Study Guide

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Part 6, Chapter 11

By Milan Kundera

Part 6, Chapter 11

A person who asks questions is the enemy of kitsch, because questions cut through the screen to let us look behind it.
Think about the way that Sabina explained her paintings to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie, and underneath, the unintelligible truth.
Once Sabina had an exhibition of her paintings in Germany.
In the promotion, she read a bio of herself that painted her to be a martyr escaped from her bleeding homeland. Clearly, they did not understand her at all. Her enemy was kitsch, she fumed, not Communism.
She started hiding the fact that she was Czech so that people would stop thinking of her this way.