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LIDOVKY
Lidovky ("The People's") is the Czech-language news website of the Prague-based daily Lidové noviny ("The People's Newspaper"). Created in 1893, it is currently the oldest Czech daily still in print.
Black-and-white photograph of Czech-born writer Milan Kundera in May 1968, in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Society
Radim Kopáč

Identity And Dissolution, A Czech Farewell To Milan Kundera

A week has passed since the passing of the Czech-born author of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera in his Paris apartment. Having emigrated to France in 1975 after being ostracized for criticizing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, his relationship with his homeland would remain complicated for decades.

-Essay-

PRAGUE — Milan Kundera's lifelong dream has finally been fulfilled. He disappeared behind his literary work, became invisible, and left in his wake only a shelf of beautifully crafted books that serve as the ideal portrait of the author — a portrait reflecting his journey, with Laughable Loves on one side and The Festival of Insignificance on the other.

Through novels like The Joke, Life is Elsewhere, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, through essays titled The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, Milan Kundera left behind half a century's worth of authorial work and a legacy unparalleled in modern Czech literature.

He left behind an extensive library, translated in some 50 languages. Perhaps only Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk — the most translated novel of Czech literature — tops this remarkable feat.

Born on April 1, 1929, in the Czech city of Brno, Milan Kundera, a resident of France since the age of 46 and a globally renowned author by the 1980s, possessed a remarkable ability beyond his evident literary talent: the ability to provoke.

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