Before he was a famous author, did Kundera inform on Western spy?

By RACHEL DONADIO, New York Times

Last update: October 13, 2008 - 8:59 PM

In a revelation that could tarnish the legacy of one of the best-known Eastern European writers, a Czech research institute published a report on Monday indicating that the young Milan Kundera may have informed on a Western spy.

According to the state-backed Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, in 1950, long before he became famous for such darkly comic novels as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "The Joke," Kundera, who was then 21, told the local police about a guest in a student dormitory where he lived.

The police arrested the man, Miroslav Dvoracek, who had defected to Germany in 1948 and had been recruited by U.S.-backed anti-communists as a spy against the Czech regime. Dvoracek was sentenced to 22 years in prison and served 14 years, including hard labor in a uranium mine.

The allegations could diminish Kundera's moral stature as a spokesman, however enigmatic, against totalitarianism's corrosion of daily human life. In 1985, he said, "Without secrecy, nothing is possible -- not love, not friendship." Kundera, who lives in virtual seclusion in France, vehemently denied the account. "I object in the strongest manner to these accusations, which are pure lies," he said in a statement released by his French publisher, Gallimard.

In a rare interview Monday, he told the CTK news agency he had learned about the revelations from news reports and he accused the media of committing "the assassination of an author."

The story is the most dramatic recent episode in Eastern Europe's fitful reckoning with its Communist past and the revelations, if true, add further complexity to Kundera's life and elliptical writing, always been anti-totalitarian if pro-communist.

In the CTK interview, Kundera said: "My memory has not tricked me. I did not work for the secret police."

Yet the revelations do not link him to the secret police. According to the report, Dvoracek visited a woman and left a suitcase with her. She told her boyfriend, who told Kundera, and Kundera went to the police. Police arrested Dvoracek, who had a false identity document, when he came to collect the suitcase.

The institute, widely viewed as credible, was created by the government to collect and publish Communist-era files.

Dvoracek suffered a stroke in June and can no longer speak, his wife, Marketa Dvoracek Novak, said from the couple's home in Sweden. She said her husband had seen a copy of the police report in June, and "He just waved his hand. After a whole life, it doesn't matter."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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