Milan Kundera's Fiction

In Milan Kunderas Fiction: A Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals, Karen von Kunes traces Kunderas 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 Miroslav Dvoek to the police, resulting in Dvoeks immediate arrest and sentencing to hard labor. von Kunes debunks this shocking charge in a systematic way and argues that Kundera reported a suitcase, not a man. She ties Kunderas 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.