![]() ![]() It was she who fostered his friendship with Roth by serving as their linguistic go-between, and - according to a 1985 profile of the couple - it was she who handled the inevitable demands on a world-famous author. ![]() Kundera’s wife, Vera, was an essential companion to the man who eschewed technology - his translator, his social secretary, and ultimately his buffer against the outside world. Kundera ultimately won the State Award for Literature for it. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’’ which won him such acclaim and was made into a film in 1988, was not published in the Czech Republic until 2006, 17 years after the Velvet Revolution, although it was available in Czech since 1985 from a compatriot who founded a publishing house in exile in Canada. His works, eventually written in French, were belatedly translated into Czech. He returned to the Czech Republic rarely and incognito, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. To say his relationship with the land of his birth was complex would be an understatement. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution pushed Communists from power and Kundera’s nation was reborn as the Czech Republic, but by then he had made a new life - and a complete identity - in his apartment on Paris’ Left Bank. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life,” he told the author Philip Roth in a New York Times interview in 1980, the year before he became a naturalized French citizen. “If someone had told me as a boy: One day you will see your nation vanish from the world, I would have considered it nonsense, something I couldn’t possibly imagine. Weaving together themes of love and exile, politics and the deeply personal, Kundera’s novel won critical acclaim, earning him a wide readership among Westerners who embraced both his anti-Soviet subversion and the eroticism threaded through many of his works. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’’ Kundera’s best-known novel, opens wrenchingly with Soviet tanks rolling through Prague, the Czech capital that was the author’s home until he moved to France in 1975. “I dream of a world where writers are obliged by law to keep their identity secret and use pseudonyms,” he wrote in the 1986 essay, “The Art of the Novel.” Kundera used the sentence to respond to questions put to him in 2011 by Le Monde des Livres, agreeing to an “interview” via responses from his works. Kundera was a man of few words whose novels were translated into dozens of languages, but he abhorred the publicity that came with it, refusing interviews. Kundera held both French and Czech nationality, which he lost and then regained. MIKHAIL SEMENKOĪrrested at his home in Arlington, he is accused of using sophisticated communications equipment and making incriminating statements to an undercover agent posing as a Russian official.The European Parliament held a moment of silence upon news of his passing. She is the only one not charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering. The New York Post and other media have reported Chapman was often spotted at popular night clubs. ANNA CHAPMANĪlso known as Anya Kushchenko, the 28-year-old was arrested in Manhattan, where she ran a $2 million real estate business, her lawyer said in court last week. prosecutors have said Lazaro told them he was born in Siberia but his attorney has subsequently denied this. Both traveled to South America to meet Russian government representatives, court documents said. Lazaro has said he is a Peruvian citizen, born in Uruguay. ![]() The government has appealed that decision and a bail hearing is set for Friday. Pelaez, a columnist for the New York Spanish-language daily El Diario, is the only suspect granted release pending trial. The married couple were arrested at their home in Yonkers, New York. ![]()
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