Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Kundera's brilliant novel is about political events in totalitarian society and ethics and morality of totalitarian societies, and somehow it has a connection to the private lives of the characters who also sometimes are dominated in totalitarian ways and lack certain kinds of freedoms. It starts out with Sabina as a socialist realist artist, and the idea that in socialist realism the individual is literally inscribed into the body of the state - in its iconography. The novel is about the dynamic correspondences between a larger totalitarian government and what is happening on the individual level.

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. In spring of 1968 the Czech Communist Party elected Alexander Dubček, a reformist leader who is symbolically linked with the phrase “socialism with a human face” - the idea that the communist party was not the gatekeeper to personal freedom; he called for relaxation of censorship, individual liberty and freedom of press.

The novel starts with the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 1968. The reforms, especially the decentralisation of administrative authority, were not received well by the Soviets who, after failed negotiations, sent thousands of Warsaw Pact troops and tanks to occupy the country.

The first thing he does he hits us with Nietzsche and the idea of eternal recurrence or eternal return. Nietzsche calls the idea "horrifying and paralyzing", and says that its burden is the "heaviest weight" imaginable. He asks the question: "What would be different about our lives if everything was destined to occur?"

The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?

In essence, if you accept this thought experiment, if you accept the idea of eternal return, do you live differently? Nietzsche says "what happens can return, can happen again and again and again..." The idea is that our actions become heavy if we accept this thought experiment that our actions are going to recur again and again...and all of a sudden we live with more consciousness and responsibility, because we are terrified of doing the wrong thing, because it is going to happen again and again. (It's hard to understand this realistically; we need to accept this as a kind of a thought experiment.)

Then Kundera introduces the idea of lightness and weight. “In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make.”


At the same time Kundera takes this individual lightness and weight issues and connects them to the country - lightness and weight in relation to what is happening in the country. “When Dubcek returned [with them] to Prague, he gave a speech over the radio. He was so devastated after his six-day detention he could hardly talk; he kept stuttering and gasping for breath, making long pauses between sentences, pauses lasting nearly thirty seconds.”

“One thing was clear: the country would have to bow to the conqueror. The carnival (lightness) was over. Workaday humiliation had begun.”