech, a sign of his "complex" relationship with his homeland, per the AP. Even The Unbearable Lightness of Being wasn't published in the Czech Republic until 2006; the book topped bestseller lists there, and the following year, he won the Czech State Award for literature. The Washington Post notes that "complete information on survivors was not immediately available" for Kundera. (More author stories.)
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