A literary giant

“My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas ...and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.” Milan Kundera, the expert craftsmen of stories who, in his own words, tried to unite the serious with utmost (or unbearable) lightness of form and being passed away in Paris at the age of 94; he had been severely ill according to reports and the Milan Kundera Library confirmed news of his death on Wednesday (July 12). He is survived by his wife, Vera Hrabankova. With Kundera's death closes a chapter of one of the most unique writers in an era of literature that has been remembered in recent years by way of obituaries -- and the classic works left behind. In Kundera's case, his 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', published in 1984, made him part of the literary world's greats. However, the Kundera we now recognize as one of the most famous and celebrated writers of the 20th century, was not always so well-received. His first book, 'The Joke', was a satire on totalitarian communism and was not appreciated by the Czech government.

Kundera was born to a pianist father on April 1, 1929 but found his calling in literature, eventually becoming a lecturer on world literature at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia. Despite becoming a member of the Communist Party as a teenager, both the man and his works fell afoul of party ideology and he was twice expelled from its ranks. He was also one of the supporters of the Prague Spring and advocated for freedom of speech and equality. Eventually, Kundera moved to France in the 1970s, which is where he wrote 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', the novel that made him a literary celebrity and won him near unanimous critical acclaim. The theme of anti-totalitarianism remained a constant throughout Kundera’s work. But, though his work has been seen to have evolved through his writing career, his signature was his ability to mix the real and the philosophical, the mundane with the lofty, irony often accompanying the writing. Apart from 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' his 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' (1979) is also much-acclaimed. Kundera's work was also immortalized on film, in a Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche starrer 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', which earned two Oscar nominations and the BAFTA award for best adapted screenplay -- an adaptation not much admired by the writer himself. Not one for fame or technology, Kundera had once commented that "An author, once quoted by a journalist, is no longer master of his word … And this, of course, is unacceptable". Kundera may have remained a part-recluse for much of his life but the exiled writer left a mark not just in native and adopted homelands but in scores of countries, in scores of languages.