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PRAGUE, Jul 12 Famous Czech writer Milan Kundera has died at the age of 94, Czech TV reported. and «The Unbearable Lightness of Being». In recent decades, Kundera wrote exclusively in French and even banned the translation of his works into Czech, lifting his ban only recently. The writer's works have been translated into dozens of languages, «the message says.
According to the Czech media, Kundera is one of such famous representatives of Czech literature as Franz Kafka and Vaclav Havel. His works were repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the writer never received it. Some of the writer's works, primarily «The Joke» and «The Unbearable Lightness of Being», were filmed.
Kundera was born in the Czech city of Brno in 1929. He wrote his first poems and stories while still at school. Then he entered the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University, but later transferred to the Film Faculty of the Prague Academy of Musical Art. In 1953, Kundera's first book was published, which did not bring him great fame, but fame came a decade after the publication of the Funny Loves series of short stories.
In 1967, the writer published the novel «The Joke», in which he showed the spiritual poverty and opportunism associated by the author with the socialist way of life. A year later, Kundera was in the forefront of demonstrators protesting against the entry of troops from five socialist countries into Czechoslovakia. After that, his books were confiscated from all libraries in the country, and Kundera himself was deprived of the right to conduct teaching activities.
In 1975, the writer was invited to a professorship at the university in Rennes, France. In 1981, he took French citizenship. A year later, Kundera wrote his most famous novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which tells about the turmoil of intellectuals during the Prague Spring of 1968 and in subsequent years, which the leadership of Czechoslovakia called «normalization».
During the next four decades of living in France Kundera wrote many more works in various genres, completely switching to French and forbidding them to be translated into his native Czech, as he doubted the level of translation. The writer welcomed the fall of socialism in his native country in 1989 and visited the Czech Republic several times after that. In 2019, he was returned Czech citizenship, which the communist authorities deprived the writer of in 1979.