The French-Czech author’s widow was discovered useless in Le Touquet on the morning of Saturday, September 14th. She had met Milan Kundera in 1967.
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Vera Kundera, spouse and nice love of French-Czech author Milan Kundera (1929-2023), died in Le Touquet (northeastern France) on Saturday, September 14. On this city, which was near her coronary heart – the couple owned an residence overlooking the seashore for a few years, the identical seashore that options in Kundera’s novel L’Identité (Identification, Gallimard, 1998) – she had spent a couple of days resting in a resort away from Paris. It was in her room that she was discovered lifeless within the early hours of the morning. She was about to show 89.
Understanding her, you would be forgiven for pondering that she died the day earlier than, on Friday the 13, such was her love affair with indicators. Superstitious, she would laughingly observe them down and interpret them, by no means actually fooled, along with her pleasant accent and inimitable verve. She typically recounted how, earlier than leaving “la Tchéco,” she had consulted a fortune-teller who had instructed her, “Little Scorpio, you will not die in Bohemia.” As of late, she stated, extra nostalgic than ever for her place of origin: “I am afraid he is proper.”
She was a wonderful brunette, slender and all the time elegant. Born in Prague on October 24, 1935, Vera Hrabankova met Milan Kundera in 1967, through the joyous effervescence of the “Prague Spring.” Slender, with very brief hair, she seemed like Jean Seberg and was six years youthful than her (who had already been married very briefly). In her youth, she was hardly comfortable. When she was nonetheless a toddler, her mom deserted her, her father and her sisters. On the age of 12, she watched considered one of them, Eva, die earlier than her very eyes of meningitis.
Then her father was unjustly accused of wanting to maneuver to Australia to flee Communist Czechoslovakia. “We did not have a lot cash then,” she tells us in Milan Kundera. Ecrire Quelle Drôle d’Idée (“Milan Kundera: What a humorous thought to put in writing!” Gallimard, 2023). “We rented a part of our residence. A French girl who was renting from us claimed that my father needed to flee illegally. She went to the police and so they arrested my father.” This remained an incurable trauma for her, and he or she couldn’t cease speaking about her beloved father who had taught her to learn on the age of 6 and launched her to poetry.
Pressured into exile
Whereas he wasted away in jail, Vera was left to her personal gadgets. At 16, penniless, she discovered a job in a brewery, like Tereza in L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’Etre (The Insufferable Lightness of Being, Gallimard, 1984). She served beer on the station in Bruntal, Moravia. “Poetry saved me going.” She memorized kilometers of verse “to maintain from going mad.” She developed a ardour for Robert Desnos and Maxim Gorky, perfected her diction, and in 1958, entered and gained a neighborhood poetry contest.
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