Eleven prominent authors came together recently in signing a statement defending Milan Kundera against recent allegations that the Czech novelist was a police informant for the Communist regime in his youth. Signatories of the statement, released yesterday by Gallimard, Kundera's French publisher, include Nobel laureates Gabriel García Marquez, Orhan Pamuk, J. M. Coetzee, and Nadine Gordimer, along with Jean Daniel, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Pierre Mertens, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, and Jorge Semprun.
"A defamation campaign is under way, aimed at tarnishing the reputation of Milan Kundera," the authors wrote in the letter of support. "This is no less than an attempt to tarnish the honour of one of our great living writers on grounds that are suspicious to say the least."
Kundera, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia to France in 1975 and became a French citizen in 1981, has himself denied the allegations, put forth last month by a Czech research group, that he informed on Miroslav Dvoracek, a pilot who defected from the Czech army to become a spy for Western intelligence, prompting Dvoracek's arrest in Prague in 1950. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes published the accusation in a report that also claimed that Kundera's supposed tip led to the arrest of several other individuals who helped Dvoracek enter Czechoslovakia.
"My memory has not tricked me. I did not work for the secret police," Kundera said last month, adding that the media and the institute were committing "an attack on an author," the Agence France-Presse reported. "I object in the strongest manner to these accusations, which are pure lies."
