Vera Kundera, who was the wife and great love of the French-Czech writer Milan Kundera (1929-2023) died in Le Touquet (Pas-de-Calais) on Saturday, September 14. In this city that she carried in her heart – the couple had an apartment there for a long time overlooking the beach, the same beach that we find in the novel Identity (Gallimard, 1998), by Kundera – she had come to rest, outside Paris, for a few days in a hotel. It was in her room that she was found lifeless in the early morning. She was going to be 89 years old.
Knowing her, one would tend to think that her death dates back to the day before, on Friday the 13th, so fond was she of signs. Superstitious, she tracked them down while laughing and interpreted them, never really fooled, with her delicious accent and her inimitable verve. She often said that before leaving “the Czech”, she had consulted a clairvoyant who had told her: “Little scorpion, you will not die in Bohemia.” These days, she sighed, more nostalgic than ever for her native land: “I’m afraid he’s right.”
She was a wonderful brunette, petite, always very elegant. Born in Prague on October 24, 1935, Vera Hrabankova met Milan Kundera in 1967, in the joyful effervescence of the “Prague Spring”. Slender, with very short hair, she had a passing resemblance to Jean Seberg and was six years younger than him (who had already been married very briefly). In her youth, she was hardly happy. When she was still young, her mother abandoned her, her father and her sisters. At the age of 12, she saw one of them, Eva, die before her eyes from meningitis.
Then his father was unjustly accused of wanting to leave for Australia to escape communist Czechoslovakia. “We had little money then, she told us in Milan Kundera. “Writing, what a strange idea.” (Gallimard, 2023). We were renting part of our apartment. A French woman who was renting with us claimed that my father wanted to escape illegally. She went to the police and they arrested my father. It remained an incurable trauma for her and she could not stop talking about this beloved father who had taught her to read at the age of 6 and introduced her to poetry.
Forced into exile
While he wastes away in prison, Vera is left to fend for herself. At 16, penniless, she finds a job in a brewery, like Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Gallimard, 1984). She serves beers at the Bruntal station in Moravia: “Poetry kept me going.” She learns miles of verses by heart “to not go crazy”. She was passionate about Robert Desnos and Maxim Gorky, perfected her diction and, in 1958, entered a local poetry competition which she won.
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