The True Believer

The New York Times reports that someone from something called the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes discovered that in 1950 Milan Kundera, then twenty-one, informed the police about the location of a defector, Miroslav Dvoracek. Kundera went on to become an internationally famous writer, while Dvoracek was sent to break rocks in a uranium mine.

Kundera denies the allegation, calling it the "assassination of an author." Speaking through his wife, Dvoracek waved away the revelation, saying it doesn't matter any more who turned him in to the police.

Even after 58 years, the question does matter; otherwise, there wouldn't be an Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, which, by the way, sounds like a fictitious security apparatus outfit in a Kundera novel. It's impossible to tell right now if the claims are true. Totalitarian societies tend to be very good at documentation, but the documents themselves could be lies. But assuming that Kundera actually turned Dvoracek in to the police, writing the act off as an act of youthful indiscretion or naiveté seems insufficient.

Michael Kraus, a Czech faculty member at Middlebury College, argues that Kundera was "just simply doing his patriotic duty, as he saw it." In 1950 Kundera was "a true believer"--as if, under these circumstances, there could be any other kind. From our perspective in 2008, Kundera believed in a vast delusion--not the sort of thing one would think the author of The Joke would do. The discrepancy between a youthful communist fervency and the canny novelist we know now may cause the greatest damage to his reputation.

But before everyone jumps on Kundera for these unsubstantiated allegations, it's important to note that even if they're true, the lesson that that experience imparted almost certainly entered into his fiction. To refuse to read him now would only compound whatever crime Kundera might have committed. Furthermore, if the young Kundera couldn't distinguish between love of country and a political belief system, we're hardly any better at making that distinction today in the United States. A certain governor of Alaska who shall remain nameless is assiduously working to blur the line between the two.

Comments

[Mano]

I agree with all that you write here. In particular, I am in full agreement about the insightful statement where you claim the experience must certainly have left its mark on the fiction produced by MK in later years.

One thing is for sure: Milan Kundera the then citizen of the Czchoslovakian state in 1950 and the internationally famed writer of these past decades would do well to try to turn this episode into The novel of his writing career. Noone else is in a better position to attempt this.

[Richard Prouty]

Yes--and I would go so far as to say that the incident--if it occurred--can only be recreated as a novel. Prague was such a prismatic place at that time that a purely factual account is impossible.