“It was a great honour for me,” Babiš wrote at the time, describing Kundera, who is often cited as a contender for the Nobel prize in literature, as a legend of Czech, French and world literature. In November 2018, prime minister Andrej Babiš announced that he had offered to restore the author and his wife Vera’s citizenship after a three-hour meeting with them in their favourite Paris restaurant. The idea of restoring Kundera’s citizenship has been floated for years by authorities in the Czech Republic. His 1988 novel Immortality was his last novel written in Czech he has since written four more novels in French, the most recent 2014’s The Festival of Insignificance. His most famous works, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, were written in France and banned in his homeland until the late 80s. In 1979, his Czech citizenship was revoked and two years later he became a French citizen. He became a hate figure for the authorities and eventually fled to France in 1975. Kundera, author of internationally acclaimed fiction, was expelled for “anti-communist activities” from the Czechoslovakian party in 1950. “He was in a good mood, just took the document and said thank you,” he added. “This is a very important symbolic gesture, a symbolic return of the greatest Czech writer in the Czech Republic,” Drulák said, describing the presentation as “a very simple moment, but of great conviviality and human warmth”.
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