Milan Kundera, the Czechoslovakian-born French writer whose novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is widely considered a modern classic of European literature, has died at 94, the Guardian reports.
Kundera was born in the city of Brno, now part of the Czech Republic. He was involved with the reformist movement in Czechoslovakia that led to the Prague Spring of 1968, which was crushed months after it began by the Warsaw Pact invasion of the country. In 1975, he moved to France, and his Czechoslovakian citizenship was revoked four years later.
He made his literary debut in 1967 with the anti-Soviet novel The Joke, which was banned in Czechoslovakia a year after its publication. Several others followed, including The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), Immortality (1988), Slowness (1995), and The Festival of Insignificance (2014).
He remains best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published in 1984. The novel, which follows four people during the Prague Spring, was adapted into an Oscar-nominated 1988 film directed by Philip Kaufman and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin.
Kundera’s admirers paid tribute to him on social media. On Twitter, author Gregory Norminton wrote, “He was a witness to the tragedies of Middle Europe through the C20th, and one of the great defenders of western liberalism. Not fashionable by the end of his life, but I will always be grateful to him for his liberating fiction and literary criticism.”
And writer David Vernon tweeted, “I was obsessed with his writing at university: its wonderful playful way with huge philosophical themes, its sense of weirdness and fun as the means to locate truth. A giant.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
