Vera Kundera, wife and great love of the French-Czech writer Milan Kundera (1929-2023), passed away in Le Touquet (Pas-de-Calais) on Saturday 14 September. In this city that she held dear to her heart, the couple had long owned an apartment overlooking the beach, the same beach that we find in the novel. Identity (Gallimard, 1998), by Kundera – had come to rest, on the outskirts of Paris, to spend a few days in the hotel. It was in her room that she was found dead early in the morning. She was about to turn 89.
Knowing her, one would be inclined to think that her death dates back to the previous day, Friday the 13th, as she was very fond of signs. Superstitious, she spotted them, laughed and interpreted them, never really fooled, with her delightful accent and inimitable verve. She used to say that before she went. “the Czech”, He had consulted a clairvoyant who told him: “Little scorpion, you will not die in Bohemia.” These days, she sighs, more than ever nostalgic for her homeland: “I’m afraid you’re right.”
She was a wonderful, short, and always very elegant brunette. Born in Prague on 24 October 1935, Vera Hrabankova met Milan Kundera in 1967, during the joyous excitement of the Prague Spring. Slender, with very short hair, she resembles Jean Seberg and is six years younger than him (he had already been married for a very short time). In her youth, she was not happy. When she was still a child, her mother abandoned her, her father and her sisters. At the age of 12, she saw one of them, Eva, die before her eyes from meningitis.
His father was then wrongly accused of wanting to go to Australia to escape communist Czechoslovakia. “We had little money then, She told us in Milan Kundera. “What a fun idea to write about” (Gallimard, 2023). We rented out part of our apartment. A French woman who was renting with us claimed that my father wanted to flee clandestinely. She went to the police and they arrested my father. » For her it remained an incurable trauma and was inexhaustible with this beloved father who had taught her to read at the age of 6 and had introduced her to poetry.
Forced into exile
While he languishes in prison, Vera is left alone. At 16, penniless, she found work in a brewery, like Tereza in The unbearable lightness of being (Gallimard, 1984). Serving beer at the Bruntal station in Moravia: “Poetry kept me going.” She learns miles of verses by heart “so I don’t go crazy”He became fascinated by Robert Desnos and Maxime Gorky, perfected his diction, and in 1958 entered a local poetry competition, which he won.
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