Milan Kundera Obituary, Death – Their host was the late novelist and essayist Milan Kundera, who was from the Czech Republic and passed away at the age of 94. In order to ensure that his visitors were able to communicate openly, Kundera took them to a sauna, which is the only area in the city that cannot be bugged. The tourists inquired about the location of a place where they could cool off after their bodies began to overheat and the steam began to rise. They followed the Czech until they found a back entrance that opened out onto a hole in the frozen Vltava. They descended to the water’s edge in anticipation of his arrival after he gestured in the direction of the river.
But Kundera stayed there on the shore, smiling as these popsicle-like blossoms of Latin American literature erupted from the freezing water like a greenhouse full of flowers. The authors Gabriel Garca Márquez and Carlos Fuentes arrived in Prague in December of 1968 aboard a plane that was also carrying Carlos Fuentes. The two authors had come to demonstrate their support for their fellow authors in Czechoslovakia and to analyze the historic events that had transpired over the past year, specifically how the aspirations of Alexander Dubcek’s Prague Spring had dissipated into the endless autumn of the Soviet patriarch.
Fuentes referred to Kundera as “the second Czech K” in 1968, when Kundera’s reputation as a poet, dramatist, essayist, and intellectual was developing. This moment when socialism with a human face met the “threatening fists” of power was decisive, providing not only the setting for his most well-known work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982), but also the governing theme of his oeuvre: how to be a novelist in an age when “political demagoguery has managed to’sentimentalize’ the masses.” His first novel, The Joke, had finally been published the year before, gaining
