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Milan Kundera has not lived in what is now the Czech Republic for more than three decades, and some of his best works are still awaiting publication in his native country. But he is still regarded as one of the country's greatest writers and, more importantly, a leading voice of the generation that turned away from Communism to embrace the heady liberalismof the Prague Spring before it was crushed by Soviet tanks. So the recent allegation that, as a student under Communist rule, he informed local police on a young man is being greeted with dismay, and a little...
...Czechs are not so much shocked that Kundera, 79, now living in Paris, may have snitched on a suspected class enemy while a staunch Communist. Such things were not uncommon at the time. What most find surprising, however, is that the secret was kept for so long. At the same time, his supporters stress that any such incident should not detract from his work as an artist and could even explain the nature of his genius: his moral detachment and near-obsession with the themes of denunciation and betrayal. "I have always known [Kundera] was a Communist...
Jiri Zak, who translated some of Kundera's French writings into Czech, told the Czech news agency CTK that the reports were "a nasty and incomprehensible surprise" - not least because the accused spy was nearly sentenced to death - but that it would not alter his views of the writer's work. "Everything that the writer lives through can somehow reflect in his work," wrote Czech novelist and playwright Ivan Klima, a contemporary of Kundera's in a Czech newspaper. "Perhaps only a subconscious need to come to terms with [an experience] can ignite the creation of great work. That...
...charge was made public by the Czech magazine Respekt and by the country's Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, a state-funded historical archive and research body. The magazine and the historical institute published a contemporary police document that names Kundera as the man who had informed police about the whereabouts of Miroslav Dvoracek, a former military pilot who had fled to what was then West Germany in 1949. Dvoracek signed up with a Western intelligence agency and returned undercover in 1950. Kundera, who had not spoken to the press for decades, broke that silence this week...
...school. You can now cross the language barrier with Lonely Planet's audio phrasebooks for mobile phones. Local linguists have recorded 600 phrases - "Do you have a room?" or "Can you recommend a bar?" - in 10 languages (Mandarin, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Thai and Czech, with more promised soon). You simply play them through your phone's speakers. You can download the app onto iPhones (go to the App Store), BlackBerrys and any cell phone running the Java midp 2.0 platform or Windows Mobile. You can also buy the program from its maker, Steape...