Milan Kundera, a Czech-born writer who drew attention to the cultural and political oppression of Central Europe under communist rule, died July 11, 2023 in Paris, according to the Moravian State Library in his hometown of Brno. He was 94.
Writing in the former Czechoslovakia and later in France, where he had lived in near-hermetic exile since 1975 and adopted French as his primary language, Mr. Kundera crafted slippery and elliptical stories, plays, essays and novels. The son of a concert pianist, he described his novels as polyphonic symphonies, works that mixed various tones and styles — fable, essay, autobiographical reflection — to explore the nature of identity or mortality.
“ ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology and part autobiography,” book criticwrote in a New York Times review. “It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius.” An idealistic communist in his youth, when he wrote propagandistic poetry on anti-Nazi resistance leader Julius Fucik, Mr. Kundera said he quickly grew disillusioned by the Stalinist regime that seized power in 1948. He became a leading intellectual dissident with his satirical first novel, “The Joke” , about a Czech student whose poor attempt at humor lands him in a forced-labor camp.The character’s fate nearly mirrored that of Mr. Kundera himself.
Freed from the censors, he became more openly critical of Czechoslovakia in his novels and in essays for the New York Review of Books, where he lamented Central Europe’s “disappearance” under the yoke of Soviet control and helped place Czechoslovakia “on the map” for readers in the United States, according to“Kundera was able to place Central Europe apart from the Soviet Union and to bring attention to its plight, and to its history and cultural heritage,” she said in a 2018 interview.
Mr. Kundera focused less on Czech politics in later years, and even in the 1980s expressed disappointment when Western critics likened him to political writers such as Russia’s
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