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The writer Milan Kundera, of Czech origin, is officially Czech about forty years after having fled his native country. He received a certificate of nationality in Paris from the Czech Ambassador who has just confirmed this information. An important news that did not go unnoticed in the birthplace of the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
With our correspondent in Prague, Alexis Rosenzweig
This is not a joke: Milan Kundera is officially, since 28 November, a national of the Czech Republic, a country he did not see born since he left a state called the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. in 1975, during the darkest hours of normalization, after the crash of the Prague Spring.
The reactions are generally positive in the Czech press at the beginning of the week, because for many it is simply and very symbolically to repair the wrong done by the communist regime, which has deprived of its nationality there is exactly 40 years old, after the publication of the Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
But the 90-year-old exile has a complicated relationship with his native country, as his wife recently explained in a long interview for the literary magazine Host , like many who left and did not live. the same story as those who stayed.
His new Czech passport will not make him a Czech writer, especially because he refuses to translate his written works into French in his mother tongue. He was naturalized French in 1981.
For the Czechs, Kundera is today this world celebrity, but distant, who accepted the proposal of citizenship made by Andrej Babis, the controversial Czech Prime Minister, whose communist past is still the subject of speculation, just like that of the author, a time accused of having been an informer .