The writer Milan Kundera passed away this Tuesday at the age of 94 in his apartment in Paris. advanced Moravian State Librarywhere a large part of the author’s personal archive is located.
“Unfortunately, I can confirm that Mr. Milan Kundera died yesterday (Tuesday) after a long illness,” library spokeswoman Anna Mrazova told France-Presse.
Born on April 1, 1929 in Brnö, in the former Czechoslovakia, he had been in exile in Paris since 1975 and had French nationality since 1981. This was the only one he had between that year and 2019, when he recovered the Czech citizenship he had. he retired in 1979.
He is the author of works such as “The Unsustainable Lightness of Being” -considered his greatest work and made into a film in 1988-, “A Brincadeira” or “A Identidade” and he dedicated himself to literary genres such as novels, essays and poetry, being considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century.
Among others, he received the Medici (1973), Mondello (1978), Common Wealth (1981), Jerusalem (1985) and Independent Foreign Literature (1991) prizes.
This July, Don Quixote published in Portugal “A kidnapped west or the tragedy of Central Europe”, a small book by Kundera, published for the first time in France in 2021, and which according to the publisher is very topical in the reflection on Europe under construction.
“We will be greatly missed”
“It is an essay that forces us and makes us reflect on the Europe we are building and the foundations of this Europe. It is a book that has two texts that were written before the fall of the Wall [de Berlim]: one is Kundera’s speech at the Congress of Czechoslovak Writers in 1967, just before the Warsaw Pact troops invaded, and the other is an article published in Le Débat magazine in 1983, when Kundera was already living in Paris “, said. explained to TSF editor Cecilia Andrade.
The translator of this work, João Duarte Rodrigues, detailed in the TSF that these are “two very important pieces in Kundera’s life as a writer, but not as a fiction writer”, because the author, “like all great writers, is very prescient about social life and what can happen”.
The translator even visited Kundera at his home in Paris, at that time accompanied by Manuel Valente when both were at the ASA publishing house, to have a conversation about a book that “was an exception because it was not originally published by Don Quixote.”
João Duarte Rodrigues says that they were “very well” received, both by the writer and by his wife Vera Kundera, “very kind, fierce with her husband’s work, let’s say, and fighters for the prestige of his work.”
Both were “very kind” and, for the translator, “Kundera was a man who could one day be a Nobel Prize winner, very easily, but in the end that did not happen.”
The same kindness of the Kundera couple is confirmed by Cecília Andrade who, although she never visited them, corresponded “sometimes” with both.
Milan “was a ‘reserved man, very private and had stopped giving interviews a long time ago.’
“Always very kind and always very kind,” Kundera “reflected a lot on our time, so much so that some of his most recent books were reflections on our time, like a book he published, which is ‘An Encounter’ (2011),” he says. the editor, who confessed that the author “will be greatly missed.”
“I thought that he would still have the Nobel Prize, because many pointed to him as a possible candidate, unfortunately it did not happen,” he lamented to the media. TSFpointing out that “The unsustainable lightness of being” is a work that “has accompanied successive generations of readers”.
A “very interesting” example of this is what he observed at the last Book Fair, where “many young people” were looking for what is one of the “most important publications of the 20th century.”
Source: TSF
