Milan kundera

maitre et proprietaire de la nature. 
And 
surely there is a deep connection between that step and the fact that he was also the 
one who point-blank denied animals a soul. Man is master and proprietor, says 
Descartes, whereas the beast is merely an automaton, an animated machine, a 
machina
animata
. When an animal laments, it is not a lament; it is merely the rasp of a 
poorly functioning mechanism. When a wagon wheel grates, the wagon is not in pain; it 
simply needs oiling. Thus, we have no reason to grieve for a dog being carved up alive 
in the laboratory. 
While the heifers grazed, Tereza sat on a stump with Karenin at her side, his head 
resting in her lap. She recalled reading a two-line filler in the papers ten or so years ago 
about how all the dogs in a certain Russian city had been summarily shot. It was that 
inconspicuous and seemingly insignificant little article that had brought home to her for 
the first time the sheer horror of her country's oversized neighbor. 
That little article was a premonition of things to come. The first years following the 
Russian invasion could not yet be characterized as a reign of terror. Because practically 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
150
no one in the entire nation agreed with the occupation regime, the Russians had to 
ferret out the few exceptions and push them into power. But where could they look? All 
faith in Communism and love for Russia was dead. So they sought people who wished 
to get back at life for something, people with revenge on the brain. Then they had to 
focus, cultivate, and maintain those people's aggressiveness, give them a temporary 
substitute to practice on. 
The substitute they lit upon was animals. 
All at once the papers started coming out with cycles of features and organized letters-
to-the-editor campaigns demanding, for example, the extermination of all pigeons within 
city limits. And the pigeons would be exterminated. But the major drive was directed 
against dogs. People were still disconsolate over the catastrophe of the occupation, but 
radio, television, and the press went on and on about dogs: how they soil our streets 
and parks, endanger our children's health, fulfill no useful function, yet must be fed. 
They whipped up such a psychotic fever that Tereza had been afraid that the crazed 
mob would do harm to Karenin. Only after a year did the accumulated malice (which 
until then had been vented, for the sake of training, on animals) find its true goal: 
people. People started being removed from their jobs, arrested, put on trial. At last the 
animals could breathe freely. 
Tereza kept stroking Karenin's head, which was quietly resting in her lap, while 
something like the following ran through her mind: There's no particular merit in being 
nice to one's fellow man. She had to treat the other villagers decently, because 
otherwise she couldn't live there. Even with Tomas, she was 
obliged
to behave lovingly 
because she needed him. We can never establish with certainty what part of our 
relations with others is the result of our emotions—love, antipathy, charity, or malice—
and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals. 
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its 
recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies 
deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: 
animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so 
fundamental that all others stem from it. 
One of the heifers had made friends with Tereza. The heifer would stop and stare at her 
with her big brown eyes. Tereza knew her. She called her Marketa. She would have 
been happy to give all her heifers names, but she was unable to. There were too many 
of them. Not so long before, forty years or so, all the cows in the village had names. 
(And if having a name is a sign of having a soul, I can say that they had souls despite 
Descartes.) But then the villages were turned into a large collective factory, and the 
cows began spending all their lives in the five square feet set aside for them in their 
cow sheds. From that time on, they have had no names and become mere