Historians at the Czech Republic’s Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes recently discovered a previously unknown element of The Unbearable Lightness of Being author’s life:  at the age of 20, while a member of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, Milan Kundera informed on a Czechoslovakian-born Western agent.  The man was then arrested, tortured and ended up spending 14 years working in a uranium mine prison camp.

Much like the criticism leveled against German author Günter Grass when he revealed that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS as a young man, Milan Kundera’s critics are focusing more upon his perceived hypocrisy than upon the supposed immorality of his actions.  Themes of betrayal and the struggle of memory against forgetting are, of course, continually recurring in Kundera’s work.  The author’s public statements in reaction to the uproar don’t exactly deny or verify the accuracy of the story, but it’s clear that he tried to suppress, or repress, this exceptional though pivotal event in his life.

We tend to hold those who speak publicly on issues of morality, be they religious leaders, politicians or writers, to a higher standard than we hold everyone else.  In the cases of both Kundera and Grass, of course, the original sin is compounded by each man’s having kept it secret (for so long in Grass’s case; until he was exposed in Kundera’s).

My thoughts:

• I don’t really care.
• This new piece of information only makes Kundera’s work more interesting to those who wish to include the author’s biography in their analysis of a work of fiction.
• An author’s life, his goodness or badness in particular, does not reflect upon the value of his work.
• Our cultural habit of giving writers, authors and other public figures greater moral authority than anyone else is the height of foolishness.
• A work is certainly the creation of the author, but it stands alone as well, and this information does not change the essence of Kundera’s writing.
• Kundera’s writing would certainly not be what it is if not for this particular experience.
• One must feel sympathy for the captured spy (currently living in Sweden, by the way), but each player was existing in a kind of moral gray area, each a product of his own time.  Such drama is part of the human experience.
• Great works of writing are not born of minds of mediocrity or lives of inaction.

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