The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The narrator tells a story about Stalin’s son Yakov. Rumor had it that Stalin had killed his mother, so the boy embodies both rejection and privilege. The narrator posits if rejection and privilege can be one and the same, then “human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light” (244). Rumor has it that Stalin’s son died in a prisoner-of-war camp as the result of a series of arguments about the camp latrines. The narrator is struck by the role that “shit” plays in this story and remembers hearing as a child that man was created in God’s image. If that was so, he thought, then God had intestines and used the bathroom like men did. The narrator realizes that most people tend to ignore such ideas and decides that “the aesthetic ideal of the categorial agreement with being in a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as if it didn’t exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch” (248).

Sabina’s “inner revolt against communism” is against its aesthetic rather than its ethics (248). It is to kitsch that she objects so strongly. She sees in communist society a feigned enthusiasm for collectivism, which she likens to a “mask of beauty” (251).