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.