Czechs debate charge against Kundera
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.
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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.