Milan kundera

totalitarian kitsch.
When I say totalitarian, what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be 
banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective 
is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts 
doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch 
everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or 
the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree Be 
fruitful and multiply.
In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to 
dispose of its refuse. 
The decade immediately following the Second World War was a time of the most 
horrible Stalinist terror. It was the time when Tereza's father was arrested on some 
piddling charge and ten-year-old Tereza was thrown out of their flat. It was also the time 
when twenty-year-old Sabina was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. There, her 
professor of Marxism expounded on the following theory of socialist art: Soviet society 
had made such progress that the basic conflict was no longer between good and evil 
but between good and better. So shit (that is, whatever is essentially unacceptable) 
could exist only on the other side (in America, for instance), and only from there, from 
the outside, as something alien (a spy, for instance), could it penetrate the world of 
good and better.
And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that 
crudest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest 
conflict that could occur between two Russians was a lovers' misunderstanding: he 
thought she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final 
scene they would fall into each other's arms, tears of happiness trickling down their 
cheeks. 
The current conventional interpretation of these films is this: that they showed the 
Communist ideal, whereas Communist reality was worse. 
Sabina always rebelled against that interpretation. Whenever she imagined the world of 
Soviet kitsch becoming a reality, she felt a shiver run down her back. She would 
unhesitatingly prefer life in a real Communist regime with all its persecution and meat 
queues. Life in the real Communist world was still livable. In the world of the 
Communist ideal made real, in that world of grinning idiots, she would have nothing to 
say, she would die of horror within a week. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
133
The feeling Soviet kitsch evoked in Sabina strikes me as very much like the horror 
Tereza experienced in her dream of being marched around a swimming pool with a 
group of naked women and forced to sing cheerful songs with them while corpses 
floated just below the surface of the pool. Tereza could not address a single question, a 
single word, to any of the women; the only response she would have got was the next 
stanza of the current song. She could not even give any of them a secret wink; they 
would immediately have pointed her out to the man standing in the basket above the 
pool, and he would have shot her dead. 
Tereza's dream reveals the true function of kitsch: kitsch is a folding screen set up to 
curtain off death. 
In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any 
questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who 
asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and 
gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact, that was exactly how Sabina had 
explained the meaning of her paintings to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; 
underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through. 
But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function 
with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the 
multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears. 
Sabina had once had an exhibit that was organized by a political organization in 
Germany. When she picked up the catalogue, the first thing she saw was a picture of 
herself with a drawing of barbed wire superimposed on it. Inside she found a biography 
that read like the life of a saint or martyr: she had suffered, struggled against injustice, 
been forced to abandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle. Her 
paintings are a struggle for happiness was the final sentence. 
She protested, but they did not understand her. 
Do you mean that modern art isn't persecuted under Communism? 
My enemy is kitsch, not Communism! she replied, infuriated. 
From that time on, she began to insert mystifications in her biography, and by the time 
she got to America she even managed to hide the fact that she was Czech. It was all 
merely a desperate attempt to escape the kitsch that people wanted to make of her life. 
She stood in front of her easel with a half-finished canvas on it, the old man in the 
armchair behind her observing every stroke of her brush. 
It's time we went home, he said at last with a glance at his watch. 
She laid down her palette and went into the bathroom to wash. The old man raised 
himself out of the armchair and reached for his cane, which was leaning against a table. 
The door of the studio led directly out to the lawn. It was growing dark. Fifty feet away 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
134
was a white clapboard house. The ground-floor windows were lit. Sabina was moved by 
the two windows shining out into the dying day. 
All her life she had proclaimed kitsch her enemy. But hadn't she in fact been carrying it 
with her? Her kitsch was her image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled 
by a loving mother and wise father. It was an image that took shape within her after the 
death of her parents. The less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more 
sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful 
daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the 
happy family's house shone out into the dying day. 
She had met the old man in New York. He was rich and liked paintings. He lived alone 
with his wife, also aging, in a house in the country. Facing the house, but still on his 
land, stood an old stable. He had had it remodeled into a studio for Sabina and would 
follow the movements of her brush for days on end. 
Now all three of them were having supper together. The old woman called Sabina my 
daughter, but all indications would lead one to believe the opposite, namely, that 
Sabina was the mother and that her two children doted on her, worshipped her, would 
do anything she asked. 
Had she then, herself on the threshold of old age, found the parents who had been 
snatched from her as a girl? Had she at last found the children she had never had 
herself? 
She was well aware it was an illusion. Her days with the aging couple were merely a 
brief interval. The old man was seriously ill, and when his wife was left on her own, she 
would go and live with their son in Canada. Sabina's path of betrayals would then 
continue elsewhere, and from the depths of her being, a silly mawkish song about two 
shining windows and the happy family living behind them would occasionally make its 
way into the unbearable lightness of being. 
Though touched by the song, Sabina did not take her feeling seriously. She knew only 
too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, 
it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming 
as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to 
escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the 
human condition. 
Kitsch has its source in the categorical agreement with being. 
But what is the basis of being? God? Mankind? Struggle? Love? Man? Woman? 
Since opinions vary, there are various kitsches: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, 
Communist, Fascist, democratic, feminist, European, American, national, international. 
Since the days of the French Revolution, one half of Europe has been referred to as the 
left, the other half as the right. Yet to define one or the other by means of the theoretical 
principles it professes is all but impossible. And no wonder: political movements rest not 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
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so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that 
come together to make up this or that