Czech-French writer Milan Kundera and his wife’s remains have been repatriated to Czechia.
ADVERTISEMENTMilan Kundera’s wish to be buried in his hometown has been fulfilled, confirmed the Morovian Library in Czechia.
The library confirmed that the Czech-French writer and his wife Věra Kundera’s ashes have been repatriated to Brno, the city in which Kundera was born in 1929.
“Věra and Milan Kundera, who had lived in France since 1975, have symbolically returned to Brno,” the Morovian Library said.
Kundera, who died in 2023 aged 94, was born in Brno, then-Czechoslovakia. After moving to France following his second expulsion from the country’s Communist Party, his Czecohslovakian citizenship was revoked in 1979.
He was nationalised as a French citizen in 1981 and spent the rest of his life living in France with his second wife, Věra, who he married in 1967.
In 2019, Czechia granted Kundera citizenship. He never returned to the country for anything other than visits.
From his first novel 1967’s “The Joke” which satirised Czechia’s Communist regime to his most famous work, 1984’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, Kundera found ways to effortlessly infuse his engaging prose style with political, philosophical and psychological intent.
Following his death, Věra kept his urn in their Paris apartment until her death, in September 2024.
“The two urns are now in Brno and will be placed in the tomb when it is ready,” Morovian Library director Tomas Kubicek said after receiving the remains of the couple from publisher Antoine Gallimard and Czech Ambassador to France Michel Fleischmann.
Brno City Hall opened an architectural competition to design the writer’s tomb, which is scheduled to be finished in 2025.
“Fleischmann and I promised that after Mrs Kunderova’s death we would make sure that both urns would be placed in Brno’s cemetery,” said Kubicek. “At the moment they are in Brno, and after the grave is ready they will be transferred there. Until that happens, they will remain safe in the Moravian Library.”
Kundera published 10 novels between 1967 and 2014, alongside collections of short stories, poetry, essays, and three plays. He won the Prix Médicis, the Jerusalem Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, and was long considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
