Teresa

See THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING













Kundera is interested in the existential code of each of his characters more than in their physical description. In The Art of the Novel he explains that “to apprehend the self in the novel means to grasp the essence of its existential problem” (Kundera 25). The existential code reveals itself in the situations in which the characters are placed. Kundera doesn’t show us what happens inside the characters’ heads; rather he situates them in circumstances tied to public events and investigates their attitudes. He grasps the characters by understanding and naming their attitudes (Kundera 25).

The days Teresa walks through the streets of Prague “taking pictures of Russian soldiers and looking danger in the face” are the best of her life, and she enjoys a few happy nights (Kundera 26). “The Russians had brought equilibrium to her in their tanks” (Kundera 27). The carnival atmosphere in the streets of Prague replaces the weight of her problems and the responsibility of her love for Tomas. But when the “carnival of hate is over,” and when the Russians force the Czech representatives to sign a compromise agreement, Teresa fears her nights again. Here's where we begin to see the connection between individual lives and individual problems and the body of the state. Kundera provides us with keys to understanding Teresa’s character – her feelings – from which we grasp the character’s nature.
















The historical circumstances of the Soviet occupation are used to reveal the existential situation for the characters in the novel (Kundera 37). Kundera offers analysis of situations and insists on understanding the essence of a situation rather than the physical appearance of the character. Understanding the situation that shapes the characters and grasps their existential problem is what makes them alive and real. The essence of a character’s existential problem is rooted in themes of the novel.

Teresa’s body is her main theme. She longs to be a body unlike other bodies (Kundera 47). Teresa insists upon the uniqueness of her body. Within a totalitarian regime, the individual body and all that is most private is in need of being protected, “if any sense of individual integrity is to be retained” (Rhine 231). Her mother is another of Teresa’s main themes. “When she lived at home her mother forbade her to lock the bathroom door,” and implied that Teresa’s body was just like all other bodies: Teresa had no right to shame and no reason to hide something that existed in millions of identical copies (Kundera 57). “Since childhood, Teresa had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity” (Kundera 57). Her mother’s injunction against privacy of the intimate body mirrors the state’s “complete obliteration of privacy” (Kundera 137). Here a connection is established between private body and a political system, and the leveling of individuals that is common in totalitarian societies.

Tomas’s repeated infidelities cause Teresa’s torment and jealousy. In her nightmares she is marching around the pool naked with a large group of other naked women, where all bodies are equal, which means that Tomas has drawn an equal sign between Teresa’s body and the other bodies. “Her mother's world, which she had fled ten years before, seemed to be coming back to her.” Tomas’s womanizing denies the uniqueness of her body, of all bodies. Here is another connection made to the state, and a reference to assimilation with no distinction that negates the sacred integrity of individual body. Both Tomas and her mother have placed Teresa in the “concentration camp” of bodies, where one body is just like another.














Kundera says that “not only the historical circumstances create a new existential situation for a character in a novel, but history itself must be understood and analyzed as an existential situation” (Kundera 38).

“When Alexander Dubcek returned 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” (Kundera, Milan part 1, 26).

This historical episode reveals the weak state of the country. Teresa cannot bear that weakness and prefers to emigrate, but faced with Tomas’s infidelities she is like Dubcek – disabled and weak (Kundera 38). She leaves Tomas and returns from Switzerland to the “city of the weak,” because she understands that she belongs among the weak, “and that she had to be faithful to them precisely because they were weak and gasped for breath in the middle of sentences” (Kundera 73). Kundera explains that here the historical situation is itself a human situation – a growing existential situation (Kundera 39). Here the Prague Spring is not described in its historical aspect but as a fundamental existential situation.

Returning again to the link between private life and the state, Kundera compares the weight Tomas feels after Teresa returns to Prague to “the tons of steel of the Russian tanks” (Kundera 31). At the same time, Kundera takes the individual issues of lightness and weight and connects them to the country. Teresa could not forget the awful pauses in the middle of Dubcek’s sentences, and how he seemed unable to breathe as if a heavy pressure was coming down on him (Kundera 26). “One thing was clear: the country would have to bow to the conqueror” (Kundera 26). The entire country is placed under the weight of the compromise and humiliation.

Sabina

Another way Kundera links the novel’s characters and the state is through the divergence of individuality and Communism. Recognizing how unique existence is extinguished, Kundera’s characters express freedoms by moving away from the public to find escape in the personal. It starts with Sabina who is strongly opposed to life within a totalitarian political regime that denies creativity. As a socialist realist artist, Sabina uses the technique of “double exposures” (Kundera 63). She accidentally drips red paint on a painting of a steel factory, turning it into a battered backdrop. The socialist realist image of steel works becomes artificial: “On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth” (Kundera 63). Her paintings feature the confluence of two themes, with the “intelligible lie” on the surface, which implies that socialist realism is a façade. Of course if she shows them to anybody she will be kicked out of the Academy (Kundera 63). This is how the private and public in the novel are tied in mutual contradiction. This is how Sabina finds a way of living while the experimentalism in art is progressively disappearing, and while many artists find their works censored, ignored, or rejected. She saves her art from socialist realist kitsch – the propaganda in communist society that masks what is underneath and prevents us from seeing the truth.

For Sabina, living in truth is possible only away from the public (Kundera 112). “A man who loses his privacy loses everything” (Kundera 113). When Franz makes their love affair public, she feels as though he has “pried open the door of their privacy” (Kundera 115). Once her love had been publicized it would gain weight and become a burden (Kundera 115). Sabina and Teresa correspond here in the idea of the sanctity of privacy. Her mother’s reading and mocking Teresa’s diaries is compared to the invasion of privacy in the totalitarian society. Teresa’s struggle with her mother and Sabina’s rejection of socialist realism are extensions of resistance to the totalitarian state.













We are told that Sabina is charmed more by betrayal than by fidelity (Kundera 115). Betrayal is the essence of Sabina’s existential problem. Thus the keyword for Sabina’s existential code is betrayal. “Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown” (Kundera 91). The existential code of Sabina reveals itself progressively in the action of betrayal as she marries a second rate artist, as she betrays her father, and Communism, which is merely another father, and as she leaves Franz; she feels that she has to keep doing it again and again (Kundera 29). She is someone whose personality has been damaged – destroyed in many ways by the Communist experience. She chooses the path of betrayal of all of her attachments. This is reflected in the government’s betrayal of her Soviet-occupied country. As a result, Sabina emigrates, escaping the pressures of the Communist ideology.

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.”

Margarita: The Source of Justice and Mercy

Human greed, cowardice, and the redemptive power of love are distinguishable themes in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. At the beginning of the novel, the Devil arrives in Moscow and performs black magic at the Variety Theater, satirizing the vanity and greed of the Muscovites. The Soviet citizens, whose lives are so arranged that they are unaccustomed to supernatural events, are faced with their real world which has been displaced into something completely crazy and fantastic. In the world where evil, loathing, hypocrisy, and despair left no trace of humanity, the Devil is the force that brings justice. Throughout the novel characters are punished or rewarded by Woland, presumably Satan, and his retinue. The contradictory nature of the characters that dispense justice is the novel’s main premise (Weeks 25). Justice is the underlying theme of the novel.

The novel has a very strong binary structure that resolves itself in unity. The two plot lines have corresponding and juxtaposed characters, and are connected through repeating dual motifs of sun and moon, light and dark, good and evil, truth and lie, Yershalayim and Moscow. Bulgakov’s Margarita is not a classic female character, with mere features of empathy and kindness. Margarita is also a witch with an unleashed sexuality and wickedness. In the novel she is called on to fill both the role of Virgin Mary and to serve as Queen of Hell at the Grand Ball.

Margarita is a dynamic figure. Unlike the Master, “who retreats under the attacks from the critical establishment and burns his manuscript,” Margarita has unstoppable determination (Weeks p. 39). She is the one with a quest to save her beloved Master and his manuscript about Pontius Pilate. Margarita turns into a witch and performs justice. She punishes Latunsky, the literary critic who ruined the Master. On her broom ride Margarita releases uncontrolled anger and violence. The devastation she causes to Latunsky’s apartment and the DRAMLIT HOUSE is similar to the chaos and disarray caused by Woland and his retinue at the Variety Theater. In her pursuit of justice, Margarita is allied with Woland. Margarita nevertheless is not evil, just as Woland is far from playing the role of adversary (Weeks 43).

Throughout the novel Woland fulfills the epigraph: “I am part of the power which forever wills evil and forever works good.” He punishes people in Moscow, he retrieves the manuscript of the book that was burnt, and gives Master and Margarita peace. Here Bulgakov is proposing an alternative to traditional Christian theology (Weeks 43). In Bulgakov's cosmology God and Devil are one. Ultimately there is no evil. In the novel good and evil coexist like light and darkness (Weeks 42). Towards the end of the book, as Woland and company prepare to leave Moscow, we are reminded that “after all, shadows are cast by things and people, and what would good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared” (Bulgakov 305).

No one in the book, except Yeshua, is entirely good or evil (Weeks 25). In her battle against injustice Margarita is merciful. Her motherly compassion emerges in her care of the little boy in Latunsky’s apartment building and in her relationship to Ivan Bezdomny (Weeks 34). As a reward for her service at the Satan’s Ball, Margarita pleads for Frieda’s redemption. The very handkerchief with which she killed her child torments Frieda eternally. Margarita asks Woland to grant mercy, to which Woland remarks that mercy is not in his department - evidence that he serves in a kind of “heavenly hierarchy” (Weeks 43). Instead he instructs Margarita to carry out forgiveness. In a sense, Margarita performs both justice and mercy. In her role as a witch she functions in parallel with Woland, and in her more compassionate role, she is equivalent to Yeshua, who performs mercy and believes in the basic goodness in every human. “There are no evil people in the world,” says Yeshua (Bulgakov 20).

Bulgakov’s worldview differs from the traditional Christian one in his treatment of good and evil (Weeks 42). God and Devil are made compatible in the novel, each performing his function in the world. Justice is enforced by Woland. Christ, and in some instances humans, perform mercy. This is how Bulgakov sees and interprets the world: justice and mercy operate together to create balance. He believes in the “necessary balance of powers within the universe” (Weeks 43). The answer seems to be his belief and faith in some kind of a world order that ultimately makes the horrors of Stalinism right.

Everything that Woland does when he comes to Moscow amounts to justice. At the end, Master and Margarita receive justice and fly away with Woland and the company. When Margarita asks Woland to grant forgiveness to Pontius Pilate, who has been tormented for two thousand years, Woland says that, “Everything will be made right, that is what the world is built on” (Bulgakov 323). This is how Bulgakov deals with the evil of Stalinism. He believes that there is a way out of the underground of the Stalinist world.

Oh gods, gods!