900-page biography on Milan Kundera coming out at the end of June. Reading between the lines it's going to give him a bit of a kicking. Not sure I've got the stomach for it. I know a handful of fans over here, but most people I know can't stick him. https://twitter.com/KnihyPaseka/status/1265639570021982208
Not read this yet (and not certain I find him sufficiently interesting to wade through it) but @enkocz had an excellent article about it yesterday. It's a very critical biography looking into Kundera's attitude towards / alleged sometime collaboration with communism.
It was greeted with anger and resentment. "How dare he?!" seemed to be the standard response. Some of this is odd given Kundera's immmense decades-long condescension towards the country of his birth...
As an example of this, he blocked translations of his French novels into Czech for years; it took a pirate copy, a kind of samizdat in reverse, to get his ass into gear and he then did no more than write a half-arsed paragraph about the context...
He's a Czech citizen again now courtesy of the current prime minister, Andrej Babiš, who he met in France last year. It is said that Kundera may have worked with the StB, the communist-era secret police. Babiš is formally listed as having worked as an agent.
There is more. There is of course 900 pages more at least. This is something I have reflected on now and again even before the biography came out - I was reading over interviews etc. last year...
What is most interesting to me, though, is the contours of the limits of Czechs' willingness to investigate the past and the various strategies people took to handle life under the former regime.
There'll be those who take a performatively strong line on Jára nohavica, a folk singer who dobbed on another, older folk singer, Karel Kryl, others who will refuse to hear a word against anti-Charta golden boy, Karel Gott...
& then others who take comfort in thinking of writer Bohumil Hrabal as a beery collaborator...

In most (at least) of these cases, it's not so simple & most accusers show little evidence of knowing what are the most important moral issues of the present day (or that they exist).
Anyway, as far as the reaction the book that began this thread, I agree with the thrust of @Simindr's article that it is too seldom that Czechs honestly confront the past in all its complexity, and that a book like this, honestly approached, might help to do so.
Equally, though I suspect the author of the article is overly kind to Boris Johnson and his biography of Churchill, I agree that biographers are seldom, if ever, "objective". An explicitly stated bias may be rare but at least you can then quarrel with the book.
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