Kundera described Havel as mentally ill, the writer says

He wrote an explosive unauthorized monograph on the life and work of the writer Milan Kundera. He worked on it for four years, spent hundreds of hours in libraries and archives, read documents and everything that came out of Kundera, and met dozens of witnesses. And the result is almost 900 pages, from which Kundera emerges as a great author, but not a great man.

Your book caused a great storm, several people were found defending Milan Kundera. Do you read their posts? I don't follow this debate systematically, here in Berlin (where he currently lives, ed. Note) I don't have to talk about it all the time with a beer, but sometimes something gets to me. I am absolutely amazed at the manipulators of some of the authors who accuse me of manipulativeness. Even after allegedly reading my book, several of them question that Kundera created his alternative biography in exile. At the same time, there is not the slightest doubt about this. He claimed, for example, that he had been fired from his studies, which is a lie. That he ate manually as a laborer - another lie. He also reportedly toured the country in his youth with a jazz band, where he played the trumpet and piano. He said the same to Philip Roth, who was interviewing him at the time.

Among other things, he told Roth that he was completely unknown in Czechoslovakia until the release of Jert. He who was nominated for the State Prize for Literature for his poetry collection The Last May at the age of twenty-five? He who was one of the youngest winners of the Klement Gottwald Prize and started writing conventions? Kundera simply created a new marketing past in the West, he didn't report his engaged poems and articles, he completely erased his Stalinist past ... No wonder when Roth later saw this distortion of history, his relationship with Kundera cooled.