The ashes of Milan Kundera and his wife repatriated to the Czech Republic

AA / Tunis / Fatma Ben Amor

The ashes of the Czech writer, naturalized French in 1981, Milan Kundera, and his wife Vera, who died respectively in 2023 and 2024 in France where they had lived since their exile from Czechoslovakia in 1975, were repatriated to the Czech Republic, indicated the Moravian Library.

“Vera and Milan Kundera, who lived in France since 1975, symbolically returned to Brno”, the writer’s hometown, wrote in a press release, relayed by the French media, the library of this city in the south-east of the Czech Republic.

The novelist, essayist and playwright, one of the great authors of European literature of the 20th century, died on July 11, 2023, at the age of 94, in his Parisian apartment. Milan Kundera having wanted to be buried in his hometown, his wife Vera kept his ashes until she died in September 2024.

The publisher Antoine Gallimard and the Czech Ambassador to France, Michel Fleischmann, brought the two urns to Brno last week, the Moravian Library further informs.

Exiled in France in 1975 after being censored and excluded from the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1970, Milan Kundera was stripped of his nationality, which was restored to him in 2019. He wrote his first books in Czech and used French exclusively from 1993.

Known in particular for his novels La Joisanterie (1967) and L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être (1984), Kundera has received several prizes, notably the grand prize for literature from the Académie française for all of his work in 2001. His name is mentioned several times on the lists of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His work has been translated into more than forty languages.

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