Czechs debate charge against Kundera
By Dan Bilefsky
Saturday, October 18, 2008
PRAGUE: Life appears to be imitating art in a drama convulsing the Czech Republic: the charge that when he was a 21-year-old student, Milan Kundera, now one of eastern Europe's most celebrated writers, denounced a Western intelligence agent to Czechoslovakia's communist police.
The denunciation resulted in a 22-year jail sentence for the agent, Miroslav Dvoracek, including hard labor in a uranium mine.
In Kundera's first novel, "The Joke," a mordantly comic satire of Stalinist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, the protagonist, Ludvik Jahn, a staunch communist, is expelled from the party and forced out of his university after being denounced by his comrade and friend Pavel. For the unlikely crime of possessing a sense of humor, Ludvik is sent to work in the mines as a laborer.
Few here have failed to notice the eerie parallels in a modern-day morality tale suffused with Kundera's favorite themes of denunciation and betrayal.
The accusation - published Monday in the Czech political weekly Respekt - has spurred a national soul-searching and threatens, however unfairly, to tarnish the reputation of a writer who has long sought to remain aloof from both his art and the country of his birth.
"Kundera has always tried to hide and to distance himself from the characters in his work, but now he has become a character out of one of his own books - and he is being manipulated by fate," said Petr Tresnak, one of the authors of the Respekt article.
When the article appeared, Kundera, a famous recluse who has lived in France since 1975 and is a French citizen, strongly denied the allegations, denouncing the story as the "assassination of an author."
But the allegations have nevertheless unleashed a torrent of schadenfreude against Kundera, a former communist turned outspoken critic of the regime, in a country that has long regarded him with ambivalence.
Since emigrating to France after being expelled from the Communist Party and having his work banned, he has resisted publishing novels in Czech. On rare visits, his friends say, he travels anonymously. He had not given an interview in nearly a quarter century - until this week.
"The revelation that Kundera denounced someone is seen by Czechs as a vindication of their belief that he has been betraying them for years," said Peter Bilek, a professor of comparative literature at Charles University in Prague. "His fellow dissident writers have long tried to dismiss him as someone who writes intellectual pornography for mediocre Western readers."
Bilek said that many in the dissident community here considered Kundera's international hit, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," a mocking betrayal because of its depiction of a dissident surgeon who embraces his new life as a lecherous window cleaner. The novel, officially published here in Czech only a few years ago - more than 25 years after it first appeared in France - sold a mere 10,000 copies.
The allegation that Kundera was an informer has also tapped into a national obsession with collaboration during 41 years of Communist rule. Today, the Czech Republic, a member of NATO and the European Union, is among the former Soviet bloc's great economic success stories. Yet many here do not want to revisit a difficult past.
In an illustration of the schizophrenia conjured across eastern Europe by the examination of relations with the widely despised Communists, for all the excoriation of Kundera, many academics and critics have also heaped scorn on the Respekt article.
They have challenged the veracity of the police report purporting to reveal him as an informer and accused the authors, who worked closely with the government-backed Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, of exaggerating the evidence.
Jiri Pehe, a prominent Czech sociologist and director of New York University's branch in Prague, said the accusations had polarized Czech society into two camps: those who saw Kundera as a moral scapegoat for their own collaboration with the Communists and those who viewed the article as an act of Czech treachery motivated by petty jealousy about Kundera's success.
He said Czechs had a long history of debunking heroes, including former President Vaclav Havel, who led the Velvet Revolution that overthrew communism in 1989, but is still resented by many of his countrymen.
Pehe said the article and ensuing debate were symptomatic of a larger trend to punish those who collaborated with communism in the erroneous belief that this was always healthy for democracy. Rather than creating a historical reckoning, he said, the rush to judgment sometimes threatened to destroy the innocent.
The Czechs were among the first to introduce a law, in 1991, banning from public life those listed as agents or informants in secret police reports. The law, Pehe contended, had ensnared tens of thousands of people who may have been unwilling collaborators.
"The reality is that the totalitarian regime was constructed in such a way that 99 percent of people cooperated in one way or another, and the Kundera case helps them to feel morally absolved, like they are the good guys and he was one of the baddies," Pehe said.
Many historians have found the evidence wanting. The policeman mentioned in the secret police report identifying Kundera is dead, while Kundera's signature is nowhere on the document.
But the institute, established this year by the center-right Czech government to collect and publish Communist-era files, stood by the report.
"No reasonable doubts have been raised about the accuracy or authenticity of the documents," said Vojtech Ripka, the head of the institute's documentation department. "We are not engaged in witch hunts and we are not going after public figures, and that includes Kundera, whose file was discovered by accident."
Kundera, he emphasized, had been asked to comment and had not answered.
Ripka said the revelation came to light when Adam Hradilek, who works for the institute, stumbled on the Kundera file while researching the story of Iva Militka, an elderly relative of Hradilek's, who had long blamed herself for the imprisonment of Dvoracek.
According to the police file published on the institute's Web site, on March 14, 1950, Kundera informed the police of Dvoracek's presence in Prague. Dvoracek had deserted from the Czechoslovak Army and fled after the 1948 Communist coup to Germany, where he was recruited by an American intelligence network.
Ripka said Hradilek's research showed that Dvoracek had visited an old school friend, Militka, and left a suitcase in her apartment. She told her boyfriend and future husband, Miroslav Dlask, who in turn told Kundera.
Dvoracek was arrested when he came to collect the suitcase. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison and eventually served 14, working in uranium mines.
Ripka said Hradilek had tried to contact Dvoracek, who is now living in Sweden, but he refused to comment. Dvoracek has since suffered a stroke and continues to believe that Militka betrayed him, Ripka said.
The mystery became even murkier this week when Zdenek Pesat, a literary historian and former member of the Communist Party, told the Czech news agency CTK that Dlask had told him years before that he had betrayed Dvoracek to the secret police, most likely because he wanted to prevent his girlfriend from being punished.
Pesat said Kundera's name had not been mentioned. He explained that he felt compelled to come forward after Kundera was implicated.
Tresnak, a writer of the Respekt article, insisted that Kundera's alleged misdeed, if true, was bereft of moral ambivalence because he informed on someone during the 1950s, a period of Stalinist repression when the communists had imprisoned tens of thousands of opponents without trial, confiscated private property and stifled free speech.
Yet Tresnak, 32, whose father is a well-known dissident, said the editors at Respekt had engaged in a pained debate about whether to publish the cover story. In the end, he said, the magazine decided to proceed to show the heroism of Dvoracek, who risked his life to fight communism, and to exonerate Militka, haunted by the guilt that she was responsible for the persecution of her childhood friend.
"This story is not just about Kundera, it is about the history of the Czech Republic," Tresnak said. "People in this country are overwhelmed and disgusted by the number of people who collaborated with the regime - and this is a very concrete example of what happened."
He added that he had been shocked by Kundera's vociferous response. "I have no serious doubts about Kundera's guilt. But his reaction was so strong and I have asked myself, 'Did we finger an innocent man?"' he said.
"There is a little possibility he is not guilty - though I would not put my life on it - but his attitude of hiding and denial risks stifling a debate that this country needs to have."
Ivo Pondelicek, a leading sexologist and friend of Kundera for 50 years, said the Kundera he knows could not have denounced someone. He said that in the 1950s, Kundera was an ideological communist, but not a fanatic. The article, he said, reflected resentment of Kundera's charisma and success.
"Milan was always introspective - he was not a fanatical communist - and I completely exclude that he could have denounced someone in this way. It just does not match his pattern of behavior. People are projecting his work onto him, but I never found him to be someone consumed by guilt or remorse."
Some weeks ago, Pondelicek said, Kundera left a message on his answering machine, saying "They are pigs."
At the time, he thought Kundera was referring to critical reviews of one of his plays being staged in Prague. In retrospect, he believes Kundera may have realized that his well-guarded anonymity was about to disappear.
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