Milan Kundera's Czech citizenship restored after 40 years
In a 1984 interview with the New York Times, Kundera said that the idea of
home was
“something very ambiguous” for him. ‘I wonder if our notion of home isn’t,
in the end, an illusion, a myth. I wonder if we are not victims of that myth. I
wonder if our ideas of having roots – d’être enraciné – is
simply a fiction we cling to,” he said, adding that he had made the choice
between living “like an émigré in France or like an ordinary person who happens
to write books”.
After more than 40
years in exile, Milan
Kundera, the Czech-born author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has
been given back the citizenship of his homeland. Petr Drulák, the Czech
Republic’s ambassador to France,
told public television he visited the 90-year-old author in his Paris apartment
last Thursday to hand deliver his citizenship certificate.
“This is a very important symbolic gesture, a symbolic return of the greatest Czech writer in the Czech Republic,” Drulák said, describing the presentation as “a very simple moment, but of great conviviality and human warmth”. “He was in a good mood, just took the document and said thank you,” he added. Kundera, author of internationally acclaimed fiction, was expelled for “anti-communist activities” from the Czechoslovakian party in 1950. He became a hate figure for the authorities and eventually fled to France in 1975. In 1979, his Czech citizenship was revoked and two years later he became a French citizen.
“This is a very important symbolic gesture, a symbolic return of the greatest Czech writer in the Czech Republic,” Drulák said, describing the presentation as “a very simple moment, but of great conviviality and human warmth”. “He was in a good mood, just took the document and said thank you,” he added. Kundera, author of internationally acclaimed fiction, was expelled for “anti-communist activities” from the Czechoslovakian party in 1950. He became a hate figure for the authorities and eventually fled to France in 1975. In 1979, his Czech citizenship was revoked and two years later he became a French citizen.
His most famous works,
including The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, were written in France and banned in his homeland until the late
80s. His 1988 novel Immortality was his last novel written in Czech; he has
since written four more novels in French, the most recent 2014’s The Festival
of Insignificance. The idea of restoring
Kundera’s citizenship has been floated for years by authorities in the Czech
Republic. In November 2018, prime minister Andrej Babiš announced that he had
offered to restore the author and his wife Vera’s citizenship after a
three-hour meeting with them in their favourite Paris restaurant....
