The Czech novelist who insisted the Prague Spring was a universal attempt to reconcile socialism with freedom
From 'The Czech Fate' in Listy, December 1968: "The Prague Spring moved Czechs and Slovaks to the center of world history… the nation had beheld its own greatness."
A Czech-French novelist. He joined the Communist Party in his youth and was expelled twice; his speech demanding an end to censorship at the 1967 Writers' Congress opened the intellectual prelude to the Prague Spring. After the Warsaw Pact invasion he published 'Český úděl' ('The Czech Fate'), arguing the Prague Spring held universal significance as an attempt to reconcile socialism and democracy, sparking a fierce polemic with Václav Havel, who called it self-centered megalomania. He went into exile in France in 1975, achieved world fame with The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), and died in Paris in 2023.
Career Timeline
- 1948Joins the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
- 1950Expelled from the party
- 1952–70Lectures on world literature at FAMU
- 1956Readmitted to the party
- 1967Speech at IV Writers' Congress; intellectual prelude to Prague Spring
- 1968.12Publishes 'Český úděl'; polemic with Havel
- 1970Expelled again; books banned
- 1975Exile in France
- 1984Publishes The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- 2019Czech citizenship restored