The unbearable lightness of being
The unbearable lightness of being (title of the first edition: L'Insoutenable Légèreté de l'être ) is a novel by the Czech author Milan Kundera , which he published in 1984 during his exile in France. His most commercially successful work in the Czech Republic was only published in October 2006 , after the first edition in Czech was published in 1985 by 68 Publishers in Toronto (title: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí ).
action
During the Cold War , the successful Prague surgeon Tomas met the waitress Teresa. They begin a lifelong relationship that suffers from Tomas' constant affairs . Teresa is fully aware that they both have different understandings of love and sexuality . Therefore, she does not confront Tomas for a long time, but endures his behavior.
Teresa starts working as a photo reporter during the Prague Spring . With her photos she documents the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops , which ended the Czechoslovak reform policy under Alexander Dubček , before she and Tomas flee to Switzerland . There Tomas quickly found work as a surgeon and renewed his old relationship with the painter Sabina, whose relationship with the Geneva university professor Franz forms a side strand of the novel. Teresa, on the other hand, has a hard time with life in the free West, with the "unbearable lightness of being".
Teresa flees Tomas and his affairs back to Czechoslovakia . Tomas, plagued with compassion, follows her to Prague, but soon comes into conflict with the new party line because he refuses to revoke a newspaper article written during the Prague Spring. He is forced to give up his career as a surgeon and, as a window cleaner, learns a new concept of work. He uses the newly won "freedom" for new love affairs. Since Teresa can no longer bear Tomas' affairs and the oppressive atmosphere of spying and betrayal in Prague, the couple move to a small, remote village in Bohemia , where they work in an agricultural production cooperative and come to rest. There both are killed in a truck accident.
As in all of Kundera's novels, the plot is accompanied by philosophical considerations. The central thoughts of “The unbearable lightness of being” revolve around Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of “ eternal return ”.
filming
The novel was filmed in 1988 by Philip Kaufman with Juliette Binoche , Daniel Day-Lewis and Lena Olin in the leading roles under the title The unbearable lightness of being .
expenditure
- Milan Kundera: The unbearable lightness of being (original title: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí , translated by Susanna Roth) Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-596-25992-4 (German first edition: Hanser, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-446- 14105-7 . French title: L'insoutenable légerté de l'être ).
literature
- Werner Riedel, Lothar Wiese: Milan Kundera, The unbearable lightness of being: Interpretation . Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-486-88674-6
- Stefan Munaretto: Milan Kundera, The unbearable lightness of being . Bange, Hollfeld 2004, ISBN 3-8044-1808-2 (= King's Explanations and Materials , Volume 423).
