No preferential treatment for Kundera

The liberal weekly newspaper Respekt, which initiated the debate surrounding the internationally acclaimed writer Milan Kundera's purported denouncing of an opposition figure in Czechoslovakia, takes a critical view of the recent declaration of solidarity for Kundera by a group of international authors: "They are not concerned about facts, but about [Kundera's] reputation. ... Are there different rules for famous writers than that for ordinary mortals? Even if one can detect in Kundera's books traces of the fate of Miroslav Dvořáček [who was sentenced to 14 years in a labour camp], one can find no concrete proof. However the issue here is not what Kundera wrote, but what happened. What we have is a police protocol [which incriminates Kundera] and Dvořáček's fate. In a country where hundreds of thousands of innocent people were jailed and sentenced to forced labour, it is our duty to investigate how such things could happen."

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