It's rather apposite, then, that Kundera's most careful defender is also his former sparring partner on the question of "Czech Destiny". In a manner redolent of his extraordinary essay, The Power of the Powerless, which showed how the "post-totalitarian" society inculpates all of its inhabitants, from the thuggish state official to the lowly greengrocer, playwright and former Czech president Vaclav Havel responded in Respekt, first by putting himself under the microscope. How would he have acted in like circumstances half a century ago? Havel was sceptical of the charges, saying that the way the events at Kolonka unfolded struck him as "stupid". But as if preparing a future defence of Kundera, he observed: "You did not have to be a committed, fanatical communist to act in this way in good faith that your actions would smooth the way to a better world. You simply may have wondered if, or may have been nearly sure, that someone had laid a trap for you or someone close to you. You simply may not have been a war hero and just thought to yourself: why should I spend ten years in a prison camp just for knowing and not telling? Prison camps are for heroes, not people like me."

To this, Havel appended a warning to young historians who know nothing at first hand about underground meetings, samizdat publications or the transcendent nature of rock concerts. But this is being both generous and coy. For of the three motives Hradilek posited as to why Kundera might have informed on Dvoracek, the most convincing was that Kundera had indeed fallen into a trap just a year before. In 1949, he received a letter from his friend Jaroslav Dewetter, criticising a high-ranking communist official. Kundera replied to it in the same spirit. Both missives fell into the hands of the secret police, and Dewetter and Kundera were called in, along with a third person, Jan Trefulka, who had defended Dewetter, to face disciplinary proceedings. Dewetter and Tefulka were expelled from both the party and the university, but Kundera was only expelled from the party.

It should be apparent to anyone familiar with Kundera's oeuvre that this episode in his life mirrors almost exactly the plot of his first novel, The Joke (1967). In that book, Ludvik sends Marketa, an earnest communist student he's courting, a postcard that reads, "Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!" He is subsequently expelled from the party and the university, and drafted into a labour battalion of the Czech army, as was Dewetter. Although the novel is divided into separate narratives, all told from the perspectives of the major characters, Ludvik's sections concern his ill-fated course of vengeance against Pavel Zemanek, a former comrade who, when the time came to attest to his integrity and defend him against the humourless pedants of the District Secretariat, chose instead to condemn him. The Joke is instructive for the way in which it shows how even independent-minded communists could, at the first sign of danger, succumb to a herd mentality. Kundera is second to none in adumbrating the thoughts of young believers - a talent that must owe something to personal experience. Although a victim of persecution, Ludvik is sharp-witted enough to place himself in the position of his persecutors, much as Rubashov does in Darkness at Noon: "I have never voted for anyone's downfall, but I am perfectly aware that this is of questionable merit, since I was deprived of the right to raise my hand. It's true that I've long tried to convince myself that if I had been in their position I wouldn't have acted as they did, but I'm honest enough to laugh at myself: why would I have been the only one not to raise his hand? Am I the one just man?"