Milan kundera

PART SIX 
The Grand March 
Not until 1980 were we able to read in the 
Sunday Times
how Stalin's son, Yakov, died. 
Captured by the Germans during the Second World War, he was placed in a camp 
together with a group of British officers. They shared a latrine. Stalin's son habitually left 
a foul mess. The British officers resented having their latrine smeared with shit, even if 
it was the shit of the son of the most powerful man in the world. They brought the 
matter to his attention. He took offense. They brought it to his attention again and 
again, and tried to make him clean the latrine. He raged, argued, and fought. Finally, he 
demanded a hearing with the camp commander. He wanted the commander to act as 
arbiter. But the arrogant German refused to talk about shit. Stalin's son could not stand 
the humiliation. Crying out to heaven in the most terrifying of Russian curses, he took a 
running jump into the electrified barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp. He hit the 
target. His body, which would never again make a mess of the Britishers' latrine, was 
pinned to the wire. 
Stalin's son had a hard time of it. All evidence points to the conclusion that his father 
killed the woman by whom he had the boy. Young Stalin was therefore both the Son of 
God (because his father was revered like God) and His cast-off. People feared him 
twofold: he could injure them by both his wrath (he was, after all, Stalin's son) and his 
favor (his father might punish his cast-off son's friends in order to punish him). 
Rejection and privilege, happiness and woe—no one felt more concretely than Yakov 
how interchangeable opposites are, how short the step from one pole of human 
existence to the other. 
Then, at the very outset of the war, he fell prisoner to the Germans, and other 
prisoners, belonging to an incomprehensible, standoffish nation that had always been 
intrinsically repulsive to him, accused him of being dirty. Was he, who bore on his 
shoulders a drama of the highest order (as fallen angel 
and 
Son of God), to undergo 
judgment not for something sublime (in the realm of God and the angels) but for shit? 
Were the very highest of drama and the very lowest so vertiginously close? 
Vertiginously close? Can proximity cause vertigo? 
It can. When the north pole comes so close as to touch the south pole, the earth 
disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him 
to fall. 
If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the 
sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human 
existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. When Stalin's son ran up 
to the electrified wire and hurled his body at it, the fence was like the pan of a scales 
sticking pitifully up in the air, lifted by the infinite lightness of a world that has lost its 
dimensions. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
129
Stalin's son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The 
Germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country's territory to the east, the 
Russians who died to extend their country's power to the west—yes, they died for 
something idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid the 
general idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin's son stands out as the sole metaphysical 
death. 
When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and 
illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He 
was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He 
had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always 
gave me a fright, because even though I come from a family that was not particularly 
religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious. 
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of 
God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, 
namely, that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in 
God's image—and God has intestines!—or God lacks intestines and man is not like 
Him. 
The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great 
Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus ate 
and drank, but did not defecate.
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, 
we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The 
responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man. 
In the fourth century, Saint Jerome completely rejected the notion that Adam and Eve 
had sexual intercourse in Paradise. On the other hand, Johannes Scotus Erigena, the 
great ninth-century theologian, accepted the idea. He believed, moreover, that Adam's 
virile member could be made to rise like an arm or a leg, when and as its owner wished. 
We must not dismiss this fancy as the recurrent dream of a man obsessed with the 
threat of impotence. Erigena's idea has a different meaning. If it were possible to raise 
the penis by means of a simple command, then sexual excitement would have no place 
in the world. The penis would rise not because we are excited but because we order it 
to do so. What the great theologian found incompatible with Paradise was not sexual 
intercourse and the attendant pleasure; what he found incompatible with Paradise was 
excitement. Bear in mind: There was pleasure in Paradise, but no excitement. 
Erigena's argument holds the key to a theological justification (in other words, a 
theodicy) of shit. As long as man was allowed to remain in Paradise, either (like 
Valentinus' Jesus) he did not defecate at all, or (as would seem more likely) he did not 
look upon shit as something repellent. Not until after God expelled man from Paradise 
did He make him feel disgust. Man began to hide what shamed him, and by the time he 
removed the veil, he was blinded by a great light. Thus, immediately after his 
introduction to disgust, he was introduced to excitement. Without shit (in both the literal 
and figurative senses of the word), there would be no sexual love as we know it, 
accompanied by pounding heart and blinded senses. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
130
In Part Three of this novel I told the tale of Sabina standing half-naked with a bowler hat 
on her head and the fully dressed Tomas at her side. There is something I failed to 
mention at the time. While she was looking at herself in the mirror, excited by her self-
denigration, she had a fantasy of Tomas seating her on the toilet in her bowler hat and 
watching her void her bowels. Suddenly her heart began to pound and, on the verge of 
fainting, she pulled Tomas down to the rug and immediately let out an orgasmic shout. 
The dispute between those who believe that the world was created by God and those 
who think it came into being of its own accord deals with phenomena that go beyond 
our reason and experience. Much more real is the line separating those who doubt 
being as it is granted to man (no matter how or by whom) from those who accept it 
without reservation. 
Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of 
Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is 
good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a