Before reading “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera (post 1): Author’s perspective from his nonfiction “The Art of the Novel”

“All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self” (1, p. 23).

“In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza is staring at herself in the mirror…And if her face no longer looked like Tereza, would Tereza still be Tereza? Where does the self begin and end?” (1, p. 28).

“The original title considered for The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The Planet of Inexperience.” Inexperience as a quality of the human condition. We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what we’re headed for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience” (1, p. 132).

“The final version of [Anna Karenina] is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work” (1, p. 158).

1. Milan Kundera. The Art of the Novel [1986]. Translated from the French by Linda Asher. New York, Harper Perennial, 2003.

2. Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]. Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.