This conflicting set of views raises the question of which is correct, and against this backdrop the story begins. If, as Nietzsche believed, everything in life happens an infinite number of times, causing the “heaviest of burdens,” then a personal life in which everything happens only once loses its “weight” and significance-hence the “the unbearable lightness of being.” Within this discussion, however, the narrator also mentions the opposing theory of Parmenides, who held that light (represented by warmth and fineness) is positive, while the opposite, heaviness, is negative. The tale begins on a philosophical note, discussing Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return (or eternal recurrence). The story is set against the background of the Prague Spring of June 1968, the Soviet invasion of the country that followed in August, and the aftermath of the crackdown on liberalization. Through the lives of four individuals, the novel explores the philosophical themes of lightness and weight.
In 1985 the work was released in the original Czech, but it was banned in Czechoslovakia until 1989. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czech Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, novel by Milan Kundera, first published in 1984 in English and French translations.
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