"The Unbearable Lightness of being" and "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" by Milan Kundera

INTRODUCTION 3
PART I. MILAN KUNDERA AND HIS BOOKS IN THE WORLD LITERATURE 6
1.1. Milan Kundera as the Czech Republic's most recognized living writer 6
1.2. The place of "The Unbearable Lightness of being" and "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" in the world literature 11
1.3. The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West 17
PART II. “THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING” 26
2.1. Themes, symbols and motifs of the novel 26
2.2. Concept of eternal recurrence in "The Unbearable Lightness of being", the dichotomy between lightness and weight 38
2.3. A genre-defying mix of the novel, its structure peculiarities 49
2.3. The political relations between Czech and Russia and their interpretation in the book 55
PART III. “THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING” AND PECULIARITIES OF THE NOVELS 62
3.1. The Stalinist totalitarianism in ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ 62
3.2. The main characters’ ‘angels and demons’ 71
3.3. The terrors and humiliations of the intellectual under totalitarianism 76
3.4. The general political, cultural and psychological peculiarities of the novels 84
CONCLUSION 91
LIST OF LITERATURE 94

1.1. Milan Kundera as the Czech Republic's most recognized living writer
Milan Kundera is one of the most important and talented novelists to emerge from the death throes of the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. However, his novels are not merely political tracts but attempts to discover possible meanings for the existential problems facing all human beings.
Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1929. Like many young Czechs who had come of age during World War II and the German occupation, Kundera was attracted to Marxist philosophy, which seemed to promise a new freedom and peace. The first literary works he produced (three volumes of poetry and a play, The Owners of the Keys) were essentially Communist propaganda, though they didn't always conform to the tenets of socialist realism approved by the state.
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1.2. The place of "The Unbearable Lightness of being" and "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" in the world literature
With his last novel, ''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting',' the Czechoslovak writer Milan Kundera established himself as one of the most original and important new voices in contemporary fiction. Such earlier works as ''The Farewell Party”, a sort of updated Restoration sex farce set in an Eastern European spa, and ''The Joke”, a dark parable about life and love in Prague, had hinted at his talents as an ironist. And ''Laughter and Forgetting'' both confirmed his mastery of that Kafkaesque skill and demonstrated his ambition - and capacity - to remake the novel as an expansive forum for philosophical and political ideas [14].
Like ''Laughter and Forgetting'', Mr. Kundera's new novel uses a seven-part narrative to work musical variations on the themes of history and desire.
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1.3. The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West
Kundera himself rarely convicts, preferring to muse on the future's incompetence to judge the past, the incomprehensibility of our younger self to our older self, and the impossibility of truly understanding even those we feel intimately close to. Writing in his essay collections Encounter and Testaments Betrayed about Martin Heidegger, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Maxim Gorky, or Vladimir Mayakovsky – authors he feels we nowadays risk thinking of as apologists for tyranny first and writers second -- Kundera always sides with the accused. In “What Will Be Left of You, Bertolt?” repudiating a hostile biography of Brecht, Kundera rejects the idea that the truth about an artist is to be found in his worst failings, and alleges that Europe is “moving into the age of the prosecutors” [25, 71].
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2.1. Themes, symbols and motifs of the novel
Kundera's novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is a novel of themes and variations.  These themes, and the variations on them, are the dichotomies of lightness and weight, soul and body, strength and weakness, and fidelity and infidelity.  Other themes are "the event" of totalitarianism, misunderstood words, the Grand March, and death, among others. The plot is not put forward as a straight chronology, but jumps around in time, with the author later interjecting bits that were left out previously.  This makes the book more difficult than it needs to be.
The plot revolves around the various relationships of the four main characters, Tomas, Tereza, Sabina and Franz.  The chief main character is Tomas, a Czech surgeon, divorcee, and an "epic" womanizer.  He has invented a form of "erotic friendship" that allows him to enjoy many mistresses without being responsible for any of them.
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2.2. Concept of eternal recurrence in "The Unbearable Lightness of being", the dichotomy between lightness and weight
Much of the philosophical content of The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with the idea of eternal return, or the notion that our lives are repeated ad infinitum throughout a circular passing of time. Kundera rejects the idea of eternal return and argues that our lives occur only once, and that time is in fact linear, not circular. Because our lives occur only once, they fail to gain weight or significance, and are unbearably light. Kundera compares human time, which is linear, to animal time and idyllic time in biblical Paradise, which he argues are circular. Kundera claims that happiness is the longing for repetition – the longing for circular time. We're out of luck, then, since we cannot experience time this way. Instead, we struggle to give our lives meaning and to be happy when neither are strictly possible.
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2.3.
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2.3. The political relations between Czech and Russia and their interpretation in the book
Let's get some background on the political history before diving into the novel. After World War II, Czechoslovakia started taking steps toward becoming a communist nation.
In November 1956, the director of the Hungarian News Agency, shortly before his office was flattened by artillery fire, sent a telex to the entire world with a desperate message announcing that the Russian attack against Budapest had begun.
In fact, what does Europe mean to a Hungarian, a Czech, a Pole? For a thousand years their nations have belonged to the part of Europe rooted in Roman Christianity. They have participated in every period of its history. For them, the word "Europe" does not represent a phenomenon of geography but a spiritual notion synonymous with the word "West.
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3.1. The Stalinist totalitarianism in ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’
Milan Kundera describes The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as "a novel in the form of variations" [29, 2] where "the individual parts follow each other like individual stretches of a journey leading toward a theme, a thought, a single situation, the sense of which fades in the distance". The main character, Tamina, only figures in the story for parts of the book, but Kundera insists that the parts in which Tamina is absent exist for her - she is its main character and its main audience. The stories swirl about her, around her, and through her. Rather than attempt to describe Kundera's semi-magical-realist style, I prefer to focus on the way in which this book touches upon totalitarianism.
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3.2. The main characters’ ‘angels and demons’
This book, as it bluntly calls itself, is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out. The strangeness of, say, Donald Bartheleme or Barry Hannah derives from shifts in a culture that, even if we do not live in Manhattan or come from Mississippi, is American and therefore instinctively recognizable. These authors ring willful changes and inversions upon forms with which we, too, have become bored, and the lines they startle us with turn out to be hit her to undeserved lines in our own face.
But the mirror does not so readily give back validation with this playful book, more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel, by an expatriate Czech resident in France, fascinated by sex, and prone to sudden, if graceful, skips into autobiography, abstract rumination, and recent Czech history.
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3.3. The terrors and humiliations of the intellectual under totalitarianism
Understandably, Kundera conceives the novel as intrinsically incompatible with authoritarianism, especially in its most radical form: totalitarianism. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the narrator proclaims: “In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions” [29, 15]. And the “person who asks questions” is, par excellence, the novelist, the writer, the artist, and this because they are not longing for final solutions.
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, as in the Dvořáček affair, the struggle is not about defining the future, but redefining the past.
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3.4. The general political, cultural and psychological peculiarities of the novels
Although Kundera throws away much traditional apparatus – elaborate description of character and setting, psychological realism, interior monologue, historical background, and so on – he insists that the concentration on his characters’ existential situations that this permits does not make them less life-like. A character, after all, is not a real person but a kind of ‘experimental self’, and the novel in Kundera’s hands is a ‘meditative interrogation’ conducted in the hope of getting to the heart of that self in that situation.
Vital aids to this process are certain key terms.
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CONCLUSION
Milan Kundera (IPA: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra]) (April 1, 1929 - ) is a Czech and French writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. He is best known for his combination of erotic comedy and his criticism of the Czech communist regime. In Kundera's work, the erotic, an act of individual intimacy, is a means of opposition to the repressive nature of the regime.
Kundera took part in the Prague Spring of 1968, a period of "socialism with a human face", but after it was crushed by the Soviet invasion, he was fired from his teaching post and removed from the Party.
Kundera has written in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations, but original works.
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LIST OF LITERATURE
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7. Bayley John, “Fictive Lightness, Fictive Weight,” Salmagundi 73 (Winter 1987): 84-92.
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Italo, Calvino. “Lightness.”Six Memos for the Next Millennium. trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: Vintage International VINTAGE BOOKS A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC, 1988. Print.
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