Vera Hrabankova lived a life fully and without regrets. When her husband died, she said: “His work belongs to literature, his body belongs to me”
A romantic story that seems to have come out of the pages of a novel has reached its inevitable conclusion. In Paris, the same place where her husband Milan Kundera passed away last July 11, Vera Hrabankovapassed away at the age of 89.
The news was announced in an official statement by the Czech Ambassador to France, Michal Fleischmann. The statement emphasizes the importance of Véra in keeping her husband’s memory alive:
“Mrs. Věra Kunderová kept the memory of the famous French-Czech writer alive until the last moment. During the last years of his life, she was his unwavering support and his loving nurse.”
A discreet but essential role, lived in the shadow of one of the most influential figures in contemporary literature. Véra, never silent, with great strength of spirit and intellectual ability, fueled Kundera’s genius and allowed him to continue writing until his final years.
Born in Bruntál into a modest family, she met Kundera in the 1960s. At the time she was a young emerging television presenter, after the poet Maxim Gorky he had noticed her on a local radio station. Their love story, marked by a deep complicity, defied conventions and the adversities of the time. They married secretly in 1967, an event that Véra, with her usual sense of humor, vaguely remembered, almost downplaying it:
“This marriage has no importance. We did it just so we could sleep in the same room.”
Their married life has gone through the storms of history, such as the “Prague Spring” of 1968. Véra was fired from Czechoslovak television for her critical positions towards the communist regime. The couple later emigrated to Paris, where they would live for the rest of their lives. Véra and Milan built a refuge, a sort of voluntary exile that would never really distance them from their Czech roots. Paris became their space of creative freedom, where Kundera continued to write the novels that made him famous throughout the world, such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being And The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Their union was as much professional as personal, an alchemy that is also reflected in their last shared wish: the return to BrnoKundera’s hometown. Fleischmann announced that their urns will be transferred there, to rest together in the land that never abandoned them. Here is the Milan Kundera Librarya project of which Véra has been a tireless promoter, a space that collects not only the writer’s works but also his spirit.
Véra Hrabankova, as told by the French journalist Ariane Chemin in the book Codename: Elitar I. In the footsteps of Milan Kunderalived a life that could have inspired one of her husband’s novels. From a waitress at a train station to a television star, to end up as a champion of literature. In Chemin’s book, not only Milan’s story is retraced, but also that of Véra, of their passion, of their battles.
With the passing of Véra Hrabankova, we lose a woman who, with her intelligence and dedication, was able to accompany and inspire one of the greatest writers of our time. As Fleischmann emphasized in his statement, the Czech Republic loses the one who preserved the memory and work of Milan Kundera until her last breath.
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