Milan Kundera Research Articles

The Unbearable Lightness of Casablanca: In Defense of a Committed Cosmopolitanism

ABSTRACT Via exposition of the classic Hollywood film Casablanca, and with reference to Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the nature of cosmopolitanism is critically explored. Both the propagandistic function of the film, justifying American entry into World War II, and the qualified love story at its center are explicated to support a “committed” cosmopolitanism, an understanding of that disposition that would distinguish it from a cynical neutrality, at a political level, and from a self- justifying conception of romantic love, on an interpersonal level.

Comic Ironic Modes in New Romanian Cinema

ETHICS IS THE NEW AESTHETICS: COMIC IRONIC MODES IN NEW ROMANIAN CINEMA Irony irritates us because it denies us our certainties by unmasking the world as ambiguity.– Milan Kundera Irony indicates saying (or showing) as little as possible and meaning as much as possible …[thereby] relying on complete objectivity and suppressionof all moral judgements.– Northrop Frye In a study on the role of irony in New Romanian Cinema (NRC), entitled The New Romanian Cinema Between the Tragic and the Ironic, we referred to the proximity - indeed, interchangeability - of the NRC realism with the tragic and the ironic, which 'sometimes, as in Corneliu Porumboiu's and Radu Jude's films,' colludes with the comedic 'by balancing on the verge of dead-pan black humour, suspense and existential angst' and even absurdity (Stojanova, Duma 2012:14). In light of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism...

David James The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary FictionThe Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction. Edited by David James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. v+287.

<i>David James</i> The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction<i>The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction</i>. Edited by David James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. v+287.

‘Keeping head above water’: A case study in religious leadership in a polluted context

‘We must stop wasting our precious water – and also stop polluting it.’ These are the words of Dr Jo Barnes, Epidemiologist and Senior Lecturer in Community Health at the University of Stellenbosch’s Faculty for Health Sciences. Her research involves the quality of water in rivers and its health impact on communities. It is general knowledge that health services are struggling under the burden of diseases resulting from environmental pollution, particularly water pollution. This potentially avoidable crisis is slowly turning into a disaster. The article draws on a case study done in the informal settlement of Sweet Home Farm in Philippi, Cape Town, with the intent of compiling a descriptive empirical report on the way the community deals with human waste. In a next step, interpretive lenses are used to look with ‘deeper understanding’ at the problem of human waste and pollution. After that, the focus shifts to the problem of a theology of human waste, and the article concludes with suggestions on the role of religious leadership and ways in which leaders can play a constructive role in handling the crisis of a polluted context.Toilets in the modern water closets rise up from the floor like water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain … Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, as a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image – and has intestines! – or God lacks intestines and man is not like him. (Milan Kundera, The unbearable lightness of being 1984:132)Water is life, sanitation is dignity. (City of Cape Town, n.d., ‘Water and sanitation services standard’, Preliminary draft 2, March 2008)

The type of structure based on music in Milan Kundera’s Immortality novel

Milan Kundera's Immortality is linked to a type of art and music – a completely extraordinary and strange structure in terms of fiction art, which makes the works more poetic, delicate and lithesome in conveying an art message of great significance. It's “modern disillusion” which man finally find from deep down in himself .

Word and Music Studies: Essays on Performativity and on Surveying the Field.

Word and Music Studies: Essays on Performativity and on Surveying the Field.

“Love Is a Losing Game”: Textual Games in Milan Kundera's “The Hitchhiking Game”

SummaryA couple who indulge in a tongue-in-cheek game of pretence soon discover that role-play can, in fact, reveal more about themselves – their real selves – and their partner, than it conceals. What begins on a whim as an indulgent and innocent bit of sport soon spirals out of control to threaten the dynamics of the couple's relationship, increasingly hampering their ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy. The authors of this article contend that Milan Kundera's “The Hitchhiking Game”, one of seven short stories in the anthology Laughable Loves (1974), benefits from being read in terms of Roger Caillois's (1967) taxonomy of games and play, which differentiates between competition, chance, mimicry and vertigo in respect of players’ attitudes towards play. This theory is expanded by Wolfgang Iser (1993), who relates these four categories to the analysis of texts, introducing the concept of textual games. Employing the mimicry—chance binary seems particularly apt for this story as it highlights the unlimited potential for sustained illusion, as opposed to the limitations imposed by the finite nature of the text and the characters’ eventual disillusionment. In this tale of erotic love, the laughter hinted at in the title of the anthology is revealed to be rather wry, personal identity is shown to be ambiguous, and love often appears to be tainted by uncertainty.

Kirjaniku maapagu: eksiili rõõmust ja vaevast

This article begins with a consideration of the problematics of exile as viewed in the essays of Tomas Venclova and Edward Said. On the one hand, exile has implications for the creativity of the writer as an individual. On the other, a „worldly“ perspective on literature in Said`s sense insists on keeping in view the global phenomenon of the mass displacement of refugees. The task of the article is to articulate a modest number of theoretical perspectives and concepts identified in research on exile over the past few decades , as well as others that may have become exaggerated, swollen with significance, or unwieldy from overuse. Terminological issues, such as nuances of meaning between the words refugee and expatriate, emigre and exile are considered with critical focus on Said´s useful situation of these concepts. The main sections of the article are devoted respectively to the effect of exile on the language of writing, nostalgia, and connections between exile and narration. It is argued that tension between the „home“ language (or mother tongue) and the language spoken in the place of exile can be a productive one, even as it may offer unforeseen alternatives, such as choosing yet a third language for creative work. Nostalgia, a „structure of feeling“, is not a necessary concomitant of exile, and can stand in multiple and complex relation to cultural understandings of loss. As Peter Fritzsche has proposed, nostalgia can also be related as to temporal ruptures , and seen as a disease of modernity. Narration, perceived by some theorists (such as Michael Seidel) as endemic to the condition of exile, may not prove to be such an imperative. Such broad statements need qualification, as well as the recognition that the imbrication of storytelling and exilic journeys harks back to ancient texts: Homer`s Odyssey and the cycle of Joseph stories in the Hebrew Bible. The last part of the article examines Julia Kristeva`s paradoxical relation to the topic of exile through her examination of the Stranger in Etrangers à nous-mêmes and her meditation on the mother tongue in the essay „Bulgaria, My Suffering.“ While exile can be a human tragedy, its „joys“ should not be disregarded, nor seen necessarily as a pale compensation for what is lost. Finally, the article briefly addresses the problematic of the exile´s return home—either for a visit or to stay. Milan Kundera`s concepts of lightness and heaviness, and in particular his novel on the returning exile, L`Ignorance provide insight into the ironies and lyricism of the post-exilic condition.

Kundera’s kidnap revisited

This article is concerned with Milan Kundera’s essay ‘A kidnapped West, or Culture bows out’, which first appeared in 1984. It considers Kundera’s essay in the context of the Reagan/Thatcher/Kohl era, examining the mythical elements of Kundera’s ‘Central Europe’, its diversity and its unifying elements. Rather than regard the essay as a museum piece, the article reflects on Kundera’s lasting and unresolved concern with the impact of totalitarianism – communist, Nazi and capitalist – on European identity and culture.

La Revelation inachevee: le personnage a l'epreuve de la verite romanesque

Yannick Roy's ambitious essay is an exploration of the role of fictional characters and of the ways in which authors and readers relate to them. He describes this relation as inherently paradoxical since it requires the reader's and the author's identification with, and detachment from, the characters. Following Milan Kundera, Roy views the novel as a reaction against the reification of man by scientific thought; the novel is an epistemological tool that conveys a distinct kind of savoir. Instead of reifying the object of its knowledge, namely the fictional characters, it consists in an ‘exploration of being’ (p. 13) that approaches the characters from the inside — rendering thus the savoir of the novel perpetually inachevé, as the essay's title hints. Roy argues that two major theories of the novel — René Girard's and Mikhail Bakhtin's — express different aspects of this savoir : he espouses both Girard's claim that the novel's true aim is to reveal the inauthenticity and the mediated nature of desire, and Bakhtin's belief that the highest achievement of the genre, accomplished only by Dostoevsky, is the freedom of the fictional characters from the authorial consciousness and their presentation in such a way as to appear to be subjects with whom the author or the reader can enter into dialogue. Roy engages in a subtle analysis that illuminates several points of contrast between these two theories of the novel, as well as several ways in which they complement each other. However, in order to reconcile them and streamline them to fit his own argument, he criticizes what, in his opinion, constitutes their blind spots. Girard's thesis is, in this sense, too clear-cut in equating the novel with truth and in precluding any identification with the deluded characters who fall into the romantic trap of believing their desires to be authentic. Roy argues that the revelation of the truth by the novelists Girard privileges cannot but be partial and that there are always residual elements of the ‘romantic lie’ in the truth of the novel that would allow the readers to identify with the fictional characters. Bakhtin, on the other hand, is criticized for overemphasizing Dostoevsky's virtues. Roy argues that Bakhtin's concepts are too abstract and can be seen only as ‘relative truths’: in a somewhat unrewarding analysis of Flaubert, Roy concludes that a ‘minimal’ presence of dialogism can be found in any novel, to the extent that a reader can identify with the fictional characters. In his analysis of Bakhtin, Roy admits that, in order to expand the meaning of dialogism to include Flaubert's novels, he had to ‘dilute’ the concept (p. 165) — a statement that, to a lesser extent, could also be applied to his treatment of Girard. His attempt at synthesizing Girard's and Bakhtin's theories of the novel comes at a cost: both approaches lose, in their attenuated version, much of their interpretative thrust as well as most of their charm.

Humanity’s “True Moral Test”: Shame, Idyll, and Animal Vulnerability in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This essay reinterprets Kundera’s best-known novel through philosophical considerations of vulnerability and the human/animal relationship. It begins with an understanding of irony—associated with Cora Diamond’s notion of embodiment shared by humans and animals—as a counter to Cartesian mastery of nature. It turns to the denial of embodiment through shame and disgust, as theorized by Martha Nussbaum and illustrated with several characters. One main character, Tereza, stands out against a normotic backdrop of human disembodiment (which Kundera calls kitsch). Her acceptance of vulnerability and encounter with shame gradually envelop her spouse, Tomas, as well. The final section examines the novel’s closing pastoral passages, in which a thorough investigation of human and nonhuman animality takes place, leaving the reader somewhere between an extremely empathetic Tereza and a sympathetic but gently skeptical narrator. It describes the novel as a “fallen idyll” where human vulnerability and shame can be expressed and considered.

Reproducing producers: Kundera, Stravinsky and the orchestration of translation

The traditional view that draws a sharp distinction between “producers” (authors) and “reproducers” (translators), though problematized in postmodern scholarship, is still prevalent in the discourse about translation by professionals and laypeople alike. In this article I examine this binary primarily through a critique of novelist Milan Kundera's and composer Igor Stravinsky's interwoven views related to musical performance and translation. While promoting innovation for their original productions, they hold fast to traditional, essentialist notions when discussing the role of those who reproduce their work. After establishing how their practices undermine their own views, I propose that we reflect on translation as a form of orchestration – that is, a complete reworking of a text for a different set of instruments, a different language. By thinking along these lines, we can develop a more realistic notion of translation and create a new language with which to discuss it.

Scenes of shame, social roles, and the play with masks

This article explores various scenes of shame, raising the questions of what shame discloses about the self and how this self-disclosure takes place. Thereby, the common idea that shame discloses the self’s debasement will be challenged. The dramatic dialectics of showing and hiding display a much more ambiguous, dynamic self-image as result of an interactive evaluation of oneself by oneself and others. Seeing oneself seen contributes to the sense of who one becomes. From being absorbed in what one does, one might suddenly become self-aware, shift viewpoints and feel pressed to put on masks. In putting on a mask, one relates to oneself in distancing oneself from oneself. In being at once a moral agent and a performing actor with an audience and norms in mind, one embodies and transcends the social roles one takes. In addition to the feeling of shame, in which the self finds itself passively reflected, the self’s active reflections on its shame are to be taken into account. As examples from Milan Kundera, Shakespeare’s King Lear, a line from Kingsley Amis, a speech by Vaclav Havel and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments indicate, self-(re)presentation in the public and the private sphere is a complex hermeneutical process with surprising twists.

Próby z Kundery. Kilka uwag na temat figuratywności

The essay tends to illuminate a series of rhetorical operations, presented and commented in the literary works of Milan Kundera, in order to discuss their performative activity, conjoined with their important participation in the textual structure. According to the author of L’art du roman, a figure of metaphor seems to be at the forefront in the privileged realm of novel, however, its phenomenological character demands to be put in question since the aforementioned figure confronts an ironic necessity regarding the apophantic essence of writing. Thus the negative work of irony manages to destabilize the phenomenological or existential metaphor that is consequently perceived in the opposition to the ornament metaphor, which is to determine the poetic imagination. Furthermore, Kundera’s irony also results in a significant involvement of the set of subsequent rhetorical devices, and among of them an extra-ordinary event of ellipsis should be taken into consideration for it perfectly renders the idyllic desire of (a) non-presence, manifested or illustrated by the case of Agnes in Immortality. Kundera’s texts, reread in the intertextual perspective, partly indicated by the writer himself, partly revealed as the essay’s intention, establish therefore an unlimited possibility of interpretation, possibility that has to remain a sequence of attempts,streaked with the art of misreading.

Prague: The Czech Republic's “Dear Little Mother”

photos: logan webb notebook Prague City Profile Cities are like oceans: their ebbs and flows offer glimpses of their depths, providing contrasts between what we know and what they’ve yet to reveal. Similarly, Prague’s staccato bursts of modernism are juxtaposed against its wonderfully intact feudal atmosphere, creating a delicious sense of fluidity between medieval and modern. Often referred to as the city of a thousand spires, Prague’s simultaneously idyllic and austere landscape hosts the Prague Writers’ Festival (www.pwf.cz) each spring. Since its inception in 1991, the festival has sought to bring together the minds of great authors—often Nobel, Pulitzer , and Booker Prize recipients—and readers to encourage cross-cultural discussion. Proposed in the late 1970s, the festival began as a rather small poetry reading in London before relocating to Prague’s Valdštejnský Palác (Wallenstein Palace ), the home of the Czech Senate. How could the Czech Republic’s Golden City not be the perfect location for thousands of literature lovers to convene? From housing numerous royals, to hosting the world premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, to what would have been Adolf Hitler’s home had his efforts been successful, Prague’s rich history is ubiquitous. Prague’s connection to the literary world doesn’t end with the writers’ festival. The city is peppered with literary cafés and antikvariats (used bookstores) stacked high with decades-old volumes. These locales are sure to satisfy even the most insatiable hunger for Czech literature, including, of course, the works of Prague’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, whose influence haunts every obscure alleyway, from cobbled street below to ascetic spire above. One of the most popular you-gotta-be-lost-to-find-it literary haunts is the Tynska Literary Café just beyond Old Town. Concealed in a meandering alley, Tynska’s walled courtyard sits just beneath the twin spires of the Church of Our Lady Before Týn, providing a hidden nook for reading, writing, and drinking. A city of contradiction, Prague is simultaneously warm and stern, soft and severe, no doubt leading Kafka to write, “Prague never lets you go . . . this dear little mother has sharp claws.” Logan Webb is an art student at the University of Science & Arts of Oklahoma. The Czech Republic’s “Dear Little Mother” What to Read at Tynska Caleb Crain, Necessary Errors Myla Goldberg, Time’s Magpie Franz Kafka, The Trial, tr. Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, tr. Michael Henry Heim (HarperCollins, 2004) Gustav Meyrink, The Golem, tr. Mike Mitchell (Dedalus, 2011) Jáchym Topol, City Sister Silver, tr. Alex Zucker (Catbird Press, 2000) Logan Webb November–December 2014 • 5 ...

Rytų europiečio sindromas šiuolaikinės (e)migracijos naratyvuose

Employing the notion of imagology as a general imitational principle in modern-day society (Milan Kundera) and the concepts of hetero-image, self-image, and imageme introduced by literary imagology (Joep Leerssen), this article focuses on literary representations of Eastern Europeans in the latest wave Lithuanian, Latvian and Bulgarian émigré narratives. The selected narrative corpus includes four émigré novels generated in Britain: Vilis Lacitis’ Stroika with the view to London (2010), Alek Popov’s Mission in London (2012), Aleksandra Fomina’s We visited the island yesterday (2011) and Zita Čepaitė’s The breeze of London (2013).In discussing several manifestations of emigrants from the post-communist bloc, the author of the article concludes that the inherited patterns of Soviet mentality determine a similar structure of characters‘ consciousness, identical personal values, and motivational mechanisms that bear witness to a common stock type “Eastern European”. This is a certain social type with an entire preconceived repertoire of stereotypical images describing a subject of post-Soviet descent. This subject appears in émigré narratives as an inferior working-class figure with low self-esteem, a person of no reputation guided by amorality and aggressiveness. People from the former Soviet bloc perceive themselves and are perceived by local British (Western European) natives mostly in negative terms. Although, at first glance, all the personal and national characteristics of homo postsovieticus appear to be negatively charged, in every unfavorable estimation there lay a positive imageme counterpart that can be activated at any given moment (e. g., passiveness/faithfulness, self-humiliation/patience, primitiveness/honesty, etc.).

Don Quijote en el siglo XX: cuatro lecturas de escritores

Cervantes’ Don Quixote has produced a rich exegetical tradition since its publication four centuries ago. A long-standing reading tradition has described it as the foundation of the modern realist novel. An also well-established reading tradition, not necessarily opposed to the other one, has stressed an element of semiotic indeterminacy and instability of meaning as its major attribute. This article focuses on the readings of four twentieth-century writers: Miguel de Unamuno, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Milan Kundera. How did these writers place themselves in relation to those reading traditions? In what ways do their texts interact with Cervantes’ novel and with the multiple elements it has to offer? This essay highlights aspects of Don Quixote that the readings of these four writers reveal, while at the same time reflecting on aspects of their own poetics that their readings serve to clarify.

Prague: The Czech Republic's “Dear Little Mother”

photos: logan webb notebook Prague City Profile Cities are like oceans: their ebbs and flows offer glimpses of their depths, providing contrasts between what we know and what they’ve yet to reveal. Similarly, Prague’s staccato bursts of modernism are juxtaposed against its wonderfully intact feudal atmosphere, creating a delicious sense of fluidity between medieval and modern. Often referred to as the city of a thousand spires, Prague’s simultaneously idyllic and austere landscape hosts the Prague Writers’ Festival (www.pwf.cz) each spring. Since its inception in 1991, the festival has sought to bring together the minds of great authors—often Nobel, Pulitzer , and Booker Prize recipients—and readers to encourage cross-cultural discussion. Proposed in the late 1970s, the festival began as a rather small poetry reading in London before relocating to Prague’s Valdštejnský Palác (Wallenstein Palace ), the home of the Czech Senate. How could the Czech Republic’s Golden City not be the perfect location for thousands of literature lovers to convene? From housing numerous royals, to hosting the world premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, to what would have been Adolf Hitler’s home had his efforts been successful, Prague’s rich history is ubiquitous. Prague’s connection to the literary world doesn’t end with the writers’ festival. The city is peppered with literary cafés and antikvariats (used bookstores) stacked high with decades-old volumes. These locales are sure to satisfy even the most insatiable hunger for Czech literature, including, of course, the works of Prague’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, whose influence haunts every obscure alleyway, from cobbled street below to ascetic spire above. One of the most popular you-gotta-be-lost-to-find-it literary haunts is the Tynska Literary Café just beyond Old Town. Concealed in a meandering alley, Tynska’s walled courtyard sits just beneath the twin spires of the Church of Our Lady Before Týn, providing a hidden nook for reading, writing, and drinking. A city of contradiction, Prague is simultaneously warm and stern, soft and severe, no doubt leading Kafka to write, “Prague never lets you go . . . this dear little mother has sharp claws.” Logan Webb is an art student at the University of Science & Arts of Oklahoma. The Czech Republic’s “Dear Little Mother” What to Read at Tynska Caleb Crain, Necessary Errors Myla Goldberg, Time’s Magpie Franz Kafka, The Trial, tr. Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, tr. Michael Henry Heim (HarperCollins, 2004) Gustav Meyrink, The Golem, tr. Mike Mitchell (Dedalus, 2011) Jáchym Topol, City Sister Silver, tr. Alex Zucker (Catbird Press, 2000) Logan Webb November–December 2014 • 5 ...

Interview with Laurent Binet

Phil Watts and Richard J. Golsan: One of the most intriguing aspects of your novel (along with the title, of course) is its blending of genres. HHhH includes an elaborate historical narrative, an adventure story, autobiographical moments, a poetics, etc. Could you tell us a bit more about how you composed the novel and about the importance of speaking in the first person? Laurent Binet: The use of a fictional narrator has become standard, but I find it to be a method that in many instances is not very productive. One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is the elimination of the old academic distinction between author and narrator. Although I did not anticipate the use of different levels of narration, it imposed itself as soon as I started writing the first chapter. Without realizing it, I promptly posed the central question of the book, which is (I realized this years later, after the book's publication), how to tell a true story? As for the question of the blending of genres, I think it has to do with a distinctive characteristic and one of the strengths of the novel, namely, its ability to incorporate all other genres, not to adhere to any kind of prescriptive poetics. The strength of the novel lies precisely in its being a hybrid genre. PW and RJG: The narrator plays an important role in your story: his research, his relationship with those close to him, his work, those who have assisted him, his hesitation and doubts. This narrative technique is very effective, and it also seems to fulfill an ethical imperative (at the beginning, for example, when you thank the woman who provided you with a valuable document). Could you expand on your decision to organize the novel in this way? LB: For me, historical material and fictional material are two different things. Dealing with historical material certainly involves more responsibility. Similarly, I do not approach a real character--dead or alive, whether I knew him or not--and a made-up character in the same way. I felt I had to be faithful to all these people on the one hand, and to historical truth on the other. That being said, I have nothing against historical fictions. On the contrary, I really like uchronias like Fatherland (a 1992 novel by Robert Harris) and Inglourious Basterds (a 2009 film by Quentin Tarantino, discussed in this issue by Susan Suleiman). Through uchronia one can broach a number of interesting questions in a playful manner. I also very much like Dumas's approach: inserting the narrative into the gaps of the historical record. Recently, for example, I really liked X-Men: First Class (a 2011 film by Matthew Vaughn), in which a whole scenario is created about mutants involved in the Cuban missile crisis. As a matter of fact, I wrote an article about it, entitled Arendt and the X-Men (Hannah Arendt chez les X-men). (2) Conversely, I dislike authoritarian fictions (3) (romans a these) that resort to fiction to prove something: I consider this to be truly manipulative. PW: You cite Milan Kundera on the first page of HHhH. What role did his work play in your own writing? LB: I really like Kundera, even though, on the whole, he writes the type of novel that I hate: realist and psychological. It took me a long time to understand this: Kundera is a master in the art of metalepsis, the intervention of the author in the story. If I owe him anything, I presume it is this. PW and RJG: With regard to Reinhard Heydrich, you say that he was un porc malefique et sans pitie mais ce n'etait pas Richard (an evil and ruthless pig, but no Richard III). This sentence seems to refer to Hannah Arendt, who says more or less the same thing about Eichmann: Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain' (Eichmann in Jerusalem 287). It seems clear that you do not subscribe to Arendt's thesis about the banality of evil, and that Heydrich is, if not intelligent, at least crafty, ambitious, and conscious of the suffering he is causing his victims. …

The Story of a Certain Illusion: Theories of Kitsch and “The Double Life of Veronique” by Krzysztof Kieślowski

In the first part of the article the author presents three theories of kitsch: Hermann Broch’s, Abraham Moles’ and Milan Kundera’s. These form the theoretical basis for the analysis of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique, which forms the body of the second part of the article. In the analysis Morstin focuses on exaltation, the primacy of the aesthetics, on the so-called religion of beauty and aesthetical lie. In the conclusion the author argues that the analysis of the film allowed her to identify terms that belong to the dictionary of kitsch of the highest order. At the same time, she maintains that the kitsch one is dealing with is not dangerous, as we are able to easily identify and formulate an insightful critique of the phenomenon. This means that our awareness of kitsch is higher than it was in the first half of the 20th century. Nowadays kitsch is no longer lived through. Rather it is used in different styles and art forms that offer both cheap thrills or exalted aesthetic experience such as in the case of Kieślowski’s film. [originally published in Polish in Kwartalnik Filmowy 2009, no. 66, pp. 139-154]