2023-07-12 13:21:50
by IDA BOZZI
Released in France in 1984, the Czech author’s novel was exceptionally successful for how it described the human condition with extraordinary narrative effectiveness
It was the 1980s, 1984 to be precise, when The Unbearable Lightness of Being was released in France, the novel by Milan Kundera which recounted the climate of 1968 in what was then Czechoslovakia, at the end of the “Prague spring”, with the arrival in the city of Soviet tanks and the beginning of the repression: but the very painful condition of intellectuals and free spirits in the face of the invasion was narrated in the book through the filigree of a story of sentimental intertwining, betrayals and passions, bright and poignant , between four protagonists, engaged in complex love affairs that gain the foreground in the book compared to the life of censorship and deprivation that forms the background.
That lightness, alongside the heaviness of the human condition, overwhelmed freedom and the pessimism that accompanied the Soviet invasion, made its way into the hearts of the whole West. Kundera’s “lightness”, in a novel that was actually extremely thoughtful and very bitter, became proverbial, and when it was published in Italy by Calasso for Adelphi, in 1985, it became the book “to read”, or at least to keep in your pocket, for all Italian intellectuals, from students to militants, because it accompanied the intelligentsia’s critical reflection on the Soviet regime and arrived in an Italy grappling with the “reflux” in the private sphere after the trauma of terrorism.
The title of the novel, in particular, has entered into daily life, giving way to a series of direct and indirect quotations as far as pop culture, starting with the piece by Antonello Venditti which is entitled This unbearable lightness of being, to arrive to the song «in Battiato style» composed by Stefano Bollani and entitled Have you ever read Kundera?. What is, in fact, the “lightness of being” which constitutes “the false aspiration” of Kundera’s protagonists, Kundera himself says in the book: “The absolute absence of a burden causes man to become more light than air, it takes flight upwards, it moves away from the earth, from earthly being, it becomes only half real and its movements are as free as they are meaningless».
July 12, 2023 (change July 12, 2023 | 1:21 pm)
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