It has been a long road back: the author Milan Kundera, perhaps the most famous living Czech, recently had his citizenship restored to him after 40 years. It had been revoked following his opposition to the communist regime, which he fled in 1975. Two years later, he took on French citizenship.
From Paris, in 1984, Kundera expressed a feeling of ambiguity about the very idea of home: “I wonder if our notion of home isn’t, in the end, an illusion, a myth. I wonder if we are not victims of that myth.” He questioned whether he was meant to believe that his “real” life was back in Czechoslovakia, or the one he was now living, in France: “I chose France.”
