![]() ![]() The reflection on rhythm and acceleration the combination of tempi and polyphony, of legato and staccato articulations and the fugue and the coda demonstrate a perfectly assimilated lesson in musical modernity, of Arnold Schoenberg in particular.Īs a teenager, he was an excellent musician (who also tried his hand at composition), he nevertheless followed a different path for his university studies, which led the Moravian country boy to the capital, Prague. ![]() His father, a student of the composer Leos Janacek and piano teacher at the Brno Conservatory, gave his son a very high-level musical education, the influence of which can be found in both the principles of composition and in the central leitmotifs that permeate Kundera's work. This has a metaphysical significance," Kundera told his friend and compatriot Antonin Liehm – the sign no doubt of an artful joker to which he dedicated his most famous title in The Joke, in 1967, as well as a nod to the popular hero of a satire, The Good Soldier Svejk (1923) by the novelist's compatriot Hasek, and raised to the status of national emblem.Ī contemporary of a nation newly reshaped by the interwar period, after and before other tectonic shifts, Kundera was born into a family of the educated elite of the independent republic, governed by its first president, Tomas Mazaryk. This was the tragically confused history of the 20 th century, or of the "kidnapped West," as he expressed it: A history against which he constantly pitted his personal life and work in multiple twists and turns, and often against a backdrop of violent controversy and calumny. But above all, it was for his "second mother tongue" conquered in a hard struggle against the dictates of history. He was a "French" novelist, by personal decree and by an elective affinity for a country that welcomed migrants, which in 1981, allowed him to get citizenship after he had been stripped of his Czech nationality in 1979. Kundera's prompt commitment to Salman Rushdie, in 1988, at the time of the Satanic Verses debacle, was an exemplary reminder of the ever-present urgency to defend fiction's inalienable rights. His art of the novel acutely questioned the territories, stakes and temporality of a genre historically under tension, threatened at times by internal exhaustion and at others by external aggression. ![]() Kundera never ceased to express his attachment to a whole tradition of "world literature," from Cervantes to Carlos Fuentes, from Goethe to Diderot, from Kafka to Musil. He described this demanding program of poetic meditation on existence in his essay Testaments Betrayed (1993), as "an outlook, a wisdom, a position a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group." He was a "novelist," not a "writer," in the full meaning that he gave to the art of the novel, which he saw as a means of total knowledge – aesthetic rather than theoretical. The novelist Milan Kundera, born April 1, 1929, in Brno, Moravia (then part of the Czechoslovak Republic) died in Paris on July 11 at the age of 94, his publisher Gallimard confirmed to Le Monde. Milan Kundera, existential novelist, has diedĪ tireless champion of the novel and fiction's rights, the Czech-born author of 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', who became a naturalized French citizen in 1981, died on July 11, at the age of 94.īy Martine Boyer-Weinmann (professor of French literature, Lyon-II University) Published on July 12, 2023, at 11:32 am (Paris), updated on July 12, 2023, at 12:49 pm ![]()
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