Unsigned play by Milan Kundera? An authorship attribution study

Abstract

In addition to being a widely recognized novelist, Milan Kundera has also authored three pieces for theatre: The Owners of the Keys (Majitelé klíčů 1961), The Blunder (Ptákovina 1967), and Jacques and his Master (Jakub a jeho pán 1971). In recent years, however, the hypothesis has been raised that Kundera was the true author of a fourth play, Juro Jánošík, first performed in a 1974 production under the name of Karel Steigerwald, who was Kundera’s student at the time. In this study, we make use of supervised machine learning to settle the question of authorship attribution in the case of Juro Jánošík, with results strongly supporting the hypothesis of Kundera’s authorship.