PRAGUE — Life appears to be imitating art in a drama convulsing the Czech Republic: an accusation that Milan Kundera, one of Eastern Europe’s most celebrated writers, denounced a Western intelligence agent to Czechoslovakia’s Communist police when he was a 21-year-old student. The agent, Miroslav Dvoracek, served 14 years in jail, including hard labor in a uranium mine.

In Mr. Kundera’s first novel, “The Joke,” a mordant satire of Stalinist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, the protagonist, Ludvik Jahn, is expelled from the Communist Party and forced out of a university after being denounced by his friend Pavel. For the unlikely crime of possessing a sense of humor, Ludvik is sent to work in the mines.

Few here have failed to notice the parallel, which has added a fitting literary tint — along with the sort of denunciation and betrayal that haunt Mr. Kundera’s books — to an episode that has spurred a complex bout of national soul-searching. The accusation was published Monday by the Czech political weekly magazine Respekt and immediately denied by Mr. Kundera.

Since then, some historians have raised questions about the allegations, which, fairly or not, threaten to damage Mr. Kundera’s reputation as an author whose historical fiction unsparingly condemns totalitarianism. On one level the reaction goes far beyond Mr. Kundera himself, tapping into gnawing discomfort in the Czech Republic about the extent of collaboration during 41 years of Communist rule.

Today, the Czech Republic, a member of NATO and the European Union, is among the former Soviet bloc’s great economic success stories. Yet many here do not want to look back at the past too closely.

“This story is not just about Kundera, it is about the history of the Czech Republic,” said Petr Tresnak, one of the authors of the Respekt article. “People in this country are overwhelmed and disgusted by the number of people who collaborated with the regime, and this is a very concrete example of what happened.”

At the same time, the revelations have given the country a chance to vent its decidedly Central European distaste for others’ success, and particularly for that of Mr. Kundera, who has long held himself aloof from the nation of his birth.

While Mr. Kundera is a cult writer for undergraduates the world over — his novels are praised for their metaphysical ponderings and eroticism — many Czechs have never forgiven him for going into exile, in France in 1975, and gaining fame abroad. And some simply don’t like his books.

“The revelation that Kundera denounced someone is seen by Czechs as a vindication of their belief that he has been betraying them for years,” said Petr A. Bilek, a professor of comparative literature at Charles University here. “His fellow dissident writers have long tried to dismiss him as someone who writes intellectual pornography for mediocre Western readers.”

Mr. Bilek said the ambivalence here about Mr. Kundera was such that many in the dissident community still considered his most famous book, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” a “mocking betrayal” because of its depiction of a dissident surgeon who embraces his new life as a lecherous window cleaner. The novel was only officially published here in Czech a few years ago, more than 25 years after it first appeared in France. It sold a mere 10,000 copies.

When the article appeared, Mr. Kundera, now a French citizen who only visits the Czech Republic incognito, denounced the story as the “assassination of an author.”

For all the excoriation of Mr. Kundera, many academics and critics have also heaped scorn on the Respekt article, a sign of the schizophrenia that arises whenever relations with the widely despised Communists are examined.

They have challenged the veracity of the police report purporting to reveal Mr. Kundera as an informer and accused the authors, who worked closely with the government-backed Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, of exaggerating the evidence.

Jiri Pehe, a prominent Czech sociologist and director of New York University in Prague, said the accusations had polarized Czech society into two camps: those who believe that Mr. Kundera may have been guilty, but also see him as a moral scapegoat for their own collaboration; and those who view the article as an act of Czech treachery motivated by petty jealousy.

He said Czechs had a long history of debunking heroes, including former President Vaclav Havel, who led the Velvet Revolution that overthrew Communism here in 1989 but is still resented by many of his countrymen.

In 1991, the Czechs were among the first Eastern-bloc countries to introduce a law banning from public life those listed as agents or informers in secret police reports. The law, Mr. Pehe contended, had ensnared tens of thousands of people who may have been unwilling collaborators.

“The reality is that the totalitarian regime was constructed in such a way that 99 percent of people cooperated in one way or another, and the Kundera case helps them to feel morally absolved, like they are the good guys and he was one of the baddies,” Mr. Pehe said.

Many historians have found the evidence wanting. The policeman quoted in the secret police report naming Mr. Kundera is dead, and Mr. Kundera’s signature is nowhere on the document.

The institute, created this year by the center-right Czech government to collect and publish Communist-era files, stood by the report.

“No reasonable doubts have been raised about the accuracy or authenticity of the documents,” said Vojtech Ripka, the head of the institute’s documentation department. “We are not engaged in witch hunts and we are not going after public figures, and that includes Kundera, whose file was discovered by accident.” He said Mr. Kundera had been contacted to comment and had declined to respond.

Mr. Ripka said the revelation came to light when Adam Hradilek, who works for the institute, was researching so-called “agent walkers” of the 1950s — defectors who returned as undercover agents for Western spy agencies. He said Mr. Hradilek stumbled on the Kundera file while researching the story of Iva Militka, a distant relative of Mr. Hradilek’s, who had long blamed herself for the imprisonment of Mr. Dvoracek.

According to the police file published on the Institute’s Web site, on March 14, 1950, Mr. Kundera informed the police of Mr. Dvoracek’s presence in Prague. Mr. Dvoracek had deserted the Czechoslovak Army and, after the 1948 Communist coup, fled to Germany, where he was recruited by American intelligence.

Mr. Ripka said Mr. Hradilek’s research showed that Mr. Dvoracek had visited Ms. Militka, who was an old school friend, and left a suitcase in her apartment. She told her boyfriend and future husband, Miroslav Dlask, who in turn told Mr. Kundera. Mr. Dvoracek was arrested when he came to collect the suitcase. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison and served 14, working in uranium mines.

The mystery became even murkier this week when Zdenek Pesat, a literary historian and former member of the Communist Party, told the Czech news agency CTK that Mr. Dlask had told him years before that he had reported Mr. Dvoracek to the secret police, most likely because he wanted to prevent his girlfriend from being punished.

Mr. Tresnak, 32, one of the writers of the Respekt article, insisted that the allegation against Mr. Kundera, if true, was morally unambiguous because Mr. Kundera had informed on someone during the 1950s, a period of Stalinist repression when the Communists were executing opponents.

He added that he had been shocked by Mr. Kundera’s vociferous response. “I have no serious doubts about Kundera’s guilt,” he said. “But his reaction was so strong, and I have asked myself, ‘Did we finger an innocent man?’ ”

Ivo Pondelicek, a leading sexologist who has known Mr. Kundera for 50 years, said his friend could not have denounced someone. He said that in the 1950s, Mr. Kundera had been an ideological Communist, but not a fanatic. The article, he said, reflected resentment of Mr. Kundera’s charisma and success.

“Milan was always introspective — he was not a fanatical Communist, and I completely exclude that he could have denounced someone in this way,” Mr. Pondelicek said. “It just does not match his pattern of behavior.”

Some weeks ago, Mr. Pondelicek said, Mr. Kundera had left a message on his answering machine, saying, “They are pigs!” At the time he thought Mr. Kundera was referring to critical reviews of one of his plays. In retrospect, he said he believes Mr. Kundera may have realized that his well-guarded privacy was about to disappear.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company