Milan Kundera's Story

Milan Kundera, the most important living Czech writer, was born in 1929 in Brno. He is best known for his novels The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. In 1948, Kundera joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but he became disillusioned with the party after visiting the Soviet Union in 1954, and he became a prominent Czech dissident and one of the Party’s greatest critics. He opposed the 1968 Soviet Invasion and was ultimately forced to relocate to France. Kundera has lived there for the past thirty-three years, becoming a naturalized French citizen in 1981. Since 1993, he has written primarily in French, though his works have been translated into many languages.

On October 13, 2008, the Prague-based political weekly magazine Respekt published an article entitled “Milan Kundera’s denunciation.” Within this article, Respekt noted that “there may be other reasons for [Kundera’s] reclusiveness than we previously imagined.” According to the magazine, an investigation by the Czech Institute for Studies of Totalitarian Regimes unearthed a 1950 police station report claiming that Kundera denounced young Czech Miroslav Dvořáček to the secret police.

As the alleged police report discloses, a young woman, Iva Militká, was visited by an old acquaintance, Miroslav Dvořáček, who requested to leave a case in her room. She offered to let him stay in her room for a time, and mentioned the encounter to a fellow student and friend, Miroslav Dlask. Dlask purportedly mentioned this information to Milan Kundera, who informed the police. As the report states,  “Today at around 1600 hours a student, Milan Kundera... presented himself at this department and reported that a student, Iva Militká, resident at that residence, had told a student by the name of Dlask, also of that residence, that she had met a certain acquaintance of hers, Miroslav Dvořáček, at Klárov in Prague the same day. The said Dvořáček apparently left one case in her care, saying he would come to fetch it in the afternoon. (…) Dvořáček had apparently deserted from military service and since the spring of the previous year had possibly been in Germany, where he had gone illegally.”

Respekt quotes this police report, contending that Kundera reported on the young pilot, disclosing that he had fled duty in Czechoslovakia before returning to the country as a Western spy. Dvořáček was convicted of desertion, espionage, and high treason, and he served fourteen years in prisons and labor camps. As Respekt questioned, “Is this covering of his tracks the natural need of a world-famous writer, who always was a reclusive introvert, or does it conceal an effort to hide an inconvenient past?“

However, since the publication of the article, Mr. Kundera has broken his isolation from interviews and the press to address what he calls an “assassination of an author.” As Respekt itself notes, Dvořáček was an utter stranger to Kundera, connected only by a chain of acquaintances. Kundera told the Czech News Agency, “I am completely taken aback by this story, of which I know nothing and which never happened. I never knew the person involved. It is a lie.” He continued, “It is not true, the only mystery that I cannot explain is how my name got there.”

Many mistrust any documents produced by the secret police under the Communist regime and question the apparent disappearance of the document for so many years; Kundera was heavily monitored by the Czechoslovak secret police as a Communist critic, but the report was never used to discredit him. In fact, Marketa Dvořáček-Novak, wife of Miroslav Dvořáček (who has since suffered a stroke and did not comment), told France 24 in an interview that she doubted the “so-called evidence” against Kundera, who had never met her husband.

Kundera requested an apology from the magazine, but it has been refused; Tomas Sidlo, director general of Respekt Publishing, asserted “Milan Kundera's rights have not been affected in any improper way.” Following the article’s publication, many prominent literary colleagues flocked to Kundera’s defense, including Nadine Gordimer, Philip Roth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, and many others. They denounced the allegations against Kundera, stating “We wish to express our indignation at this orchestrated campaign of calumny, and to state our solidarity with Milan Kundera.” As the author maintains, “My memory has not tricked me. I did not work for the secret police.”