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| Milan Kundera, the Communist Party outcast who became a global literary star with mordant, sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in the workers’ paradise of his native Czechoslovakia, died Tuesday in Paris. He was 94. |
| A spokesperson for Gallimard, Kundera’s publisher in France, confirmed the death, saying it came “after a prolonged illness.” |
| Kundera’s run of popular books began with “The Joke,” which was published to acclaim in 1967, around the time of the Prague Spring, then banned with a vengeance after Soviet-led troops crushed that experiment in “socialism with a human face” a few months later. He completed his final novel, “The Festival of Insignificance” (2015), when he was in his mid-80s and living in Paris. |
| “Festival” was his first new fiction since 2000, but its reception, tepid at best, was a far cry from the reaction to his most enduringly popular novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” |
| An instant success when it was published in 1984, “Unbearable Lightness” was reprinted over the years in at least two dozen languages. The novel drew even wider attention when it was adapted into a 1988 film starring Daniel Day Lewis as one of its central characters, Tomas, a Czech surgeon who criticizes the Communist leadership and consequently ends up washing windows for a living. |
| But washing windows is a pretty good deal for Tomas. A relentless philanderer, he’s always open to meeting new women, including bored housewives. But the sex, as well as Tomas himself and the three other main characters — his wife, a seductive painter and the painter’s lover — are there for a larger purpose. |
| In putting the novel on its list of best books of 1984, The New York Times Book Review observed that “this writer’s real business is to find images for the disastrous history of his country in his lifetime.” |
| “He uses the four pitilessly, setting each pair against the other as opposites in every way, to describe a world in which choice is exhausted and people simply cannot find a way to express their humanity.” |
| Kundera’s fear that Czech culture could be erased by Stalinism — much as disgraced leaders were airbrushed out of official photos — was at the heart of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” which became available in English in 1979. |
| Writing in The Times Book Review in 1980, John Updike said the book “is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out.” |
| Kundera told The Paris Review in 1983, “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.” |
| He acknowledged that the names of his books could easily be swapped around. “Every one of my novels could be entitled ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ or ‘The Joke’ or ‘Laughable Loves,’” he said. “They reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me and, unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or to write.” |
| Although written in the Czech language, both “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” were composed in the clear light of France, where Kundera resettled in 1975 after giving up hope of political and creative freedom at home. |
| His decision to emigrate underlined the choices available to the Czech intelligentsia at the time. Thousands left. Among those who stayed and resisted was playwright Vaclav Havel, who served several prison terms, including one of nearly three years. He survived to help lead the successful Velvet Revolution in 1989 and then served as president — first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic after the Slovaks decided to go their own way. |
| With that great turnabout, Kundera’s books were legal in his homeland for the first time in 20 years. But there was scant demand for them or sympathy for him there. By one estimate, only 10,000 copies of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” were sold. |
| Many Czechs saw Kundera as someone who had abandoned his compatriots and taken the easy way out. |
| The rocky history of Kundera’s first novel, “The Joke,” is a good illustration of the trouble he faced while still trying to promote reform from within. |
| When the Prague Spring ended, the book was condemned as cynical, erotic and anti-Socialist; and if the reader could somehow adopt the censors’ mindset, the reader would see their point. |
| Ludvik, the main narrator of “The Joke,” is a Prague university student in the 1950s who is under suspicion by party members for his perceived individualism. “You smile as though you were thinking to yourself,” he is told. Then he gets a letter from a credulous female friend praising the “healthy atmosphere” at the summer training camp she’s been sent to. Resentful that she should be happy when he is missing her, young Ludvik makes a horrible mistake: |
| “So I bought a postcard,” he says, “and (to hurt, shock and confuse her) wrote: ‘Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!’” |
| There is a trial. For his little joke, Ludvik is thrown out of the party and sentenced to work as a coal miner in a military penal unit. |
| Kundera didn’t suffer quite that fate, but he was twice expelled from the party he had supported from age 18, when the Communists seized power in 1948. |
| His first expulsion, for what he called a trivial remark, was imposed in 1950 and inspired the central plot of “The Joke.” He was nevertheless allowed to continue his studies; he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1952 and was then appointed to the faculty there as an instructor in world literature. |
| Kundera was reinstated to the Communist Party in 1956 but kicked out again, in 1970, for advocating reform. This time, the ejection was forever, effectively erasing him as a person. He was driven from his job and, as he said, “No one had the right to offer me another.” |
| Milan Kundera was born April 1, 1929, in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, the son of Milada Janosikova and Ludvik Kundera. |
| Having grown up in a country occupied by German forces from 1939 to 1945, the young Kundera was one of many millions who embraced Communism after the war. |
| Too late, he said, he realized that the evil done in the name of Socialism was not a betrayal of the revolution, but rather a poison inherent in it from the beginning. |
| When Communism ended in 1989, Kundera had been living in France for 14 years with his wife, Vera Hrabankova, first as a university teacher in Rennes and then in Paris. Czechoslovakia revoked his citizenship in 1979, and he became a French citizen two years later. The Czech Republic restored his citizenship of his homeland in 2019. Information on his survivors was not immediately available. |
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