The Fall of Kaavya and Kundera

Almost 60 years ago, a Czech author may have reported a Western spy to the local authorities. The man, whose reputation is in shambles after a report released last week, is Milan Kundera who, according to a 1985 New York Times article, did for Eastern Europe “what Gabriel Garcia Marquez did for Latin America in the 1960’s and Alexander Solzhenitsyn did for Russia in the 1970’s.”

Literature lovers around the world are shocked and many cannot suppress their urge to judge a man whose work captures the erosive effects of totalitarianism on the human soul and whom many consider(ed) a moral authority. But given the questionable evidence behind the suggestion, a lot of the reactive commentary has been amounted to a misguided barrage of condemnation and venom. It is a tragedy that so many have rushed to hasty conclusions and completely ignored the arguments suggesting that Kundera could well be guiltless.

All we know today is that Kundera’s name appears on a short police report from 1950 and that Communist counterintelligence, perhaps based on that report, arrested and sentenced a Czech-born anti-Communist spy to many years of hard labor. But government documents were routinely fabricated under Communism and an 81-year-old historian asserts that the real informant (who is no longer alive) confessed to his testimony years ago. Given the evidence at this stage, it appears that the agent was betrayed either by his college friend, her jealous boyfriend or, only possibly, Kundera himself.

One probably would not have guessed that from Time Magazine’s loaded title (“Was Milan Kundera a Communist Snitch?”), which overshadows the reasonably balanced content of its article. A top Italian newspaper ran a headline that read, “Kundera helped the Czech secret police,” while the German paper Die Welt likened Kundera to Günter Grass, a Nobel Prize-winning author who hid his military service for the Nazis during most of his life. Several Czech journalists and intellectuals stated they are not surprised that Kundera had once been an informant, as if the matter were already settled. All the while, the author’s own denials were nearly drowned out.

Is it right that we can form such dramatic opinions regardless of whether we have access to and time to process crucial information that might complicate our beliefs (or convince us that withholding judgment is the only reasonable choice)? When Kaavya Viswanathan was accused of plagiarism, I remember hearing contemptuous comments in every corner of Harvard Yard well before the suspect passages of her book were publicly scrutinized. Watching rumors quickly transform into absolute “facts” and seeing reasonable people cast sweeping verdicts were frightening events for a freshman born in a totalitarian state, who thought that groupthink would not so easily occur in America.

The media can play a wicked role in society when they lead the public from ambiguous specks of evidence to a very specific mental ruling—especially since our brains are particularly attuned to negative language and images, which remain engraved in our minds longer than anything else. If more evidence exonerating Kundera is discovered one day, will it be so widely reported? Will masses of readers notice, as they did the recent accusations? And, of course, Kaavya’s alleged indiscretions would have had a more limited impact if they had occurred before the age of blogs and mass media. In the words of Yasmina Reza, a French playwright who wrote an excellent piece about the Kundera affair for Le Monde, “one can broom someone’s entire life in 30 seconds” these days.

To the end of slowing that sweep, a few media outlets do resist encouraging the churning of the rumor mill. The most responsible coverage last week was to be found, interestingly, on the pages of The Boston Globe. It would be naïve “to take at face value documents discovered in secret police files years after a Stalinist regime has vanished,” the editorial board asserted on Saturday. In exactly this manner, journalists should pause before using their power to shock and spread controversy. Their prime responsibility is to exercise caution when making claims and, when blunders occur, to seek a “public recognition and rectification of [their] mistakes,” just as Solzhenitsyn demanded at Harvard 30 years ago. We can only hope that the Russian writer’s prudence will bear out if the insinuations made about his Czech counterpart’s past are proven false.


Jan Zilinsky ’09, a Crimson editorial writer, is an economics concentrator in Mather House.