In Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the protagonists are confronted with the easy and difficult choices they make in life. Now we show you how the work, translated into many languages, has been published with different covers in different countries!
Milan Kundera, the Czech-born French writer was born in Brno in 1929, where a library was opened this year to celebrate his 94th birthday. The writer had a controversial relationship with his homeland: after the Prague Spring of 1968, in which he took an active part, the regime of the time banned his books, but he was allowed to travel to Paris, where he became friends with the publisher Claude Gallimard. He finally emigrated to France in 1975 and became a French citizen in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019. Kundera passed away in Paris on 11 July 2023.
Kundera won numerous literary prizes throughout his career, and his best-known work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was published in 1984. The novel is about the lives of two women, two men, and a dog during the Prague Spring of 1968. The story is interwoven with philosophical-historical-political reflections, the most important of which is the theory of eternal return: “The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?” Everything in life happens only once, never again—hence the lightness of being. However, if everything repeats itself, forever, over and over again, it is difficult to make life-defining choices. This drama and tension are illustrated by the lives of Tomáš, Sabina, and Tereza.
Hats, dogs, and the city of Prague are recurring motifs on the book’s covers, but the swimming pool and the male-female relationship also appear repeatedly. Artworks such as paintings by Dalí, Magritte, and Chagall have also been used for covers.
One novel, twenty-seven languages, forty-two covers. Which one is your favorite?
The book+covers series presents the covers of Central and Eastern European literary classics published in countries all over the world.
Cover graphics: Roland Molnár
Translation used for the quotation: 2009, Harper Perennial, New York City, NY, USA. Translation: Michael Henry Heim
Milan Kundera: A lét elviselhetetlen könnyűsége. Európa Kiadó, Budapest, 2002. Fordította: Körtvélyessy Klára
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