Milan Kundera, the critically-acclaimed author of the 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, died at his Paris home on July 11, a spokesperson from his French publisher, Gallimard, confirmed. He was 94.

Born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Kundera's novels are known for their light, philosophical touch and acerbic views about the relationships between men and women, often set against the backdrop of the period of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, between the years 1948 and 1989.

Kundera gained acclaim among readers abroad for the insights he offered into the machinations of Communism. His debut novel The Joke, published in 1967, was a satire about a Czechoslovakian student whose life is derailed after he makes fun of Communist slogans, PW called its publication "a key literary event of the Prague Spring," a short-lived period of liberalization in the country. The following year, Russia invaded, reasserting control, and Kundera's works—which also included more than a decade's worth of poetry collections, essays, and plays—were banned.

He was placed under state surveillance, but remained free from prison largely due to his public profile and popularity abroad. Philip Roth was an early champion of Kundera's work in the U.S. and helped publish the 1974 English translation of his 1969 story collection Laughable Loves.

In 1975, Kundera went into exile in France, where he would write his two most acclaimed and enduring works: the 1980 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published by Knopf, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published by Harper & Row. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979 (though reinstated in 2019) and he became a French citizen in 1981.

"Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and, unfortunately, restrict me," he told the Paris Review in 1985. "Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or to write."

The Unbearable Lightness of Being was an instant hit in the U.S. and internationally, and was reprinted into dozens of languages. The story follows a dissident surgeon and his wife and a lover from Prague to Geneva and back again. In 1988 it was adapted into a well-received film adaptation starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche. Kundera found himself somewhat overwhelmed by the novel's reception, telling the Paris Review, "I've had an overdose of myself!"

Kundera was private and often reclusive, giving few interviews and refusing to be on camera. In one of his few public statements, a June 2012 speech to the French National Library, Kundera expressed fears for the future of literature.

"It seems to me that time, which continues its march pitilessly, is beginning to endanger books," he said. "It’s because of this anguish that, for several years now, I have in all my contracts a clause stipulating that they must be published only in the traditional form of a book, that they be read only on paper and not on a screen.” For a time, Kundera did not allow digital editions of his work, though today a Kindle version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is available.

None of his books following The Unbearable Lightness of Being found the same level of commercial success, though he was a critical favorite. In 1985 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize and the 2000 Herder Prize, among others and he was frequently cited as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize.

Kundera's final novel, The Festival of Insignificance, was published in 2015. PW called it "a fitting bookend to Kundera’s long career intersecting the absurd and the moral." In 2021, Kundera donated his archives and private library to the public library in Brno.

"My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. Nor is this purely an artistic ambition," Kundera told the Paris Review. "The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas—those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History—and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being."