Mirek

Character Analysis

Revisionist Historian

It's no mistake that Kundera opens Mirek's story with the story about Clementis' hat on Gottwald's head—that story opens up the theme of memory for exploration, a major concern for an author who has just been erased from his country's history.

In fact, the first line of Mirek's narrative shows that the character understands the power of controlling the past: "It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" (I.2.1). This is why Mirek unwisely keeps notes of things he shouldn't—and ultimately why he falls before the Communist regime.

But the point is that Mirek wants to make sure that records exist, so that forgetting won't be an option—just like Tamina later in the novel.

The thing is, though, that Mirek doesn't necessarily want the documents he leaves behind to reflect the absolute truth about his life. He really wants total editorial control over the past, a chance to make his life story the best it can be despite reality: "...his destiny was rapidly coming to its end and he must do everything to make it perfect and beautiful" (I.6.7).

That's why Mirek can't have his love letters to the ugly Zdena hanging around; he doesn't want that vulnerable and embarrassing bit of his past in someone else's hands. As he reflects on his true motives for his relationship with Zdena, Mirek lies to himself. He was a "social climber" trying to impress the Communists, he says.

Yeah, right.

It takes Mirek a long time—and a very stressful day—to admit the truth about Zdena and his ill-timed trip to see her:

He wanted to efface her from the photograph of his life not because he had not loved her but because he had. He had erased her, her and his love for her, he had scratched out her image until he made it disappear as the party propaganda section had made Clementis disappear from the balcony where Gottwald had given his historic speech. (I.17.6)

So Mirek totally engages in revisionism "like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like all mankind" so that he can have ultimate control over the representation of his life. It's the ultimate statement of personal agency, something that Mirek is quickly losing.

Priorities, Man!

Mirek's practical teenage son cannot understand why his dad would take off at a time like this, when they expect the secret police at any moment. Mirek himself knows that he should have stayed home and made a huge bonfire of all his papers. But his urge for control takes over his rational brain. Not that he doesn't regret his choices:

He felt assailed by everything absurd, ridiculous, and childish about his trip. It was not reasoning or a plan that had led him to this trip but an irresistible desire. The desire to extend his arm far back to the past and hit it with his fist. (I.16.6)

Mirek is on the verge of understanding that you just can't beat up the past. You can't permanently revise it. Even the Communists couldn't truly fool the world with their revised picture of Gottwald. (The interwebz now has the two pictures side by side.) Mirek even gets to use this failure to his advantage:

They wanted to efface thousands of lives from memory and leave nothing but an unstained age of unstained idyll. But Mirek is going to land his small body on that idyll, like a stain. He'll stay there just as Clementis' hat stayed on Gottwald's head. (I.19.4)

Memory has a way of reasserting itself, sometimes in messy ways. And while that doesn't suit Mirek right now, it will in the future because his downfall is not something that can be erased.