The Weighty Resolution of Love: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
Czechoslovakia in 1968. Flickr © Sludge G.
By Yoojin Shin
This review contains minor spoilers
When Olga Carlisle, writing for the New York Times Magazine in 1985, spoke to Milan Kundera, a Czech-born and later French-naturalized writer, he said with what read like a poignant disposition: “My stay in France is final, and therefore, I am not an émigré. France is my only real homeland now.”
Milan Kundera, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929, joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the 1940s and saw it seize power in 1948. For Kundera—who repeatedly faced expulsion from the Czechoslovak Communist Party for reformist, or in other words, anti-Party actions—the burst of the Prague Spring in 1968 followed by the reactive Soviet invasion was a great turning point in his life. Although he maintained his efforts to reform the changing Czechoslovak communism for several years, the newer brand of ideological totalitarianism pervading the country eventually convinced Kundera to stop trying to change things. Then he moved to France in 1975.
It’s not difficult to see that Kundera was deeply disillusioned with communism, or rather with the Eastern brand of the sort, and how such communism changed his countrymen. This disillusionment, however, like every other human emotion, is deeply complicated—it is laced with an unfathomable love for Prague, where, as he told Olga Carlisle, his life experiences and imagination are anchored. But alas, his decision to leave was final.
Disillusionment and love pervade the life of Thomas, the protagonist in Kundera’s landmark novel published in 1984, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Faber & Faber). Thomas is a talented, valued surgeon—and perhaps more importantly, a serial womanizer—living in Prague, and he likes his life of itinerant solitude. His body travels from woman to woman, but his soul remains alone, so much so that he even enters a tacit agreement with his mistresses that he was to leave out love from all his relations. Thus, in Surgeon Thomas’s life, love and sex are irreconcilably separate.
That is, until Tereza, a former waitress from the countryside, sweeps into Thomas’s life.
“She was a child whom he had taken from a bulrush basket that had been daubed with pitch and sent to the riverbank of his bed” (7).
Thomas suddenly finds that, in Tereza, love and sex fuse together in an unexplained, swift course of events and emotions. Hovering over sleeping Tereza, Thomas feels unprecedented, overflowing joy, an inexplicable feeling of purity that separates his experience with his mistresses; but he simultaneously realizes that Tereza cannot and will not understand his need for affairs. Seeing Tereza suffer from his womanizing, Thomas feels pain but unwantedly bound. He is simultaneously happy and unhappy with Tereza—such is the complicated disillusionment of his life.
In the spring of 1968, when dissent against the communist regime begins to bubble, Thomas writes and publishes an essay on Czechoslovak Communism and compares its defensive rhetoric to the tale of Oedipus. The simple, succinct prose of the novel’s third-person narration summarizes Thomas’s problem with the communists as such: “the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people” (176). When such atrocities came into light, the communists insisted on the “inner purity” of their ideology—a sequence of events that Thomas, and perhaps Kundera, found repugnant and, in turn, inspired a contemplative parallel with the tale of Oedipus, who dug out his eyes after realizing that he had unwittingly slept with his mother.
Once again, disillusionment and love are the two sides of the same coin. Thomas’s critique of the Czechoslovak communists and the rather bone-chilling parallel to the tale of Oedipus (Is he or is he not suggesting that the communists should take their eyes out? That is the question!) reflect his deep disillusionment with the state of his homeland—an intensely personal feeling which, ironically, cannot transpire out of anything but of his love for Prague and Bohemia.
The close coexistence of disillusionment and love continues to plague Thomas in the two greatest parts of his life: his stance towards the new communist regime and his marriage with Tereza. Throughout the novel, this duality of feeling forces him to choose between leaving and staying. To leave or stay in communist Prague? To leave or stay with Tereza? To leave behind or continue his womanizing?
Like everyone else, Thomas makes his choices, sometimes out of disillusionment and sometimes out of love, and the results of these choices arrive in beautifully unassuming prose that has managed to fill my heart with heavy stones. Whether Thomas and Tereza find happiness in the end is not an easy question to answer; but whether they would have found happiness with choices other than the ones they made is a futile question to ask. Thomas’s choices were final, unable to be repeated to compare their outcome—such is the complicated disillusionment of life, the unbearable heaviness of being.
“Es muss sein!” (193). It must be!
Yoojin Shin is a writer, editor, and translator who has been nurturing a lifelong love for the creative arts. After accumulating an eclectic range of experiences in journalism, academia, and the fine arts, she launched the Baram House with Natalie Anderson over a plate of cheesecake. You can follow her personal journey on Instagram (@yoojinshin1).
