No..........!

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: October 13, 2008

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 told the police about a supposed spy.

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, in Paris in 1975.

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

The police quickly arrested the man, Miroslav Dvoracek, who had defected to Germany in 1948 and was said to have been recruited by United States-backed anti-Communists as a spy against the Czech government. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Mr. Dvoracek narrowly escaped the death penalty, a common punishment for espionage, and eventually served a 14-year sentence, including hard labor in a uranium mine.

The allegations could diminish Mr. Kundera’s moral stature as a spokesman, however enigmatic, against totalitarianism’s corrosion of daily life.

The reclusive Mr. Kundera 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 on Monday with the Czech CTK news agency, Mr. Kundera also accused the news 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, an era that Czechs, with their soft Velvet Revolution against the Soviet system, have been loath to explore deeply.

The report about Mr. Kundera also recalls the case of the German writer Günter Grass, a Nobel laureate, who disclosed in 2006 that he had been a volunteer in the Waffen-SS as a teenager during World War II.

The report also speaks to Mr. Kundera’s vexed relationship with his former homeland. He was a staunch member of the Communist Party until the Soviet invasion in 1968, when he was fired from his teaching post and his work was banned. Expelled from the party in 1970, he emigrated to France in 1975 and has lived there ever since, taking French citizenship. He is respected but not loved in the Czech Republic, where many of his recent books, written in French, have not been translated.

In the interview with the Czech news agency, Mr. Kundera said: “My memory has not tricked me. I did not work for the secret police.”

Yet the institute’s claims do not link him to the secret police. Instead, with its combination of specificity and mystery, a local police report from the time reads like something out of Mr. Kundera’s writing.

Dated March 14, 1950, during the Stalinist terror, it states that “Milan Kundera, student, born on 1 April 1929 in Brno, resident at the Prague VII student hall of residence,” went to the local police at 4 p.m. and made a statement about Iva Militka, another student from the residence.

According to the report, Mr. Kundera learned that Ms. Militka had told a fellow student that she met Mr. Dvoracek, who said he had deserted Czech military service and fled to Germany. He asked her to hold a briefcase “for safekeeping.” Informed by Mr. Kundera about the briefcase, police officers waited for Mr. Dvoracek to return, found that he had a false identity document and arrested him.

The suitcase contained “two hats, two pairs of gloves, two pairs of sunglasses and a tube of cream.”

The claims emerged only now, more than 50 years after the arrest, when a researcher for the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes stumbled onto the police report “by accident” earlier this year, said Vojtech Ripka, the director of the institute’s documentation unit. The institute, which opened in February, was created by the government to research the country’s Communist and Nazi past.

The researcher, Adam Hradilek, was investigating cases like that of Mr. Dvoracek’s: Czechs who fled to Germany after the Communist invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1948 and returned to spy on the Prague government.

Mr. Hradilek and a co-author, Peter Tresnak, published their findings on Monday in Respekt, a Czech political weekly magazine. Martin Simecka, the editor in chief of Respekt, said he had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the police report. Mr. Simecka said that if the Czech authorities had known about the document in the 1970s, they might have used it against Mr. Kundera.

Walter Gibbs contributed reporting