“The Unbearable Lightness of Being… How much unusual is hidden only in the title. Incompatible components, which the author easily mixes in the text, and mixes so that after reading it remains only a question – why, in fact, they were “immiscible”?

What is the book about? Well, it is about everyday philosophy; a special philosophy, original and in many ways even detached. Kundera skillfully avoids the concrete, leaving it to the reader to choose the best example of abstract reasoning. And there are examples, to be sure. Still, this is not a purely philosophical work. Yes, Kundera does not worry too much about narrative narrative, it no longer has the confident intellectuality and original generalization that is characteristic of the author’s lyrical digressions (if they can be called that at all, since they dominate the composition).

It is unlikely that Kundera had planned in advance to write The Unbearable Lightness of Being as such, and this is evident from the structure of the text. However, the plot does not disappoint, stretched through the pages of the book it is, in addition to its external significance, attracts the integrity and scope of the internal coverage of the characters, which is typical, for example, the works of Dostoevsky (certainly, to a greater extent, but also so what).

The time of the novel is the middle of the twentieth century, 1968, the place of action – Czechoslovakia. “The Prague Spring”, Secretary of the Central Committee Dubcek, the introduction of Soviet troops in Prague, the sad pages of our common history. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czechoslovakia appears to the reader in a distant (not direct) contrast with the book’s characters, who exist as if by themselves (and this under socialism!). And while some events do affect the lives of the characters, the extent of their significance is no greater than the decisions they make on their own. The genuine tragedy of the events taking place in the country silently disappears from the reader’s mind when the author, with his usual openness and sincerity, begins to talk about something higher, something more important, more significant.

There are few works in modern literature (the book was written in 1982) that could more clearly be classified as modern classics. For connoisseurs of good literature who, for whatever reason, have not yet read Milan Kundera’s novel, there should be no problem of choice here at all.