Milan Kundera’s Fiction: A Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals

Milan Kundera is one of the few Czech writers with worldwide readership. Often set within a political context, his novels have appealed to readers for their clarity and originality, intellectual flair, philosophical angles, and mythological metaphors. In Milan Kundera’s Fiction: A Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals, Karen von Kunes traces Kundera’s literary aspirations to a single episode in Czechoslovakia in the Stalinist era. This moment attracted international attention when a 1950 police report was released in 2008. Reporters rushed to judgment, accusing Kundera of denouncing a young man, Miroslav Dvoracek, to the police, resulting in Dvoracek’s immediate arrest and sentencing to hard labor. von Kunes debunks this shocking charge in a systematic and thorough fashion. She argues that Kundera reported a suitcase, not a man. Von Kunes further contends that two sentences in the report provide significant insight into Kundera’s novels and plays. She ties his dominant themes of sex, betrayal, and political denouncement to the suitcase, a fatal instrument that can lead to paradoxes and unforeseen and catastrophic coincidences for his characters.