In this book, Milan Kundera offers a fictional account of the human psyche's attempt to cope with the modern God of good government. Totalitarianism's seductions are the promises of heaven on earth. Like the prosperity gospel preached by some evangelical Christians, totalitarianism guarantees perfection and happiness in your own backyard. Hordes of hope-filled artists, writers, and intellectuals fell prey to the swan-song of scientific socialism. Kundera describes surrealist Paul Eluard's blind adulation of the hangman that killed his colleagues as he wrote songs decrying gloom, cynicism, and sadness.

Totalitarianism only survives where the murderous instincts of the hangman can be transformed into myths and mystique by the poet. Kundera explains:

People like to say: Revolution is beautiful, it is only the terror arising from it which is evil. But this is not true. The evil is already present in the beautiful, hell is already contained in the dream of paradise and if we wish to understand the essence of hell we must examine the essence of the paradise from which it originated. It is extremely easy to condemn gulags, but to reject the totalitarian poesy which leads to the gulag by way of paradise is as difficult as ever. Nowadays, people all over the world unequivocally reject the idea of gulags, yet they are still willing to let themselves be hypnotized by totalitarian poesy and to march to new gulags to the tune of the same lyrical song piped by Eluard...

Laughter offers brief respite to humans whose language regales the absurd, while forgetting becomes a political problem as well as a political solution. For history to be rewritten to the drum-beat of the dialectic, forgetting reaches the level of an intellectual commitment, a political position, if you will. Kundera maintains:

The basic event of the book is the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children. All totalitarianisms do this. And perhaps our entire technological age does this, with its cult of the future, its cult of youth and childhood, its indifference to the past and mistrust of thought.

Kundera portrays Gustav Husak, Czechoslovakia's seventh president, as"the president of forgetting", the man who led his people away from memory. In 1969, Husak dismissed 145 historians from universities and research institutes. One of these historians, Milan Hubl, dropped by to visit Kundera one day in 1971. Hubl told Havel that "the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory":

Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

This organized, regimented forgetting is one of communism's most haunting legacies. Though Kundera's subject is totalitarianism, he is wary of assertions and prognostications-- "of the words pessimism and optimism". He insists on the right to remain a storyteller as opposed to a prophet. As a novelist, Kundera invents stories, confronts one story with another, and thereby arrives at questions.