The Unbearable Lightness of Being () is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera about two women, two men, a dog, and their lives in the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history.
Though written in 1982, the novel was not published until two years later, in a French translation (as L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être). The same year, it was translated from Czech into English by Michael Henry Heim, and excerpts were published in The New Yorker.
The original Czech-language text was published the following year. A feature-length film adaptation of the same title was released in 1988.
In 1968, TomÃ¡à ¡, a gifted surgeon in Prague, lives according to a personal philosophy of âÂÂlightnessâÂÂ, indulging in numerous sexual encounters without attachment. Previously married, he avoids all contact with his former wife and their young son, à  imon, embracing a life of permanent detachment. During a trip to a provincial town, he meets Tereza, a café waitress. When she later follows him to the capital, he understands that she is essentially entrusting her life to him. As a habitual womanizer, he initially resists his growing affection, but eventually gives in to it.
Tereza, dissatisfied with her existence in her small hometown and eager to escape her coarse mother, sees in TomÃ¡à ¡ both an intellectual and a dreamer. She falls for him immediately. They move in together, yet TomÃ¡à ¡ continues seeing other women. At first he conceals his infidelity, but later admits it, insisting that his sexual encounters have no bearing on his devotion to her. Unable to embrace such a separation between love and physical desire, Tereza is plagued by disturbing dreams and sinks into despair, contemplating suicide.
The political liberalization of the Prague Spring ends abruptly in August with the Soviet invasion. Because of a past essay criticizing the ruling regime, TomÃ¡à ¡ is warned to flee. In 1969, hoping to secure TerezaâÂÂs happiness, TomÃ¡à ¡ marries herbut does not abandon his lovers. Among them is Sabina, a talented, free-spirited painter and his closest confidante. Tereza is drawn to SabinaâÂÂs openness, and they become friends. Sabina even helps Tereza find work as a photographer in Prague, but the undercurrent of jealousy over TomÃ¡à ¡ remains.
In 1970, Sabina leaves for the West, and eventually TomÃ¡à ¡ and Tereza join her in Zurich, Switzerland. However, Tereza feels purposeless without her photography and grows resentful while TomÃ¡à ¡ continues his affairs. Believing that âÂÂwhen the strong are too weak to hurt the weak, the weak must be strong enough to leaveâÂÂ, she returns to Czechoslovakia a year later. TomÃ¡à ¡, after briefly enjoying his regained independence, follows her back later that same yearknowing this means abandoning the possibility of leaving the country again.
However, in Prague, 1972, TomÃ¡à ¡âÂÂs political troubles deepen. He refuses to sign a statement retracting his political criticism, costing him his surgical career. Both state authorities and dissident circles attempt to enlist him, but he rejects being used by either. His estranged son, à  imon, now politically active, lectures him to no avail. Seeking anonymity, TomÃ¡à ¡ takes work cleaning windows, though his notoriety endures, and he continues his sexual encounters with other women.
In 1973, Tereza, now working as a bartender, has an affair with a visiting engineer in an attempt to emulate TomÃ¡à ¡âÂÂs detachment. The experience leaves her feeling worseconvinced the man was a police informant gathering evidence. After much emotional turmoil, she persuades TomÃ¡à ¡ to relocate to a rural village, ending his sexual encounters. Life in the countryside brings them tranquility, but their time is cut short when they die together in a sudden car accident the following year.
Meanwhile in Geneva, 1971, Sabina embarks on a relationship with Franz, a married academic whose idealism aligns more with TerezaâÂÂs sensibilities than her own. Franz idolizes Sabina, but feels tormented by betraying his wife, Marie-Claude. Sabina, in contrast, views this betrayal as an exhilarating step into the unknown.
A year after, when Franz leaves his marriage expecting to live with her, Sabina disappearsfirst to Paris, then to the United States. Two years later, she learns of TomÃ¡à ¡ and TerezaâÂÂs deaths from a letter, sensing the severing of her last tie to her past. Settling temporarily with an elderly American couple, Sabina wonders if her restless wandering has finally reached its end.
In 1975, Franz remains separated from his wife and begins seeing a young student with oversized glasses who adores him. Still clinging to a romanticized vision of Sabina, he dies believing she would have approved of his choices. After his death, his wife takes charge of his burial, inscribing his grave with the words, âÂÂA return after long wanderingsâÂÂ.
Challenging the concept of eternal recurrence (the idea that the universe and its events have already occurred and will recur ad infinitum), the story's thematic meditations posit the alternative: that each person has only one life to live and that which occurs in life occurs only once and never again â thus the "lightness" of being. Moreover, this lightness also signifies freedom; TomÃ¡à ¡ and Sabina display this lightness, whereas Tereza's character is "weighed down". In Constance Garnett's translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace she gives us the phrase "strange lightness of being" during the description of Prince Andrey's death. In contrast, the concept of eternal recurrence imposes a "heaviness" on life and the decisions that are made. Nietzsche believed this heaviness could be either a tremendous burden or great benefit depending on the individual's perspective.
Quoting Kundera from the book:
<blockquote>The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ... When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina â what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.</blockquote>
In the novel, Nietzsche's concept is attached to an interpretation of the German adage 'one occurrence is not significant'; namely, an "all-or-nothing" cognitive distortion that TomÃ¡à ¡ must overcome in his hero's journey. He initially believes "If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all," and specifically (with respect to committing to Tereza) "There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison." The novel resolves this question decisively that such a commitment is in fact possible and desirable.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) was not published in the original Czech until 1985 by the exile publishing house 68 Publishers (Toronto, Ontario). The second Czech edition was published in October 2006, in Brno, Czech Republic, some 18 years after the Velvet Revolution, because Kundera did not approve it earlier. The first English translation by Michael Henry Heim was published in hardback in 1984 by Harper & Row in the U.S. and Faber and Faber in the UK and in paperback in 1985.
In 1988, an American-made film adaptation of the novel was released starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche and directed by Philip Kaufman. In a note to the Czech edition of the book, Kundera remarks that the movie had very little to do with the spirit either of the novel or the characters in it. In the same note, Kundera goes on to say that after this experience he no longer allows any adaptations of his work.