PARIS — Milan Kundera, whose dissident writings in communist Czechoslovakia transformed him into an exiled satirist of totalitarianism, has died in Paris. He was 94.

       The renowned author died Tuesday afternoon, his long-standing publishing house Gallimard said in a one-sentence statement on Wednesday. It confirmed that he died in Paris but provided no further information.

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       The European Parliament held a moment of silence upon news of his passing.

       “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. 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.