Czech-born novelist Milan Kundera, who satirized totalitarian regimes and mixed dark irony with philosophical musings to explore the human condition, has died, a library he worked with said on Wednesday last week. He was 94.
The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) won accolades for his style in depicting themes and characters that floated between the mundane reality of everyday life and the lofty world of ideas. He rarely gave interviews and believed writers should speak through their work.
His first novel The Joke, published in 1967, offered a scathing portrayal of the Czechoslovak Communist regime.
Photo: AFP 照片：法新社
Coming at a time when Czech reformers were seeking to establish “socialism with a human face,” the novel was a first step in Kundera’s path from party member to exiled dissident, a moniker he disdained.
He told French daily Le Monde in 1976 that to call his works political was to oversimplify, and therefore obscure their true significance.
A year earlier Kundera was blacklisted after criticizing the Soviet invasion of 1968 and finally forced to emigrate with his wife Vera to France, where he eventually became a citizen.
Photo: Reuters 照片：路透
His first novel as an emigre was The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), a story written in seven parts that showed the power of totalitarian regimes to erase parts of history and create an alternate past.
While not as well known as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published five years later, the book cemented Kundera’s reputation as a leading novelist with critics who called it a work of genius. It also cost him his Czechoslovak citizenship. He regained a Czech passport in 2019.
“The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography,” the New York Times wrote in a review.
Born in the Moravian capital of Brno on April 1, 1929, to a musicologist who studied under the composer Leos Janacek, Kundera began writing poems in high school and studied at Charles University in Prague after World War Two.
During his exile the author had an icy relationship with his former homeland, writing his new works in French and even preventing some of his novels from being translated into Czech. But Kundera never lost a connection with his homeland and many of his books took place in the nation of his birth.
Translated into more than 20 languages, Kundera won several literary prizes. He was nominated several times for the Nobel prize in literature but never won.
Accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, Kundera said: “It pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God’s laughter.”
(Reuters)
出生於捷克的小說家米蘭‧昆德拉辭世，享耆壽94歲，與他合作的圖書館上週三表示。他諷刺極權主義政權，並結合黑色反諷與哲思以探索人類處境。
著有《生命中不能承受之輕》（1984）的昆德拉，描繪在日常生活的平凡現實與高深思想世界之間漂浮的主題與人物，此風格備受讚譽。他鮮少接受採訪，認為作家應透過作品來說話。
他的第一部小說《玩笑》於1967年出版，對捷克斯洛伐克共產政權進行了嚴厲的描寫。
這部小說是昆德拉與共產主義分道揚鑣的第一步，他由共產黨員變成流亡異議人士（他對此稱呼感到不屑），小說出版時正值捷克改革派試圖建立「人性化的社會主義」。
他1976年對法國日報《世界報》表示，將其作品描述為政治性的，是過於簡單化了，掩蓋了其真正意義。
此前一年，昆德拉因批評蘇聯1968年入侵捷克而被列入黑名單，最後不得不與妻子薇拉移民到法國，最終成為法國公民。
他流亡後的第一部小說是《笑忘書》（1979），故事由七個部分組成，展示極權政權的權力，可以將歷史的部分抹去並捏造另一個過去。
雖然這本書不如五年後出版的《生命中不能承受之輕》出名，但被評論家稱為天才之作，鞏固了昆德拉作為重要小說家的聲譽。這也讓他失去了捷克斯洛伐克公民的身份。2019年，他重新獲得了捷克護照。
《紐約時報》一篇評論寫道：「《笑忘書》自稱為一部小說，雖然它一部分是童話，一部分是文學批評，一部分是政治小冊子，一部分是音樂學，一部分是自傳」。
昆德拉1929年4月1日出生於摩拉維亞首府布爾諾，父親是音樂學家，師從作曲家萊奧什‧楊納傑克。昆德拉在高中時開始寫詩，第二次世界大戰後就讀於布拉格查理大學。
流亡期間，昆德拉與故鄉的關係冷淡，新作品以法文寫成，他甚至不讓自己的一些小說被翻譯成捷克文。但昆德拉從未失去與祖國的聯繫，他筆下許多故事都發生在他出生的國家。
昆德拉的作品被翻譯成二十多種語言，榮獲多項文學獎。他多次被提名諾貝爾文學獎，但從未獲獎。
昆德拉在1985年獲頒耶路撒冷獎時說道：「小說藝術是上帝的笑聲傳來世間的回音，一想到這我就覺得很高興」。
（台北時報林俐凱編譯）
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