Czech writer, poet, essayist and playwright Milan Kundera has died at the age of 94.
The news was given this morning by public broadcaster Czech Television.
The Czech writer, who later became French, a symbol of Central European literature with his novels "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "A Captive West", died in Paris.
Born in Brno, in what was then Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic), on April 1, 1929, Kundera studied literature and music in Prague. His father Ludvík was director of the Brno Academy of Music and a well-known pianist. From an early age, therefore, Kundera studied music, especially the piano, and the passion for music will often return to his literary texts.
The publication of the first poems is still in his teens, thanks to his cousin Ludvík, a few years his senior.
After following literature courses at the Charles University in Prague for a year (starting in 1948), Kundera moved on to the Film School, where he graduated and where he would later hold courses in comparative literature.
In 1948, while still a student, he joined the Communist Party, but was expelled in 1950 due to some criticisms of his cultural policy contained in a letter sent to him by a friend. In 1956 he was then readmitted, becoming an important point of reference in the discussions of those years.
In 1968 he openly sided in favor of the so-called "Prague Spring", and for this he was forced to leave his teaching position and, in 1970, he was expelled from the party.
In 1975 he then emigrated to France, where he taught at the universities of Rennes and Paris. In 1979, following the publication of "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", his Czechoslovakian citizenship was taken away. In 1981, thanks to an interest from the French president François Mitterrand, he obtained the French one.
Among the best known novels "The joke" (1967), "The waltz of goodbyes" (1972), "Life is elsewhere" (1973), "The book of laughter and oblivion" (1978), "The unbearable lightness of being” (1984), “Immortality” (1990), “Slowness” (1995), “Identity” (1997), “Ignorance” (2001), “The Feast of insignificance” (2013).
(Unioneonline/vl)