The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera(1984)
Novelc. 310 pages
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground.”
One great work, every day
by Milan Kundera(1984)
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground.”
Milan Kundera(1984)
Kundera's 1984 novel follows two couples in Prague before and after the Soviet invasion of 1968, but its real subject is the philosophical question announced in the title: is life's lack of rehearsal, its uniqueness, a burden or a liberation? The novel moves between story and essay, between characters and ideas, in a way that recalls Dostoevsky while remaining distinctively Kundera's own. Kitsch, weight, lightness: these become vocabularies for understanding existence. The novel made Kundera internationally famous and remains his most widely read work.