Character Analysis
Muse in Training
Kristyna doesn't seem to rank up there with (the real) Petrarch's Laura or Dante's Beatrice. She's a butcher's wife, for one thing. And for another, she's hooking up with the local mechanic in the middle of the auto grease and all the tools. She's not even clever enough to be one of (the real) Boccaccio's bad girls. But the student has his motives for hanging out with her:
She had come to him like a huge adhesive bandage, prepared to cover all his wounds. She adored him, she worshiped him, and when he talked about Schopenhauer, she did not try to display her own independent personality by raising objections...but looked at him with eyes in which, moved by Kristyna's emotion, he thought he was seeing tears. (V."Litost?".12)
In short, Kristyna is good for the student's wounded and delicate ego. She has no problem playing this part, but she's a bit out of her league; she's used to working-class men to whom she can speak her mind without worrying about turning them off. But with the student, Kristyna walks on eggshells: she's always afraid that she'll be too vulgar to inspire more Schopenhauer to fall from his lips.
When Kristyna's country aesthetic backfires, she gets help from an unlikely source. It's Goethe, with his sentimental views of femininity and poetry, who transforms Kristyna's flaws into gold: "It's just those details—poorly chosen clothes, slightly flawed teeth, delightful mediocrity of soul—that make a woman lively and real...I assure you, my friend, your small-town woman is just what a poet needs, and I congratulate you!" (V."Queen".14).
And just like that, Kristyna goes from Miss Hayseed 1977 to the Queen of Hearts.
Getting What She Came For
What does Kristyna really want from her tryst with the student? It has nothing to do with sex, unfortunately for the unintentionally "hypercelibate" young man. She wanted to take her life to the next level, to do something that she never imagined she could have done as the wife of a butcher:
She kept telling herself, with a simple woman's avaricious pragmatism, that she had experienced something "no one could take away" from her...She might never see him again, but she had never believed she could go on seeing him. She was happy with the thought of keeping something of his that was permanent: the Goethe book with its unbelievable inscription, which she could use at any time to prove to herself that her adventure had not been a dream. (V."Morning".7)
Kundera isn't particularly gentle with Kristyna, but what does it matter? She made a splash in poetic circles, had a novel sexual experience, and is now walking away with her virtues immortalized by the greatest poet in the country. No litost there.