Czech Documents Purport to Show Author Milan Kundera Was an Informer
Posted on October 22, 2008
A document written by the Czech Communist police claims that author Milan Kundera informed on a purported Western spy in the 1950s, a state-sponsored institute said Monday Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has been accused of being an informer. Documents written by the Czech Communist police claim that Kundera informed on a Western spy in the 1950s.
The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes said a team of historians and researchers found a document written by the SNB, or Czech Communist police, that identified Kundera as the person who informed on a man who was later imprisoned for 14 years. The reclusive Kundera, the author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," lives in Paris. Phone calls to his publisher seeking comment were not immediately returned.Kundera is 79 and lives in France, where he writes; he is now a French citizen. He never talks to the media and hasn't commented so far on the allegations. It was a very grim time in Czech history.According to the file, published on the institute's Web site, Kundera in 1950 informed on Miroslav Dvoracek, who had been recruited in Germany by the Czech emigre intelligence network to work as a spy against the Communist regime. Dvoracek visited a woman in Prague and left a suitcase in her apartment. She told her boyfriend, who later told Kundera, and Kundera went to the police. Dvoracek was arrested when he came to collect the suitcase. He was later sentenced to 22 years in prison and eventually served 14, working in uranium mines.
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Kundera joined the Communist Party as a student, but was expelled after criticizing its totalitarian nature. After the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia crushed the liberal reforms of Alexander Dubcek, he left the country. The books Kundera wrote after his departure were banned from publication in his homeland until the Communist collapse in 1989, but his work was respected among dissidents.