ABSTRACT
The crucial notion organizing the memory of 1968 in Czechoslovakia of the outstanding writer Milan Kundera was the declaration of love received by him from the officer of the occupying forces on the third day of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. “They all spoke more or less as he did, their attitude based not on the sadistic pleasure of the ravisher but on quite a different archetype: unrequited love. Why do these Czechs (whom we love so!) refuse to live with us the way we live? What a pity we’re forced to use tanks to teach them what it means to love!” 1 The lesson received by Czechs and Slovaks along with all the countries of the Eastern Bloc was not exclusively of a historical, but also of a linguistic nature. Sixteen years later, on the pages of his philosophical account of the communist past, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera answered: “love means renouncing strength.” 2
