Write what you know, and Milan Kundera did just that.
The author who won a Nobel Prize made his name as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book that shredded the false promises of communism. The myth of eternal return, a life which disappears is like a shadow...like the life of the man Mr. Kundera denounced as a Western spy?
Jiri Dedecek of the Czech Pen Club is disappointed at the news. He sees now that Milan Kundera penned his guilt into his work, with a repeated theme of denunciation. It was a subject that the author knew well, from experience.
The Czech Republic has been examining secret police archives, and they discovered a document which stated quite simply that Milan Kundera made a report to the authorities back in 1950.
It began innocently enough. Don't come around to my flat, said his friend Iva Militka. She was hosting an old comrade, a man who had fled Czechoslovakia a year earlier, gone to the west, trained as a spy, and returned to gather intelligence for the U.S. Communism had proved to be a misery, oppressive misery and a complete lie. The system had to change. Czechoslovakia had to be free.
Mr. Kundera promptly went to the authorities and turned in Miroslav Dvoracek. Thanks for the tip, said the secret police, and they staked out Ms. Militka's flat and arrested Mr. Dvoracek.
Tried for desertion, espionage and treason, Mr. Dvoracek was spared the death penalty but served 22 years in a uranium mine at hard labor. Ms. Militka was left to wonder if she had done or said something to tip off the police, which in turn destroyed a life.
It wasn't her at all. It was Milan Kundera, who finally figured out that Communism was a cod after the Prague Spring of 1968. He fled to Paris, to write, to eventually win a Nobel Prize for his fiction.
The Swedish Academy is on a roll. They've got Milan Kundera and Gunter Grass on their roster of literary glory. The rest of the world puts them in a different category altogether, the category that is shunned by decent people.
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