Word: kundera
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Almost 60 years ago, a Czech author may have reported a Western spy to the local authorities. The man, whose reputation is in shambles after a report released last week, is Milan Kundera who, according to a 1985 New York Times article, did for Eastern Europe “what Gabriel Garcia Marquez did for Latin America in the 1960’s and Alexander Solzhenitsyn did for Russia in the 1970?...
...consider(ed) a moral authority. But given the questionable evidence behind the suggestion, a lot of the reactive commentary has been amounted to a misguided barrage of condemnation and venom. It is a tragedy that so many have rushed to hasty conclusions and completely ignored the arguments suggesting that Kundera could well be guiltless...
...charge was made public by the Czech magazine Respekt and by the country's Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, a state-funded historical archive and research body. The magazine and the historical institute published a contemporary police document that names Kundera as the man who had informed police about the whereabouts of Miroslav Dvoracek, a former military pilot who had fled to what was then West Germany in 1949. Dvoracek signed up with a Western intelligence agency and returned undercover in 1950. Kundera, who had not spoken to the press for decades, broke that silence this week...
...While not commenting on the accuracy of the allegation against Kundera, Czech historians suggest that presented with the context, the choice to expose a a suspected enemy of the state would have been quite widespread among Czech students of the time. "It falls within the context of that era," says Ondrej Tuma, director of the Institute for Contemporary History . "The Czechoslovak society, and especially the young people, the intellectuals, were crazy about the Communist ideology. They were absolutely serious about it, including the propaganda and spy-mania. Thousands and thousands of young people would have acted the same...
...Still, the latest allegations against Kundera, which have spurred discussion across Europe, are a reminder of the moral ambiguities and compromises that haunt the generations that lived through World War II and the Cold War - exactly the stuff of the novels that made Kundera famous...