The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984

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Background

Authorial Context: Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera was a prominent Czech author whose many novels, stories, and plays explore the impact of totalitarianism on societies, develop complex philosophical thought experiments, and probe the nature of existence and the complexities of human relationships. Born in Czechoslovakia, Kundera emigrated in 1975 and lived in exile in France for the duration of his life. He was awarded French citizenship, and ultimately began to write his novels in French rather than in Czech. Until the peaceful Velvet Revolution of 1989 that toppled communism and resulted in the breakup of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, many of Kundera’s works were banned in his birth country. His widely lauded career spanned decades, and he died in Paris in July 2023.

Born in 1929 in the Czech second city Brno to Ludvík Kundera, a musicologist, and Milada Kunderová, an educator, Kundera was interested in music from an early age. He joined the communist party in 1947 and moved to Prague, where he first enrolled in music studies at Charles University, but then switched to film studies. He was expelled from the party in 1950, but went on to work as a lecturer in world literature. Kundera came of age and began his career during an era of intense totalitarian repression, not only of politics and society, but also of the arts. Like character Sabina, whose artistic expression must take the form of state-sanctioned socialist realism, the students, writers, scholars, and artists of Kundera’s generation were limited in the thematic focus and scope of their work. Their writing and art was subject to intense scrutiny, and they lived always under the threat of censorship and denunciation.

It is for this reason that Kundera’s first attempts at writing were staunchly pro-communist in their ideological orientation. However, as he grew and developed as a writer, he began to explore new themes and his works began to evidence critiques of the communist regime. By the time he published his first novel, The Joke, in 1967, he had already begun to depict the trials and tribulations of life under totalitarian control, and other works, such as his 1975 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, engage further with the repressive nature of Czechoslovakia’s communist government.

Although Kundera did not shy away from political themes, he was never comfortable with the label of political novelist, and his writing is also characterized by a deep interest in philosophy. This too is apparent in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is in many ways a lengthy thought experiment that encourages readers to question concepts such as body-and-soul dualism, eternal return, Parmenidean dichotomies, and the nature of love and sexual attraction. Because of his interest in the nature of existence, his characters can often be read as developments of particular themes, philosophical problems, and ideas rather than as direct representations of living people.

A film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being was released in 1988, but Kundera was deeply critical of it. He dismissively noted that it had very little to do with his novel and after that refused to allow his works to be adapted for the cinema.

Historical Context: The Prague Spring

The events of The Unbearable Lightness of Being unfold against a period in Czechoslovak History known as the Prague Spring. Although 1968 stands out as the year of the Prague Spring because it was in 1968 that the Soviets sent troops into Czechoslovakia to prevent a possible political uprising, the Prague Spring is better understood as an era of attempted social and political liberalization that began regionally in 1963 in Bratislava, Slovakia, then part of Czechoslovakia. A series of reforms was passed with the goal of liberalizing society and the local economy. These reforms were in response to the economic downturn of the 1950s and represented an attempt by the local communist party to secure a greater degree of popular support than they had enjoyed in a society struggling against the dead weight of a planned economy. The reforms did indeed appeal to ordinary citizens and were so successful at shoring up the party’s image that they were adopted as national policy in 1968. Dubbed “socialism with a human face” by First Secretary of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Alexander Dubček (the state’s de facto leader from January 1968-February 1969), the reforms sought to increase personal freedom in Czechoslovakia. A secondary goal was to present an image of “successful” socialism to the West, providing evidence that communism could bring peace, success, and prosperity to society.

Meant to overcome political fatigue and widespread societal disillusionment with socialism and its failed economic promises on a national level, the reforms included increased freedom of individual speech, of the press, and of movement. Economic liberalization brought increased access to consumer goods, improving relations with the West. This “Action Programme” also allowed for conversations to begin about multi-party elections in the state. Although Dubček’s government was careful not to openly criticize past administrations or the Soviet occupiers, the reforms rendered public condemnation of the government possible for the first time during the communist period, and an explosion of anti-Soviet writing appeared. Public discourse in Czechoslovakia began to dissect and discuss Soviet policies, especially those of the Stalinist era, and to interrogate socialism on both practical and abstract levels. Although written in 1982, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is set during the Prague Spring, and its engagement with the increased media freedom of that era is emblematic of the sea change that public discourse, letters, and the arts underwent during the 1960s. In this text, Kundera wrestles with abstract conversations about freedom, love, existentialism, philosophy, and the relationship between the individual and the state. Tomáš, Sabina, and Tereza openly discuss a set of ideas and ideologies that were then up for interpretation and public interrogation for the first time in Czech history.

The reforms of the Prague Spring, and in particular the impact of increased freedom of media and personal speech, caught the attention of the Soviet government in Moscow, and in August 1968 Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev ordered Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops to occupy Czechoslovakia. It is this event that energizes Tereza’s career, and the photographs she takes of Russians, their tanks, and the resulting protests garner national and even international attention. In the wake of the invasion, there was a massive wave of emigration, and it is during this period that Tomáš and Tereza move to Zurich. They return to a Czechoslovakia undergoing its post-invasion “normalizace,” or normalization period, a time during which opposition was stifled and dissidents were persecuted. Tomáš gets caught up in this wave of political repression: Because of his anti-communist essay, he loses his position and is forced to work as a window washer. The secret police were very active during this period, and both Tomáš and Tereza have run-ins with their agents.

Philosophical Context: Eternal Return

Put simply, eternal return (also referred to as eternal recurrence) is the philosophical idea that time repeats itself in an endless, infinite loop. The same events, both for individuals and in a broader historical sense, have been happening in exactly the same way since time immemorial, and will continue to happen in the same way for eternity.

Within the tradition of western philosophy, this idea dates to ancient Greece and is most often associated with Zeno and the Stoics. According to the Stoic school, the universe is regularly destroyed and reborn, and each new incarnation is a perfect reproduction of its predecessor. Pythagoras and Eudemus of Rhodes also investigated the nature of temporality and explored the possibility that time is a loop rather than a line. Part of the evidence for this theory was found in nature, where the seasons turn from one to the next in an endless series of cycles.

Nietzsche revived the idea in the 19th century, first in The Gay Science and then, most famously, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it forms a critical part of the text’s thematic underpinnings. Although he did at one point work on a set of logical proofs of eternal return, Nietzsche conceived of it as a thought experiment rather than a strict interpretation of the nature of time. For Nietzsche, and for Kundera and his narrator, what is important is the possibility of return. They wonder how a formulation of time predicated on infinite repetition alters the meaning and scope of human action. In the aphorism devoted to Eternal Return in The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks, “Does thou want this once more, and also for innumerable times?” as a way to encourage self-reflection (Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Dover Reprint, 2020, p. 176). He is asking his audience about the character and nature of their lives: Have their experiences been of the kind that they would want to repeat again and again? Or, conversely, does the thought of having to live and relive their lives ad infinitum fill them with dread?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being’s narrator, quoting Nietzsche, calls this possibility of return “the heaviest of burdens” (5). He imagines a world in which each small decision, each small mistake has the potential to reverberate throughout eternity. This possibility, he notes, “crushes us.” And yet, he wonders if weight is truly terrible, for he can find myriad metaphors in which weight is associated with deep meaning and therefore positivity. Furthermore, if meaning is derived from weight and weight from the possibility of return, is a life lived only once truly meaningful?

It should also be noted that Kundera’s narrator calls eternal return a “mad myth.” The text itself can be read as an interrogation of this myth: In the initial series of chapters that explore Eternal Return, the narrator, even as he admits the plethora of associations between weight and meaning, argues that it is the absence of burden that causes humans to feel truly happy and free. Tomáš, the novel’s male protagonist, wrestles repeatedly with these concepts: He wonders what the meaning is behind a life lived only once. He laments not having past versions of his life against which to weigh his decisions. He values lightness in relationships, but chooses of his own free will (and over and over again) the weight of his love for Tereza.