Prague (AFP)
Novelist Milan Kundera was granted Czech citizenship 40 years after he was stripped of his Czechoslovak nationality by the communist regime, the Czech Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
Milan Kundera and his wife Vera were given documents at their home by the Czech ambassador to Paris, Petr Drulak, on November 28, told AFP Zuzana Stichova, spokeswoman for the ministry.
"There was no ceremony, just a personal delivery," she said, adding that according to the Czech Foreign Ministry, Kundera's books "have made the Czech Republic famous in the world. integer ".
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis proposed citizenship to Mr Kundera and his wife during his visit to Paris last year.
"They were really happy, they know it's not a life-changing moment, but they really felt the symbolic character of it, and it was very important to them," Drulak said. in the daily Pravo.
Mr Kundera, 90, left his country of origin for France in 1975.
The Czechoslovak authorities withdrew his citizenship following the publication of the "Book of Laughter and Forgetting" in 1979, when he described the then Czechoslovak President Gustav Husak as "President of Oblivion. ".
In 1981, Mr. Kundera became French.
Czechoslovakia split in 1993 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, four years after the collapse of the communist regime.
The writer rarely goes to the Czech Republic. In 2008, a Czech magazine exhumed a "document" of the Prague Communist police of 1950 suggesting that the writer denounced one of his fellow citizens during the dark Stalinist period. Injured by these accusations, Milan Kundera called them "pure lie".
Milan Kundera is the author of "The Joke" (1967), "Loveable Loves" (1969), "Life Is Elsewhere" (1969), "Waltz Farewell" (1972), "The Unbearable Lightness of being "(1984).
© 2019 AFP