What makes the police document credible is the implausibility of it being a forgery. Who forged it? A Czech policeman in 1950, who had a mysterious grudge against a student intellectual and who somehow knew the details of Dvoracek's clandestine return and how he was connected to Kundera? Or, if the secret police invented the report years later, using meticulous methods that have somehow hoodwinked forensic archivists, why was it never used against the writer as a way of justifying the regime's crackdown on him after the Prague Spring in 1968, when the very privileges he enjoyed despite getting into trouble had at last been taken away? (By 1974, a year before he emigrated to Paris, Kundera had been expelled from his position at the Prague Film Academy, banned from travelling abroad, his books and plays had been pulled from libraries, and his foreign royalties limited to just ten per cent.)

Unfortunately, Kundera's refusal to give any interviews or to offer a thorough refutation of Hradilek's charges, and his threat to sue Respekt (which he has since withdrawn) if it fails to print an apology - he says that he "never knew the person involved; it is a lie", and that the accusation amounts to the "assassination of an author" - are not helpful, but nor are they surprising. He has often compared the erasure of private life by prying journalists in democratic societies to state invigilation in totalitarian ones. "Secrecy" is a sacred right, without which, he has said, "nothing is possible - not love, not friendship". By and large, Kundera's friends have abided by his need for total opacity. "I'd happily talk to you about Milan," the Czech actor Mojmir Heger told Hradilek, "but we have an agreement that I won't while he is still alive."

Still, Kundera has not lacked for vocal defenders. Gallimard, his French publisher, released a statement condemning the article and subsequent round of accusations. It was signed by a constellation of luminaries including Salman Rushdie (no doubt grateful for Kundera's honorable intervention after the Iranian fatwah), Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Gabriel García Márquez and Nadine Gordimer. Yasmina Reza, in Le Monde, questioned the legitimacy of Hradilek's publishing the file at all, a judgment seconded by the Czech Academy of Sciences, which said that Hradilek's method "testifies to a lack of scientific thinking". Rolf Schneider, in Die Welt, cautioned that, based on his personal experience travelling in the country and being shadowed, the Czech secret police "proceeded as sloppily as the East German state security" and thus their findings were unreliable-forgetting that the file in question belonged not to the archive of the secret police but to that of the local constabulary. Bernard Henri-Lévy, in Le Point, spent the majority of his piece railing against the schadenfreude felt by the "pack of dwarves" attempting to fell a giant of letters. Jiri Grusa, the Czech poet and Velvet Revolution icon, currently the president of PEN, went on German radio to announce, "The document is real. There's no denying it. Only it is not Milan Kundera's document. It is no denunciation, it's a police annunciation. And if Kundera says, ‘I didn't do it,' then I have to believe him." But as if unsure of what he had just said, he emphasised the penalty for not reporting suspicious behaviour in those days.