The Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, who died on July 11 at the age of 94, was cremated “in the strictest privacy”, announced Wednesday July 19 Gallimard, his publishing house. The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), who lived in great discretion, did not want a funeral. The place of his cremation has not been specified.
“Janacek’s sonatina, played on the piano by Ludvik Kundera, Milan’s father, accompanied him on this last trip,” publishing house president Antoine Gallimard said in a statement. This piece by Czech composer Leos Janacek was recorded by the novelist’s father, a renowned pianist, who died in 1971.
Milan Kundera, born in Brno (Moravia, then in the Czechoslovak Republic) in 1929, exiled in France from 1975, is one of the great authors of 20th century literature. His novels question the human condition, the evolution of identity, the sense of freedom, the hazards of existence or even the possibility of love.
A sarcastic painter of the human condition, in its political, amorous and erotic dimensions, Milan Kundera is one of the rare authors to have entered the prestigious “La Pléiade” collection during his lifetime. It has been translated into fifty languages.
The one who began his career by exposing the absurdities of the communist regime was destined like his parents for a career as a musician. Milan Kundera was first a music-loving writer: his first texts, poems, are composed like sonatas.
Blacklisted in his native country
In the 1960s, he published two novels. The Joke (1968), like a nod to the burlesque of the Brave soldier Chvéïk (1921), popular hero of his compatriot Hasek, was particularly praised by the poet Louis Aragon. Risible amours (1970) offers texts drawing up a bitter assessment of the political illusions of the generation of the Prague coup which, in 1948, allowed the communists to come to power.
Blacklisted in his country after the “Prague Spring”, Milan Kundera went into exile in France in 1975 with his wife, Vera, a star presenter of Czech television. Naturalized, he will therefore choose French as the language of writing. He marked his break with a native country which stripped him of his nationality in 1979, then returned it to him in 2019.
In France, he notably published La Valse aux adieux (1976) or The Book of Laughter and Oblivion (1978). Discovering that his first French translator had distorted his style, he was then extremely picky about the French editions of his works.
In 1984 appeared what some consider to be his masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a love novel and ode to freedom, both serious and casual. The book will be adapted to the cinema, with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis.
He refrained from expressing himself in the media since the mid-1980s, wishing that people talk about his work and nothing else.
Milan Kundera lived discreetly in the center of Paris, with a very small circle of relatives. He was repeatedly the victim of hoaxes announcing his death before the hour.
He was regularly approached to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he never won.
