Unsigned Play by Milan Kundera? An Authorship Attribution Study
This resolves a specific literary mystery for scholars and fans of Kundera, but is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new case.
The study tackled the authorship attribution of the play 'Juro Jánošík', hypothesized to be by Milan Kundera, using supervised machine learning, with results strongly supporting Kundera's authorship.
In addition to being a widely recognised 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 is 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.