680 Kundera, Milan
says, “I recalled the trains carrying people to the
gas chambers and crematories. The men who had
ordered and organized all that probably enjoyed
a similar feeling of complete power over their
uncomprehending victims.” Moreover, by juxtapos-
ing the violence of the villagers with the violence
of the German army, Kosinski cautions us that the
Holocaust was not simply a product of Nazism.
Violence and cruelty were not simply the result of
the war. Rather, they are a part of nature, and our
distrust of those who are different can too easily
lead to atrocities.
James Wyatt
kunDEra, miLan The Unbearable
Lightness of Being (1984)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a masterpiece
of European literature, written by Milan Kundera,
a Franco-Czech novelist born in Brno but living
in France since 1975. The novel was written in
1982 (Czech title: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) but first
published in 1984 in France; Czech censorship
had prevented the author from publishing it in his
homeland. The novel is set in 1968 Prague, and aims
to be a fresco of the situation of artists, intellectuals,
and leading figures in communist Czechoslovakia
after the tragic events of the Prague Spring and
the subsequent invasion by the USSR. The novel’s
main character is Tomas, a renowned surgeon who
loses his position for writing an insignificant article,
published in an unknown journal, that is accused
of criticizing Czech communists. The other most
prominent characters are Tomas’s wife Tereza (a
photographer and, later, a barmaid), his lover Sabina
(a painter), and Sabina’s lover Franz (a college
professor).
The novel portrays a passionate love affair,
entangled with crucial historical issues and some
philosophical adagios—such as the reflection on
Parmenides’s concepts of “lightness” and “heavi-
ness”; or the considerations on “Einmal ist kein-
mal ” (“what happened once might as well have
never happened at all”). Analyzing the relationships
between Tomas and Tereza, Tomas and Sabina,
Sabina and Franz, set against the misery and trag-
edy of an oppressive political regime, the narrator
offers a masterful exploration of such themes as
love, identity, and oppression, in which all nuances
are given voice.
Tania Collaniidentity in The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
readers are faced with a sophisticated reflection on
identity. On the one hand, characters do everything
not to identify themselves with their parents and
their own homeland; on the other hand, when they
are away from their own country, their feeling of
self-dispossession becomes “unbearable,” and they
feel a natural need to go back to their origins, to
their original identity. This feeling is particularly
evident in the stories of the two female characters of
the novel, the unconfident Tereza and the crackling
Sabina.
From the beginning of the novel, Tereza looks
at herself in the mirror, trying to find out as many
differences as possible between her mother and her.
She hates her mother, and all her choices are influ-
enced by the comparison. Tereza’s revulsion toward
her heritage has a parallel with her hate toward
the weakness of her own country, which resigned
itself to the invasion of the Soviet Union. After the
Prague Spring of 1968, the equilibrium of the whole
country changed radically in August 1968. Since
Tereza identifies herself neither with her personal
roots (her mother), nor with her social roots, she
decides to fly to Switzerland: “one thing was clear:
the country would have to bow to the conqueror . . .
The carnival was over. Workaday humiliation had
begun.”
During her short Swiss exile, Tereza feels the
sensation of losing her roots: It is one thing to “hate”
her country and her mother, it is another thing to
be “indifferent” to both. She cannot bring herself
to become a fashion photographer, after having
reported the horrible events of Prague, even though
everyone seems indifferent to what happened in
Czechoslovakia: “Being in a foreign country means
walking a tightrope high above the ground without
the net afforded a person by the country where he
has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he
can easily say what he has to say in a language he has
known from childhood.”