“Unbearable lightness of being” – the most famous novel by Milan Kundera, which read more and more generations of readers, discovering the heights of literature of the XX century. Kundera’s book is about love and difficult human relations, about the tragic period of history and at the same time it is deeply philosophical thing. The author writes about the irreconcilable duality of body and soul, about the labyrinth of possibilities, through which the characters wander, living their only life.

…The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.

We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.

Will the war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century itself be altered if it recurs again and again, in eternal return?…