V bouři hlasů, která se zvedla po zveřejnění článku Udání Milana Kundery v týdeníku Respekt, zněl jeden hlas zřetelněji než jiné. Byl to hlas české generace spisovatelů a intelektuálů s ročníkem narození těsně kolem roku 1930, do níž patřil také můj otec. V bouři hlasů, která se zvedla po zveřejnění článku Udání Milana Kundery v týdeníku Respekt, zněl jeden hlas zřetelněji než jiné. Byl to hlas české generace spisovatelů a intelektuálů s ročníkem narození těsně kolem roku 1930, do níž patřil také můj otec. Pojí ji společný osud a velký vliv na českou společnost, ve střední Evropě naprosto výjimečný. Zásadním […]

We were sitting on the terrace of a traditional literary institution in Berlin admiring the view of Lake Wannsee. Somewhere on the other shore was the building where seventy years ago top Nazis, in a matter of just few hours, hatched  out a plan for annihilating a whole nation. Did you serve in the army? an Israeli literature professor asked me.  No. None of my friends have done military service.   I fought in the war with Egypt.  Would you fight for your country?  I’ve never thought about it. Probably, yes. No. I don’t know….  I was dodging the answer. Maybe […]

I am grateful to Respekt  for insisting on being the one to air my views and not letting in any other media publish my answers to the questions relating to Milan Kundera’s  guilt or lack of guilt. I do have a lot to say on the subject, for Zdeněk Rotrekl and I are the only two surviving authors of those who served time under the communists. It is if the two of us who have been at odds with this ideology all our lives, were now the only ones who can determine what took place fifty-eight years ago. But what this is really […]

I remember those days too. I remember their atmosphere. It is not easy to explain. Looking back, I find it hard to understand myself and sometimes my own past actions surprise me and make me blush. For example, how could I have used the term socialist literature even though I must have known that it’’s nonsense and that no such thing as a socialist or capitalist literature could possibly exist? How could I have said things in public that I did not believe in private? I happened to see the new Czech film Tobruk yesterday. And for the hundredth time,  […]

Kundera’’s misdeed of half a century ago that cruelly marred the lives of several people will have an impact on the interpretation of his oeuvre That record of an act of denunciation contained in a police report lay hidden for over fifty years in heaps of files. Found by chance, it has enabled us to uncover a story dating back to 1950, in which the destinies of two young people of the same generation crossed just once. One of them went to jail for many years while the other went on to become a world-famous author. In 1949 Miroslav Dvořáček […]

Milan Kundera has always carefully covered his tracks. He has given no interviews for the past quarter of a century. He visits his native country only incognito and stays in hotels under assumed names. He has sworn his Czech friends to silence, so not even they are willing to speak to journalists about who Milan Kundera is and was. A murky and convoluted story has now accidentally surfaced from the past of the best known Czech writer. It indicates that there may be other reasons for his reclusiveness than we previously imagined. The fourteenth of March 1950. Two years have […]