How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph), with the exception of Part V, which runs (Part#. "Short Title". Paragraph). Part V has no numbered chapters—only title headings.
Quote #1
Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. (I.1.4)
The Communist regime in Czechoslovakia has a way of owning the past and reshaping it for its own purposes. With some handy-dandy photographic techniques, whole people can disappear from history as if they were never there at all. But here's the punchline: everybody knows about the manipulation. No one's really being fooled. The Communists are not really interested in pulling the wool over anybody's eyes (okay, maybe some people's eyes); the ability to alter the past is just another weapon in their arsenal of punishment.
Quote #2
I emphasize: idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. (I.5.5)
It's a nice dream that the Communists want everyone to believe in. In fact, it's part of their initial popularity among the intellectual set in Czechoslovakia (including Kundera). But it's this fierce commitment to an unrealistic ideal that turns the dream into a nightmare.
Quote #3
He told everyone that he had broken permanently with his father, a well-off farmer. He spat, he said, on the age-old rural tradition of attachment to land and to property. He described the scene of the quarrel and his dramatic departure from the parental home. There was not an ounce of truth to any of this. (I.13.5)
When Mirek tries to get on the good side of the Communist Party, he creates an entirely different family story for himself, one that will jibe with their ideals. It doesn't matter that none of it is true; Mirek's just participating in the favorite activity of the day: historical revisionism.