The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Kundera's Prague is a city under occupation and the memory of it: Tomas and Tereza love, quarrel and photograph the streets while Soviet-led tanks roll into Wenceslas Square in August 1968. The map holds the old core on both banks of the Vltava, from the square and the Old Town across Charles Bridge to the wooded rise of Petřín and the open plain of Letná, before the story leaves for exile in Zurich and a last retreat into the Bohemian countryside.

Tomas

Tomas and Tereza's flat

Prague

The surgeon Tomas and the waitress Tereza set up house in a Prague flat, sharing it with the dog Karenin. Their domestic life, his affairs and her jealousy, is the intimate weight the novel keeps setting against the huge public weight of the occupation. Kundera keeps the address vague, so the flat stands for the private Prague the tanks could not quite reach.

Part One, Lightness and Weight

inferred Kundera never gives the couple a street address. Their life together plays out in an ordinary Prague flat above the old core, so this marks a representative point in the central residential district, not a documented building.

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Tomas

The Letná plain

Prague

The open plateau of Letná, above the river on the north bank, is the kind of empty Prague space the novel uses for its quieter reckonings, the long walks and second thoughts that follow the couple's return from exile. The plain looks back across the Vltava to the Old Town, and in the Communist years its parade ground carried the weight of official spectacle that the book's private lives resist.

Part Five, Lightness and Weight

explicit Named in the book.

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