The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera | Review and Analysis

Hello internet. It’s been a while since we’ve talked face-to-face. I just recorded this again because I forgot to press the record button the first time, so that’s fun. I’ve been feeling a bit jaded, to be honest. Current events and the news and all this chatter…I don’t think it’s healthy for me to be as hyperfocused as I am on the sad state of the world. There’s good out there too of course, but the cynicism is strong with me right now. So I’m going inward. I don’t know how I ever got so distracted from the big picture and the biggest questions of life, the universe, and, well, everything. 

For my first video back I want to discuss this book right here - The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by the late, great author Milan Kundera, which I will shorten to Unbearable Lightness because, well, that’s a long name for a novel. As an aside, I will try to do my best with pronunciation throughout the episode, but I am only an ignorant American who has never been to Europe.

As with many, perhaps most writers, Mr. Kundera’s work draws from his direct life experience as well as some insightful observations from his mind and the minds of great thinkers who came before. Mr. Kundera lived an interesting life. He was born in 1929 in then-Czechoslovakia (present day Brno, Czech Republic). He came of age in the abject horror of the eastern front of world war two - and several of his family members died in the concentration camps of the nazis.

He lived through the Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history, which also features in the novel, as well as the invasion by the warsaw pact that followed.

Like many writers in the USSR, he inevitably found himself on the receiving end of the Party’s ire. He went into exile in France in 1975 and more or less lived there until he passed away in July of this year.

You know, sometimes you read a book and your inner narration won’t stop commenting on the ideas you’re reading. It’s not always a good thing. If you’re reading something particularly illogical, it can present a sort of chatter that makes it annoying to continue reading. That’s how I’d describe my experience reading the opinions of antivaxxers. I’m just outraged at every sentence because it’s so. Stupid. Other times when a work is particularly profound, you may feel like you have to reread the book ten times to understand every sentence and idea, and you enjoy it because it’s taught you something useful and new every time.

With Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness, there are a lot of ideas worth commenting on. So many in fact that the underlying story can be a little hard to follow. I would recommend you read it yourself, I think it is worth reading. But if you don’t mind a direct analysis which may and will spoil it, I’m going to dissect it.

The fictional story of Unbearable Lightness takes place partly in Prague, where Mr. Kundera attended university and lived for a number of years. It’s supposedly one of the most beautiful cities in the entire world. Not sure how to square that with the place Franz Kafka drew his inspiration.

In the book, philosophical questions are juxtaposed with the story of several characters engaged in life and love. The very first sentence calls into question Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, auf Deutsch Ewige Wiederkunft, the idea that, given that we all exist here and now, and given all of eternity and the existence of matter, it is mathematically inevitable that many many years after the end of our existence, we will come into being once again and live out our lives exactly as we did before. Unending life - but you can’t remember or experience it as unending - you can only ever experience the present moment. The period between where one of your lives ends and the other begins could be trillions of years - but for you it would feel like an instant.

It sounds crazy, I know. It’s hard to tell what it even means to eternally recur or how it would all work. It does not seem logically necessary that my future consciousness is “me” - that is, my experience of myself as myself does not seem as though it would be connected necessarily to my future self’s experience of themselves as themselves. But the theory also has the dubious benefit of being, as far as I can tell, impossible to disprove. Russell’s teapot is boiling over somewhere.

Nietzsche used the concept of the eternal return to emphasize a philosophy he called amor fati - love of fate - one should embrace their life as if they will relive it over and over again for all of time. Because if nothing else, Nietzsche was hardcore.

In the first few pages of Unbearable Lightness, Kundera elaborates Nietzsche’s idea and juxtaposes a reality in which Nietzsche is not correct - one where we live, we die, and that’s it. This reality he calls light - and he calls it light because in a world in which we live but once, well, once it’s over what does it matter? We won’t feel the consequences of our life ever again.

Einmal ist keinmal, he quotes from German. If something happens only once, it may as well not have happened at all. Because what does it really, ultimately, matter to us personally, our consciousness, if we don’t feel some sort of karmic consequence for our actions good or bad, or if we don’t at least have to bear our lives again and again unendingly and deal with the consequences of our actions that way.

Parmenides, an ancient Greek philosopher predating Socrates, also wrote of diametrically opposed concepts such as the light of fire versus the darkness of night. Although I’m not sure if Kundera is correct to relate his dichotomy to Parmenides - Kundera mentions that Parmenides says light is good. I think if I’m understanding Parmenides’ concept of the unity correctly as a changeless oneness, I think he might actually come down on the side of Kundera’s heaviness. But back to the point.

One thing I find remarkable is that, as far as I can tell, one of these realities has to be true. Either everything is light or everything is heavy, there is no in between. And it’s not necessarily the eternal return that has to make it heavy as we’ll see later in the novel, but rather there being in a cosmic sense some ultimate impact of our lives, something that survives into eternity in one form or another. Even if we are reincarnated into nine hundred trillion lives, our actions become light if we fail to come back for nine hundred trillion and one.

Now, Kundera introduces all of that before we get to the actual plot of the novel. It’s…a bit strange, to be frank. Or maybe not strange per se, but it doesn’t hold back from discussing things taboo. You may have to overcome several periods of irrational embarrassment to finish the novel. Or maybe that was just me.

The first main character we read of, Tomas, is not exactly a moral paragon - he’s more of a serial adulterer who hurts the people he claims to love. I certainly didn’t read the novel and get the impression Kundera wanted us to like Tomas - but I will say he felt more human for having such glaring faults in his moral character. He has a wife - Tereza - and he cheats on her constantly with various mistresses, but his main mistress Sabina is also a focal point of the novel.

The story really gets going in August of 1968, when Russian tanks came to Prague. This story could not be more apropos for current events - Russia really is the worst neighbor in history.

And make no mistake, Kundera does not pull punches - he brings up the genocides of Poles and Crimean Tatars committed by Russia. It’s not surprising he left the Soviet Union on bad terms. He describes the mania of the invasion as a sort of carnival of hatred in which the citizens and invaders both engaged. For seven days, Tereza photographed the chaos and tragedy in the Prague streets.

Tomas and Tereza escaped the Russian invasion to Zurich, Switzerland through a fellow doctor of Tomas’. There, Tereza tried to have her photographs published, but she found no interest there in the madness she had captured on film. And while Tomas lived double lives no matter where he went, Tereza languished in Zurich in a low misery. Eventually she couldn’t take it anymore, and she went back to Prague with her dog Karenin, also a main character in the novel but we’ll get to that later.

Once again, we come to the lightness of being. By leaving him in Zurich, Tereza removed the heavy weight of her responsibility, her love and her life from Tomas. But lightness is its own kind of curse - actions which are light have no ultimate meaning, and though we can fool ourselves for a while with hedonistic debauchery we can never escape the utter pointlessness.

If I can take a slight detour into Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and more specifically the spinoff Angel) - David Boreanaz delivered an absolutely killer line which I will abbreviatedly quote and not show because the mouse is a scary copyright holder:

“In the greater scheme or the big picture, nothing we do matters…”, and, “if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. Because that’s all there is. What we do, now.”

And that is the sort of subjective morality-interpretation of lightness vs. heaviness that posits that even in a “light” universe where you only live once and then you’re gone forever, your life can still be subjectively heavy if you live your life as if you were to live it again and again unendingly and be ultimately satisfied with it.

So, Tomas returned to Prague to be with Tereza and Karenin, drawn to heaviness despite it all

Later on we learn Tomas had a controversy arise from a “letter to the editor” type article he wrote for a journal sort of randomly or offhand. The article addressed the very real atrocities committed under the guise of communism and who bears responsibility for the crimes. Tomas felt past discourse only ever addressed whether or not certain people knew of the brutality, and not the question of whether it even mattered that they knew or not. 

Tomas likened the moral dilemma to the story of Oedipus from Greek mythology. Stories differ through the centuries, but Oedipus essentially was a king who, without knowing what he was doing, kills his father and marries his mother. Oedipus had no idea what he had done for many years, but on learning the full story he puts out his eyes in shame. And to possibly probably ameliorate the wrath of the Gods.

And what the communists read into his article was that Tomas was demanding communists put out their eyes, even if they did not know of the purges and the madness and the murder. And they probably didn’t even take offense to it - they were likely just using the article as leverage to pressure Tomas to comply.

Let me tell you friends, call me “progressive” or “liberal” all you want, but I condemn communism absolutely - no “real communism has never been tried” will ever utter from my lips - except of course in mockery as I did just there.

The way Kundera tells it, communist rule sounds like the worst kind of hell I could imagine for myself personally. A world with no privacy, where every single thing you say or do is scrutinized by your neighbors, your friends and family, and complete strangers for allegiance to the principles of the party. Constant fear of the people closest to you, because any one of them could be an informer and statistically at least one probably is.

And the bureaucracy, god the bureaucracy! Letters of recommendation are a nightmare for me already. I don’t want to have to seek them out for every major and minor decision of my life. Kafkaesque never fit a better picture.

Tomas’ punishment for this transgression against The Party was to be fired from his job as a prestigious surgeon. He makes his way for a time as a general practitioner of medicine, but the party came for him there too. Eventually he just gives up and becomes a window washer.

From an appointment for window cleaning, Tomas met an editor of the paper that screwed him over as well as his never-before-seen son in a random home. They wanted him to sign a petition for the release of political prisoners, which he declined to do for fear it would only hurt his only weight in the world Tereza.

Possibly the best lines of the novel occur in this scene:

Tomas, in reference to the article he wrote, “maybe it helped people, maybe it didn’t. But as a surgeon I know I saved a few lives”.

His son says, “Ideas can save lives, too”.

Maybe I, a peddler of words and ideas, am biased. But that makes me feel a little hopeful. And then of course Kundera crushes that hope inside of me in the next chapters but we’ll get there.

But ultimately as I said Tomas does not sign the petition. It only got the petitioners in trouble, because of course it did in their communist utopia. You don’t even have the choice to die a martyr for your cause - if you do sacrifice your life as you know it to oppose the party, no one will know about it except in a way that makes everyone hate you and curse your name.

Going back a bit - nothing is in order in the novel - part two opens with a meta-analysis of the genesis of the characters. Whereas Tomas was born from the phrase Einmal ist keinmal - one time is no time - Tereza was quote “born of the rumbling of a stomach”. Somehow, Kundera’s hungry tummy caused him to have a full-blown existential crisis by bringing to his attention the fact that his stomach was part of himself - yet somehow separate. This is the mind-body problem of legend.

Tereza’s character is as complex as Tomas’ - this realization of herself as separate from her body horrified her in the way the evil demon horrified Descartes. Combined with a narcissistic parent in her mother that embarrassed her at every opportunity, Tereza has a strange relationship with human bodies. Nudity brings up some amount of trauma from her upbringing - but more than that, nudity brings to the forefront of the mind the bare mundaneness and fundamental similarity of every human being. But that is the very issue - if every one, every body is fundamentally the same, then what is the Tereza that feels the hunger of her stomach separate from herself? Tereza is not a body like all others - she is a soul, unique among all existence. Tomas’s infidelity hurts her all the more for the fact that it equates her body with the body of every other woman out there. 

Ironically enough she briefly befriends chief concubine Sabina. Sabina is the true rebel of the novel. In part 3, we finally hear her story, and that of her other lover Franz who is also cheating on his wife. It’s almost like a love triangle turned into a W (go badgers). Sabina is an artist - and her work transgresses all artificial boundaries including those set by the communists.

She hates kitsch, which is a hard word to define. Kundera does a lengthy breakdown in the end of the novel of ‘communist kitsch’ and et cetera. Her art is a rebellion against fake smiles and two-faces and overly puffy nationalism and pride. She rejects the world as it appears. She may even reject the world altogether - she flirts with lightness of being. My interpretation is that she rejects heaviness as fake - as kitsch. Subjective heaviness doesn’t make it real, not for Sabina anyway.

Her lover Franz on the other hand is an academic - his world is the world of words. I personally relate. And like Franz, I find my escape in music - which is sort of the negation of words. Or maybe it’s another language entirely. See, Franz discovered the ultimate, ugly truth of words and writing and academia and all the mountains of books and knowledge built up over centuries and millennia - that it is all humanity collectively screaming into the void - and receiving nothing at all in reply. 

So, Franz escapes into music. But for all his strength both physically and in academia, he is utterly helpless interpersonally. He doesn’t understand why Sabina abandoned him after he revealed his affair with her to his wife, when that was the one act that Sabina could never abide by. In outing their affair and naming Sabina, he had revealed her to the world she so desperately wished to be invisible to.

Now turning back to Tomas, he has his own existential crisis in the form of possibilities. He reasons that his chance encounter with Tereza was a result of no fewer than six highly improbable coincidences. Her life could just as easily have been spent with another man - it just so happened that of all the hotel bars in all the towns in all the world, he walked into hers.

This is a concept I am struggling to put into words. Then again, I’m not nearly as experienced of a writer as Kundera was.

Nevertheless, I will try:

Think about your life, in its entirety. Think about the ups and downs and curves in your path. It didn’t have to be this way, did it? If you really, really think about it, I bet you could come up with some life decisions you’ve made that were really down to the wire. The simplest breeze knocked you over onto one side; but it could’ve just as easily gone the other way.

Now, combined with heaviness vs. lightness, this makes for some pretty crazy thinking. Heaviness posits that your life repeats and repeats ad infinitum - but isn’t your life also a chance collection of possibilities that just happened to shape out how they did? Does that mean heaviness and lightness are as arbitrary as the happenstance nature of our lives?

Well, I don’t have the answers, I think that’s enough philosophical detour.

The story is even less cohesive in part 6. The main focus is on the “grand march of history”. Kundera throws a few jabs at the sort of intellectual Franz is - someone who believes that, somehow, progress will march ever forward - never mind the bloodthirsty regimes that often accompany violent revolution. Kundera takes Franz to the border of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge laid waste to almost a quarter of their country’s population. Doctors and famous people alike took part in the “grand march” to deliver humanitarian aide to the country - but were met with nothing but silence.

Kundera links the idea of kitsch to the grand march - it is fundamentally performative in nature.

And unfortunately for Franz, he would never make it back from this one. A botched robbery left him almost dead, and when he kicked it in Geneva he at last belonged to his wife - a dead trophy for her to make into her own performance piece. As Kundera puts it “Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.” And honestly, he’s not wrong. I’ve been to my fair share of funerals. They are a strange mix of raw emotion and paying respects, but rarely do we pay the dead what they are actually due. Feelings take precedence over honesty, and that’s probably for the best.

Part seven and the last of the novel is titled “karenin’s smile”, and it bookends the story of Tomas and Tereza and Karenin of course. They end up on a collective farm outside the city, and unlike so many in socialist republics they moved there voluntarily. Karenin makes friends with a pet pig, Mefisto. Karenin also, and this is by far the saddest part of the novel, also gets cancer. Kundera turns a walk with Tereza and Karenin into a pretty spicy roast of Descartes’ idea that animals don’t have souls and are just walking automata, and I’m all for it. I mean it’s ridiculous to deny animals like dogs a spirit or whatever it is that we have just because we happen to have opposable thumbs and slightly more developed brains. Although in the case of some people (like the entire Texas government) I’m not sure about the brains part.

Kundera’s moral lesson is that man is judged by how we treat animals: creatures that we have near-absolute control over and have the potential to harm or help as we choose. There are no inherent consequences to mistreating animals - sure, we’ve enacted laws against animal cruelty, but there is no smiting mechanism to ensure the offenders are punished one hundred percent of the time. It’s as simple a test as one could possibly devise to determine if someone is good, bad, or utterly indifferent: how much do you help or harm our furry friends?

Karenin’s smile referred to a moment of playing between Tomas and Karenin, where Karenin appeared genuinely happy to be alive. As the cancer progressed, Karenin became less and less capable of even going on walks. Of course this novel couldn’t have a happy ending, and near the end Karenin is finally put to sleep. And look, I’m not saying Kundera is right about animals determining morality, but I find it interesting that by far the saddest deaths in any story are animal deaths. Can any of us really blame John Wick?

The way Kundera writes, it’s hard to tell where exactly where the novel even ends. “Chronological order” isn’t really a thing in his novel. Sabina eventually ends up in America. Tereza and Tomas both died under heaviness, and Sabina wants to die “lighter than air”. 

But the very last chapter of the last part follows Tomas and Tereza as they enjoy a night out dancing in the village. Tereza tells Tomas that she’s sorry for basically ruining his life and any chance of him being a surgeon (which isn’t true, it was the initial letter to the paper that ruined Tomas and his stubbornness only exacerbated it, but who can blame him) and Tomas tells Tereza that he “has no mission”, “missions are stupid”, and “it’s a terrific relief to realize you’re free, free of all missions.” So in the end, I’m not sure Tomas died heavy after all, except maybe heavy with Tereza.

And that’s the end.

This one was frustrating to write because even though the book is relatively short, there’s so many things I want to comment on that I had to skip around quite a bit. Read it yourself, you’ll see what I mean.

I have a patreon with ad-free content, some bonus papers, that sort of thing. I suspect the interest for it would be increased if I increased my posting regularity. I should do that. I am leaving a record of myself here on the world because eventually I won’t be in it. I hope my thoughts and ideas survive in some form for a while at least, and I’d like to say what I want to say before I can’t anymore. Anyway, thanks for watching and listening. See ya next time.