The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

First published:L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être, 1984 (English translation, 1984; in Czech as Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, 1985)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Philosophical

Time of plot: 1960’s and 1970’s

Locale: Czechoslovakia and Switzerland

Principal characters

• Tomas, a surgeon
• Tereza, Tomas’s wife
• Sabina, an artist, Tomas’s mistress
• Franz, a university lecturer, Sabina’s lover

The Story:

Tomas is visiting a provincial town in Czechoslovakia to perform surgery when he meets Tereza in a café, where she works as a waitress. Shortly after he returns home to Prague, she turns up at his apartment with a heavy suitcase. They make love immediately. She then comes down with flu, and he is unable to make her leave his apartment for a week afterward. Even when he has installed her in an apartment of her own, he is unable to leave her.

Although Tomas loves Tereza as he has loved no other woman, he is unable to give up seeing other women. Chief among these is the artist Sabina. Sabina resembles Tomas in her wish not to be weighed down by the heavy burden of love and in her tendency to betray those who threaten her freedom. At Tomas’s request, Sabina finds work for Tereza in a photographic darkroom and encourages her to develop her talent for photography. The two women become friends, though their relationship is affected by Tereza’s awareness of Sabina’s continuing relationship with Tomas.

Tomas marries Tereza and buys her a dog, which they name Karenin. Both actions are partly motivated by Tomas’s desire to try to make amends for his womanizing. Tereza’s efforts to tolerate Tomas’s lifestyle are undermined by her recurring dreams that reveal her inability to accept his infidelities. When he recognizes the suffering his actions cause Tereza, Tomas is racked with guilt, but he is still unable to stop seeing other women.

Following the liberalization of Czechoslovakia under the leadership of Alexander Dubček (the Prague Spring), Soviet tanks roll into Prague and a military occupation begins. Tereza roams the streets with her camera, capturing the horrors of the occupation on film. She gives the film to foreign visitors to smuggle out of the country and publish abroad. When Tomas is offered a job in Zurich, Switzerland, he and Tereza move there. His passport is taken as he crosses the border, so he knows that if he ever goes back to Czechoslovakia, it will be for the rest of his life.

Sabina is already living in Switzerland, in Geneva. She becomes involved with Franz, a university lecturer. Franz is married to Marie-Claude, but he leaves his wife to be with Sabina. One day when he turns up at Sabina’s apartment, however, she has gone, leaving no forwarding address.

Tereza, worn down by Tomas’s infidelities, flees back to Prague, to what she has dubbed the country of the weak. Tomas cannot resist the pull of Tereza and follows her, knowing that they cannot escape again.

Tomas writes a piece for a newspaper commenting on the guilt of the Soviet authorities, and the piece is interpreted as subversive. When he refuses to sign a retraction proposed by the secret police, he has to resign from his job as a surgeon (since he is an employee of the state). He takes a job as a window cleaner.

In an ironic twist, Tomas and Tereza learn that when they believed they had been acting to oppose the regime, they may actually have helped it. Tereza discovers that her photographs could have been used by the secret police to identify opponents of the occupation. When Tomas was interrogated by the secret police, he had lied about the appearance of the editor who commissioned his article, only to unwittingly implicate another editor who, unknown to him, resembles his made-up description.

Tomas’s work as a window cleaner gives him plenty of opportunities for assignations with women. He is something of a hero to his clients, who know that he must have refused to cooperate with the regime to have been hounded out of medical practice. Tereza, in an attempt to understand Tomas’s appetite for extramarital sex, turns the tables on him and has sex with another man, someone who had protected her from some abuse in the bar where she works. When it is suggested to her that the whole scene may have been set up by the secret police as a blackmailing device, she develops a strong desire to leave Prague.

She and Tomas go to live and work on a farm in the country, he as a driver and she as a cowherd. Their dog, Karenin, develops cancer and dies. Tereza reflects that her love for Karenin is in a sense superior to her love for Tomas, since she has never asked the dog for anything in return, whereas she always wants Tomas not to cheat on her. Tomas, however, tells her that he is happy in the countryside, where he does not carry on affairs, presumably from lack of opportunity.

One day, a farmworker dislocates his shoulder, and Tomas has to put it back in place. The worker, feeling happy, suggests that they all drive to a nearby town to go dancing. On the way back, the truck they are riding in gets a flat tire. When Tomas and Tereza set about changing the tire, they are accidentally crushed to death. Sabina, in Paris, learns of their deaths. She moves to California, where she enjoys considerable success selling her paintings. She continues to live in avoidance of the weight of love and commitment, such weight having killed Tomas and Tereza.

Bibliography

Aji, Aron, ed. Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1992. Collection of critical essays addresses such topics as Kundera and the eighteenth century English novel, the narrative technique and characterization of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Kundera’s contribution to the novel form.

Banerjee, Maria Nemcová. Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. Presents philosophical and psychological analysis of Kundera’s long fiction, including a comprehensive chapter on The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Well worth reading for its insights into Kundera’s techniques and characters.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Milan Kundera. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Collection of essays offers discussion of topics such as Kundera’s use of sexuality in his writings and estrangement and irony in his work. Includes an informative introductory overview.

Frank, Søren. Migration and Literature: Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Examines works by Kundera and three other authors, focusing on the theme of migration and the various strategies these writers use to describe the experience of exile and homelessness.

Hruby, Peter. Daydreams and Nightmares: Czech Communist and Ex-Communist Literature, 1917-1987. Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1990. Contains a lucid chapter on Kundera’s life and his political and literary development. Briefly discusses individual works, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Miletic, Tijana. European Literary Immigration into the French Language: Readings of Gary, Kristof, Kundera, and Semprun. New York: Rodopi, 2008. Kundera, Romain Gary, Agota Kristof, and Jorge Semprun are twentieth century writers whose native language was not French, but who chose to write in this language. Examines the common elements in their work from linguistic, sociological, and psychoanalytic perspectives.

Petro, Peter, ed. Critical Essays on Milan Kundera. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999. Includes a review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by novelist E. L. Doctorow, several interviews with Kundera, and essays that address topics such as the use of commedia dell’arte style in his novels and the slow pace of his works. Essays of particular interest are “Kundera’s Quartet (On The Unbearable Lightness of Being),” by Guy Scarpetta, and “A Body of One’s Own: The Body as Sanctum of Individual Integrity in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” by Marjorie E. Rhine.