Mysterious

Skeletons in Kundera’s Closet

The Czech author’s murky communist past.

Milan Kundera, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is a famous communist dissident, so it came as a bit of surprise when he was recently accused by the magazine Respekt of outing an American agent to Czech authorities in 1950. "I am totally astonished by something that I did not expect, about which I knew nothing only yesterday, and that did not happen. I did not know the man at all," the reclusive Kundera said in a statement to the Czech news agency CTK. But a Czech researcher claimed the story was extensively researched. “A murky and convoluted story has now accidentally surfaced,” he said. “It indicates there may be other reasons for his reclusiveness than we previously imagined."