Milan Kundera under a cloud
The Czech novelist has been accused of betraying a spy to the communist regime
Anne Penketh

Milan Kundera, who bitterly satirised the communist system in his novels The Joke and Life is Elsewhere, has been accused of helping the communist state

IN a sensational plot line that could have come straight from the pages of one of his own novels, the acclaimed Czech-born writer Milan Kundera has been accused of denouncing a Western spy to the Communist secret police when he was a student.

The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being was identified by a Czech state institute as having betrayed a young man in 1950 at the height of the Communist show trials.

Kundera, one of Czechos-lovakia’s best-known writers, who moved to France in 1975 as a dissident, bitterly satirised the Communist system in novels such as The Joke and Life is Elsewhere.

The reclusive Kundera, now 79, categorically denied the accusation and accused the institute and media of "the assassination of an author". He said: "I am totally astonished by something that I did not expect, about which I knew nothing, and that did not happen. I did not know the man at all."

The spy at the centre of the allegation was Miroslav Dvoracek, a young pilot who fled Czechoslovakia after the 1948 Communist takeover, was recruited in Germany by US counter-espionage agents and sent back to his homeland. According to the government-sponsored Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Dvoracek visited a woman in Prague and left a suitcase in her student dormitory. She told her boyfriend, who later told Kundera, and Kundera, it is claimed, went to the police.

Dvoracek was arrested when he came to collect the suitcase, and it was initially believed that his girlfriend had betrayed him. He was later sentenced to 22 years in prison for desertion, espionage and treason, although he served a total 14 years, mainly spent working in uranium mines as a political prisoner. The institute said a document written by the Czech secret police, and unearthed by a team of historians, identified Kundera as the person who informed on Dvoracek.

Although informers were tools of the totalitarian system, the charges against Kundera could seriously undermine his reputation in his native country as the scourge of Communism. The former Soviet bloc has been torn apart by the revelations of its Communist-era secret files, and Czechoslovakia was one of the first to publish the identities of informers, in 1991. Germany followed suit by releasing its East German Stasi documents in 1992.

In Poland, authorities have been accused of using the files in order to settle political scores, with the former president Lech Walesa accused of being an informer by the current President, Lech Kaczynski, and his twin brother, and former Prime Minister, Jaroslaw.

In the Czech Republic, the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, which is widely viewed as credible, has been tasked with collecting and publishing the Communist-era files. Among its goals it mentions the "research and non-partisan evaluation of the time of oppression and the period of Communist totalitarian power, research of antidemocratic and criminal activities of state structure, namely its security forces, and the criminal activities of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and other organisations based on its ideology."

Like most Czechs of his age, Kundera joined the Communist Party as a student, but was expelled after criticising its totalitarian nature. He wrote about his experience in his first novel The Joke, in which a playful anti-Communist message on a postcard leads to a tragedy.

He went on to examine the difficulties of personal relationships, often set against a political background, in subsequent works, which included The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That novel was written in Paris but set against the background of the Prague Spring of 1968 and the liberal reforms of Alexander Dubcek, crushed by Soviet tanks. The book contributed to the writer’s international reputation after it was turned into a film, although Kundera repudiated the filmed version.

Kundera’s works were banned in Czechoslovakia until the Communist collapse, and he was granted French citizenship in 1981.

But some say that his best works are behind him now that his Communist muse is gone.

In later works, such as Immortality and Ignorance, he concentrates on the personal and the art of writing, rather than the political.
As for his alleged victim, Dvoracek is now aged 80 and living in Sweden in poor health after suffering a stroke. His wife, Marketa, told the AFP news agency that the couple was "not surprised" that Kundera’s name had surfaced in the Czech media reports. He is "a good writer but I am under no illusions about him as a human being," said Marketa. As for her husband, he "knew he was informed on, so who did it makes no difference to him now".

By arrangement with The Independent

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