The literary Czech of Milan Kundera revisited

This article is a reaction to the text by Z. Kufnerova (2008), in which the author presents 24 types of mistakes she found in two novels by Milan Kundera. The author of this article attempts to put forth theoretical and empirical arguments in favor of Kundera's literary Czech and against the above-mentioned critique by Kufnerova. For example, Kufnerova criticizes Kundera for occasionally placing the focus of the sentence in the middle as opposed to at the end, as is required by contemporary Czech's word-order norm. However, this is a highly simplified view, and the topic-focus articulation of the sentence operates in a much more complicated manner in reality. In the opinion of the author of this article, most of the points of criticism by Kufnerova toward Kundera are unwarranted, stemming from insufficient theoretical knowledge of language and its communicative scope.