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| The Unbearable Lightness of Being | |
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| Author | Milan Kundera |
| Original title | Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí |
| Country | Czech Republic |
| Publisher | 68 Publishers |
| Publication date | 1984 |
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), by Milan Kundera, is a philosophic novel about a man and his two women and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968. Although written in 1982, the novel was not published until two years later, in France; the Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí and French: l'Insoutenable légèreté de l'être titles are the more common worldwide.
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Synopsis
The Unbearable Lightness of Being catalogues Prague in 1968, the artistic and intellectual life of Czech society during the Communist period, from the Prague Spring to the USSR’s August 1968 invasion and its aftermath, and until 1984. The characters are Tomáš, a successful surgeon; his wife Tereza, a photographer anguished by her husband's infidelities; Sabina, a free-spirit artist, who is Tomáš’s lover; and the secondary characters Franz, the Swiss university professor lover of Sabina; and Simon, Tomáš’s estranged son from an earlier marriage.
Challenging Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence (the universe and its events have already occurred and will recur ad infinitum), the story’s thematic meditations posit the alternative that each person has only one life to live, and that which occurs in that life, occurs only once shall never occur again — thus the “lightness” of being; whereas eternal recurrence is the “heaviness” threatening the meaning of said life.
The German expression Einmal ist keinmal encapsulates “lightness” so: “what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all”; if concluded logically, life ultimately is insignificant. Hence, because decisions do not matter, they are rendered light, because they do not cause personal suffering. Yet, simultaneously, the insignificance of decisions — our being — causes us great suffering, perceived as the unbearable lightness of being consequent to one’s awareness of life occurring once and never again; thus no one person’s actions are universally significant. Said insignificance is existentially unbearable, given that people want their lives to have transcendent meaning. As literary art, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is considered a modernist humanist novel and a post-modern novel of high narrative craft.[citation needed]
Publication
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) was not published in the original Czech until 1985, as Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, by the exile publishing house 68 Publishers (Toronto, Canada). The second Czech edition was published in October 2006, in Brno (Czech Republic), some eighteen years after the Velvet Revolution, because Kundera didn't approve it earlier. The first English translation by Michael Henry Heim was published in hardback in 1984 by Harper & Row in the US and Faber and Faber in the UK and in paperback in 1985. The US paperback was reprinted in New York City by Perennial in 1999 with ISBN 0-06-093213-9.
Characters
- Tomáš - The story's protagonist: a Czech surgeon and intellectual. Tomáš is a light-hearted womanizer who lives for his work. He considers sex and love to be distinct entities: he copulates with many women but loves only his wife, Tereza. He sees no contradiction between these two activities. He explains womanizing as an imperative to explore the idiosyncrasies of people (women, in this case) only expressed during sex. At first he views his wife as a burden he is obligated to take care of, but this changes when he abandons his twin obsessions of work and womanizing and moves to the country with Tereza. There, he communicates with his son after having to deal with the consequences of a letter to the editor in which he likens the Czech Communists to Oedipus (although this was unintentional). Later, Simon tells Sabina that Tomáš and Tereza died in a car crash; his epitaph was: He wanted the Kingdom of God on Earth.
- Tereza - Young wife of Tomáš. A gentle, intellectual photographer, she delves into dangerous and dissident photojournalism during the Soviet occupation of Prague. Tereza does not condemn Tomáš for his infidelities, and instead characterizes herself as weaker than he is. She is mostly defined by the division she places between soul and body: because of her mother's flagrant embrace of all the body's grotesque functions, Tereza views her body as disgusting and shameful. Throughout the book she expresses a fear of simply being another body in Tomáš's array of women. Once they go live in the country, she devotes herself to taking care of cattle and reading. During this time she becomes fond of animals, reaching the conclusion that they were the last link to the paradise abandoned by Adam and Eve, and becomes alienated from other humans.
- Sabina - Tomáš's favorite mistress and closest friend. Sabina lives her life as an extreme example of lightness, finding profound satisfaction in the act of betrayal. She declares war on kitsch, and struggles against the constraints imposed by her puritan ancestry and the Russian Socialists. This struggle is shown through her paintings. She occasionally expresses excitement at humiliation, shown through the use of her grandfather's bowler hat, a symbol that is born during one sexual encounter between her and Tomáš, and eventually changes meaning and becomes a relic of the past. Later in the novel, she begins to correspond with Simon while living under the roof of some older Americans, who admire her artistic skill. She expresses her desire to be cremated and thrown to the winds after death - the last symbol of eternal lightness.
- Franz - Sabina's lover. A Geneva professor and idealist. Franz falls in love with Sabina, whom he (erroneously) considers a liberal and romantically tragic Czech dissident. Sabina considers both of those identities kitsch. He is a kind and compassionate man. As one of the dreamers of the novel, he bases his actions on loyalty to the memories of his mother and of Sabina, whose eyes he always feels. His life revolves completely around books and academia, so that he seeks lightness and ecstasy by participating in marches and protests, the last of which is a march in Thailand to the Cambodian border. While in Bangkok, after the march, he is mortally wounded during a mugging. Ironically, he always sought to escape the kitsch of his wife, Marie-Claude, but dies in her presence, so that Marie-Claude claims he always loved her. The inscription on his grave was: "A return after long wanderings."
- Karenin - The dog of Tomáš and Tereza. Although physically a female, the name given always alludes to masculinity, and is a reference to the husband of Anna in Anna Karenina. Karenin lives his life according to routine, and shows extreme dislike of change. Once the married couple moves to the country, Karenin becomes more content than ever, as he is able to enjoy more the attention of his owners. He also quickly befriends a pig named Mefisto. During this time Tomáš discovers that Karenin has cancer, and even after removing a tumor it is clear that Karenin is going to die. On his deathbed he unites Tereza and Tomáš through his "smile" at their attempts to improve his health. When he dies, Tereza expresses a wish to place an inscription over his grave: "Here lies Karenin. He gave birth to two rolls and a bee", after a dream she had shortly before his death.
Film
In 1988, an American-made film adaptation of the novel was released starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Lena Olin, and Juliette Binoche.
See also
Notice
The photograph shown above is a Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition. The 1st Harper Colophon edition was published in 1985. It was reissued as a Perennial Library edition in 1987. Later, it was reissued in HarperPerennial edition in 1991. (1st Perennial Classic edition published in the year of 1999.)
External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The Unbearable Lightness of Being |
- SparkNotes
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being at the Internet Movie Database
- Criterion Collection essay by Michael Sragow
- An essay written by Giuseppe Raudino
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