Urns containing the ashes of Brno-born writer Milan Kundera and his wife Vera were placed in the last remaining grave in the Circle of Honour at Brno’s Central Cemetery yesterday, in the presence of family members, friends, and representatives of the French Embassy and the City of Brno. Kundera died in Paris in 2023 aged 94, and his wife Vera died in September 2024, at the age of 89.
The urns containing the couple’s remains were returned to Brno from Paris last January, and have been stored at the Moravian Library in Brno since then.
The grave features a headstone designed by Austrian architect Johannes Paar, which gives the impression of levitation. It was selected last year through an architecture competition, as a design whose simple and sober style reflects Kundera’s unornamented authorial style.
French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron also sent a wreath to the burial ceremony, via the French ambassador to the Czech Republic.
“It is a great honour for Brno to enable Milan Kundera to fulfil his last wish – to rest in his hometown and thus symbolically bring his life full circle. When I received his request, I felt both moved and proud,” said Brno Mayor Marketa Vankova (ODS).
She added that Kundera was her favourite author when she was at secondary school. “I consider him Brno’s greatest writer of international renown,” she said.
Kundera, born in Brno in 1929, was one of the most prominent Czech authors of the past century. He entered the literary world as a poet and playwright, but eventually became internationally known as a prose writer and essayist. His most famous works include the novels ‘The Joke’ (1967), ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ (1984) and ‘Immortality’ (1990). Kundera’s texts have been published in 54 languages in more than 3,000 editions.
He was one of the leading figures of political reform efforts of the 1960s, and also among those who were quickly banned from publishing in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968. After emigrating to France in 1975, he became one of the major authors of the Gallimard publishing house in Paris, and published his works in Czech with the Toronto publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers, run by the Škvoreckýs, and after November 1989 at the Brno publishing house Atlantis.
After he published the novel ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ (1978), which referred to the Communist leader Gustav Husak as the “president of forgetting”, Kundera was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979. He was granted French citizenship two years later, and his Czech citizenship was only restored in 2019. Amid this turbulent relationship with his home country, he decided to write his later works in French, from the 1980s onwards.
The author, who received many literary awards, visited Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic several times after the November 1989 collapse of the Communist regime, but continued to live with his wife in Paris.
Kundera rarely gave interviews or made public appearances, but he wished to be buried in his hometown, where he had spent his youth until graduating from a grammar school in 1948. He maintained a warm relationship with Brno throughout his life.
Thanks to his donation, the Milan Kundera Library was established as part of the Moravian Library in Brno. In addition to books and reviews of his work, the library also houses a part of his archival documents, including his correspondence.
