The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Tereza, like Tomáš, is a complex character. Her intellect and her keen photographic eye belie the provincialism with which Tomáš characterizes her. Although deeply and repeatedly wounded by Tomáš’s infidelities, she never ceases to love him, and some of the novel’s most important meditations on love and emotional connectivity come from Tereza.

Tereza grew up in a small town in a difficult and dysfunctional household. Her mother valued neither modesty nor privacy, thus inadvertently instilling in Tereza a deep attachment to both. Because her mother so often walked around naked and denied Tereza privacy even in the bathroom, Tereza grows up with a fixation on her own body. She longs to be able to look at herself and not see a naked woman or a woman who resembles her mother, but the pure expression of a soul that is both individual and valuable. In addition to denying her daughter private space, Tereza’s mother also fails to identify and nurture Tereza’s intellect, and she removes Tereza from school as a teenager so that she can work as a waitress in a hotel. It is here that she meets Tomáš, with whom she feels an instant kinship simply because Tomáš is reading a book. Reading for pleasure, although one of Tereza’s greatest joys, is a rarity in her village, and she is sure this is a sign that she and Tomáš have a future together.

Tereza is able to explore her intellectualism when she moves to Prague to be with Tomáš, and it is there that she realizes her innate talent as a photographer. Although she is first employed in a darkroom, her skill behind the camera results in a promotion, and it is during the Russian invasion that she truly finds her photographic eye. She shoots “roll after roll” of film, giving some to the local press and others to international papers (67). Her images are widely viewed both at home and abroad, and she is recognized as an important observer of Russia’s campaign to crush the Prague Spring. This is an important piece of her characterization, because the text often views her through Tomáš’s eyes, and he does not quite see her as the talented, artistic intellectual that she is.

Although arguably a member of Prague’s dissident community in her own right, much of Tereza’s characterization within the narrative focuses on her relationship with Tomáš. His repeated acts of infidelity tear at her emotional stability, and Tereza struggles in their marriage. She disagrees with Tomáš’s claim that sex and love are not one and the same, and she does not understand how he can so easily and so frequently betray her. Late in the narrative, when Tereza is reflecting on her relationship with their dog, Karenin, she realizes that “the love that tied her to Karenin was better than the love between her and Tomáš” (297). She decides that this is because her love for Karenin is entirely selfless, and the love that humans feel for one another is demanding: Humans want to change their partners, they want to measure their love, and they want their love to be reciprocated on their precise terms. Her love for Karenin is pure, demands nothing of Karenin, asks no questions, and seeks no answers. This is a fairly sophisticated understanding of different manifestations of love, and it again speaks to Tereza’s intelligence, intellectual depth, and complexity. She is much more than a betrayed woman in this narrative. Like Tomáš, she helps the narrator explore complex thought experiments and functions as an archetype of Czech artistic dissidence during the mid-century.

Sabina’s most important points of characterization are her sexuality, her deep commitment to individualism, and the way that she uses art to express dissident political opinion.

She is first introduced as Tomáš’s mistress, and out of all the women with whom he maintains “erotic friendships,” she is his favorite because she and Tomáš are kindred spirits. She, too, approaches sexuality with lightness and prefers relationships that lack the weight of emotional attachment. She is perfectly happy to have periodic liaisons with Tomáš whether he is married or single, and she never seeks a more “important” or permanent place in his life. She brings this same spirit of lightness to her relationship with Franz, and indeed she is moved to leave him when he leaves his wife for her: She was not looking for marriage or even a long-term commitment from Franz. For her, the highest expression of romance is that which does not weigh the individual down.

She brings this same spirit of lightness to her artistic endeavors. A student in Prague during the 1960s, she was schooled in the socialist realist school of art and taught that the role of an artist in communist society was to produce work that inspired fidelity to socialist ideology in its viewers. Although Sabina creates paintings that have the appearance of conformity with this project, her work contains hidden references to individualism and to ideas that oppose socialism, collectivist societies, and the far-left ideology of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Sabina is fiercely opposed to kitsch, which she defines as a false enthusiasm for communist ideology and the kind of aesthetic conformity demanded by the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. To Sabina, the kind of art that she is required to produce falls under the aesthetic of kitsch, and although she must do so obliquely, she uses her work to quietly rebel against the hegemony of kitsch within Soviet societies.

Her strong sense of individualism suffuses all her behaviors, values, and choices, and she defines herself largely against mainstream standards and norms. This is most evident in her understanding of the concept of betrayal. Her lover Franz sees it as the ultimate sin one can commit against one’s partner, but to Sabina “betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown” (91). Betrayal, for Sabina, means deviation from the norm. The “norm” that Sabina grew up with was the stifling strictures of communism, which sought to eradicate difference and control how people think and express themselves. Sabina is the walking, breathing, art-making embodiment of dissidence, and her character, too, represents a generation of Czech artists and intellectuals who “broke ranks” and “betrayed” communism by daring to question an ideology that suppressed its people and stifled their potential.