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Part 2, Chapter 22
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time, Happiness, and Eternal Return
Lightness, Weight, and Dichotomies
Sex, Love, and Duality of Body and Soul
Words and Language
Power, Politics, and Inequality
Summary
Analysis
Tereza took hundreds of photos of the Russian occupation of Prague before moving to Switzerland. She gave much of the film to the foreign press, and many of her photos were printed in Western publications. The Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia was not merely a tragedy, the narrator says, but “a carnival of hate.”
Kundera’s description of the occupation as “a carnival of hate” illustrates just how terrible the occupation was for Czechoslovakia. Thousands of pictures like Tereza’s were leaked to the foreign press, but this did the Czech people very little good.
Themes
