How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph), with the exception of Part V, which runs (Part#. "Short Title". Paragraph). Part V has no numbered chapters—only title headings.
Quote #1
It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. (I.2.1)
Kundera spends a lot of time talking about how the destruction of a culture or people happens when its past—history, language, rituals—is somehow erased. For Kundera, that erasure usually happens at the hands of a ruthless, totalitarian government, but it can happen on a more personal level, too. Mirek has nooo problem trying to obliterate his past love for an ugly woman (!) so that his history will jibe with the image he has of himself.
Quote #2
The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything. (I.5.1)
We see this kind of global forgetting every day: one calamity replaces another in our minds, as if we don't have the capacity to handle all the tragedy swirling around us at one time. The problem with this? History has a tendency to repeat itself (see that list above) if we aren't aware of how easy it is to fall into brutality.
Quote #3
And because not even the shadow of a bad memory should distract the country from its restored idyll, both the Prague Spring and the arrival of the Russian tanks, that stain on a beautiful history, had to be reduced to nothing. That is why today in Bohemia the August 21 anniversary goes by silently and the names of those who rose up against their own youth are carefully erased from the country's memory, like mistakes in a schoolchild's homework. (I.10.4)
Kundera makes it clear that Communism is above all things an "ideal" or "idyll"—a dream of the perfection of society—rather than just a political or social stance. The difficulty with idylls is that they're unrealistic: an idyll is something that doesn't or cannot actually exist when you start to add people and ambitions into the mix. Kundera knows this firsthand. The Communist "idyll" is shaken by the Prague Spring and defaced by the violence that follows when the Russians decide to clamp down on Czechoslovakia at the end of the summer of 1968. Hence the need for erasure. Blots are no good for an idyll.
Quote #4
Mirek rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. (I.17.6)
Kundera gives the past a weighty value. It has the power to dictate how we move forward, as well as how we create ourselves as people or as a nation. If you take a look at any political campaign, you'll notice that there's a whole lot of modification of the past going on, just for this reason. Politicians are either spinning past events to make themselves look better (or less bad), or they're suppressing it to make sure that we don't find the skeletons in the closet.
Owning the past is power for the future: it's a free pass to control the national or personal story—and shape what it looks like in the future.
Quote #5
They wanted to efface thousands of lives from memory and leave nothing but an unstained age of unstained idyll. But Mirek is going to land his small body on that idyll, like a stain. He'll stay there just as Clementis's hat stayed on Gottwald's head. (I.19.4)
Mirek has made some questionable choices as a man living under a Communist regime. For one, he's kept detailed documents of conversations and meetings (including names) that will be used to destroy his own life and the lives of those around him. This is a total downer, but Mirek has found a silver lining in his downfall: his imprisonment will (one day) be proof that not all was sunshine and buttercups under Communist rule.
Quote #6
Recapturing the lines of his nose and chin, she was horrified every day to notice the imaginary sketch showing newly questionable points introduced by the uncertain memory that was doing the drawing. (IV.4.6)
Tamina has never left off grieving for her dead husband. She can't move on because she feels that her identity is completely wrapped up in her married life—and, by extension, in her husband's identity. Problem? Uh, he's dead. He no longer has an identity, except for what she retains in her memory. And that's getting pretty spotty.
Lost loved ones have a way of fading from our minds as we replace memories with present life. But Tamina can't accept this as a normal process because she doesn't value her present life in the same way as she values her past.
Quote #7
For Tamina is adrift on a raft and looking back, looking only back. Her entire being contains only what she sees there, far behind her. Just as her past contracts, disintegrates, dissolves, so Tamina is shrinking and losing her contours. (IV.5.9)
This is the problem of living in the past: you make nothing of your present life. For Tamina, the tragedy of her husband's death is also a loss of her own life, at least in part. She's so invested in the life that's now gone that she sees no future for herself and no purpose in the present. It's a desperate place to be, and it drives Tamina to some pretty questionable behavior.
Quote #8
The time of Kafka's novel is the time of a humanity that has lost its continuity with humanity, of a humanity that no longer knows anything and no longer remembers anything and lives in cities without names where the streets are without names or with names different from those they had yesterday, because a name is continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name. (VI.1.4)
Hence the term "Kafkaesque": disorienting, nightmarish, senseless. Kundera identifies with Kafka precisely because Prague is the city that inspires this feeling in both of them. It's a place that suffers under the tyranny of people who want to erase the city's past and its culture.
Why would anyone want to do this, you ask? In order to dominate the people who live there. It's really easy to control something once you take hold of its identity and shape it for your own purposes. And this is the reality of Kundera's life in Prague under the Communist regime.
Quote #9
"You begin to liquidate a people," Hübl said, "by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was." (VI.2.4)
Kundera's historian friend Milan Hübl understands that there's power in owning the identity and past of an entire people. If you can erase or modify what people think they know about themselves, you can make them think anything—about themselves, about you, about everything. It's an insidious power, but it's way effective.
Quote #10
Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge! (VI.8.9)
Tamina has this startling epiphany after years of waging a battle against the loss of her past life—but it's too late for her to do anything useful with this new info. Had she been able to act on this, she might have been reminded of the useful bits of her past by making a life for herself in the present.
But she's already surrendered to the urge for self-destruction by wanting to drop the weight of the past that's moving quickly away from her. What she gets instead is a life without "weight"—no meaning, no purpose, and no future.