The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), by Milan Kundera, is a philosophic novel about a man and his two women and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968. Although written in 1982, the novel was not published until two years later, in France; the Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí and French: l'Insoutenable légèreté de l'être titles are the more common worldwide. The Unbearable Lightness of Being catalogues ... more

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), by Milan Kundera, is a philosophic novel about a man and his two women and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968. Although written in 1982, the novel was not published until two years later, in France; the Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí and French: l'Insoutenable légèreté de l'être titles are the more common worldwide. The Unbearable Lightness of Being catalogues Prague in 1968, the artistic and intellectual life of Czech society during the Communist period, from the Prague Spring to the USSR’s August 1968 invasion and its aftermath, and until 1984. The characters are Tomáš, a successful surgeon; his wife Tereza, a photographer anguished by his infidelities; Sabina, a free-spirit artist, who is Tomáš’s lover; and the secondary characters Franz, the Swiss university professor lover of Sabina; and Simon, Tomáš’s estranged son from an earlier marriage. Challenging Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal... less