Milan Kundera’s "The Joke," a summary

This book is a polyphonic novel, composed of the interior monologues of four narrators: Ludvík Ján, Helena Zemánková, Jaroslav, and Dr. Kostka. The four voices alternately describe the same events from different perspectives, juxtaposing the official enthusiasm of post-war Czechoslovakia with private human memory. Milan Kundera completed the manuscript in Prague on December 5, 1965, and the book was published in the spring of 1967, on the eve of the Prague Spring, the suppression of which led to the writer’s novels being banned in his homeland.

In 1968, the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union awarded the author its prize for this book. That same year, director Jaromír Jireš adapted the novel into a feature film of the same name, for which Kundera himself wrote the screenplay. Shortly after its premiere, the film was withdrawn from theaters and shelved.

Keys to someone else’s apartment and a razor

Fifteen years later, scientist Ludvík Jan returns from Prague to his native South Moravian town. His third-floor hotel room proves cramped and squalid: cold water flows from both the red and blue faucets, there’s only one chair at the small table, and the bed sags under his weight like a hammock. The room is unsuitable for the planned rendezvous. Ludvík rushes to the local hospital to see an old acquaintance, the virologist Kostka, an eccentric Christian whom he once helped find a job.

Kostka lives alone in a new building on the dusty outskirts of town, and tomorrow evening he’s leaving to join his fiancée in a neighboring town twenty kilometers away. His fourth-floor apartment has a wide ottoman under a red patterned bedspread that doesn’t creak at all. Having received the coveted set of two keys and instructions for the gas water heater, Ludvik allows a friend to take him to a small hair salon.

A woman in a white coat lathers Ludvik’s cheeks. Looking in the mirror, he suddenly recognizes the aging hairdresser as his former lover, Lucie Shebetkova, whom he hadn’t seen for fifteen years. Overwhelmed, he hesitates to speak to her, silently handing over five crowns and slipping out into the street.

Keychain with the Kremlin

Prague radio journalist Helena Zemánková is about to catch a morning flight to Brno, and from there, take a bus to Southern Moravia to report on the "King’s Horse" folk festival. On her wrist, next to her watch, hangs a silver keychain engraved with the Kremlin. It was a gift from her future husband, Pavel Zemánek, thirteen years ago, when the committee of the Fučík Youth Song and Dance Ensemble threatened to discipline him for his refusal to marry after two years of student romance.

They met in 1949 at a demonstration in Old Town Square, when Pavel began singing an Italian revolutionary song for Palmiro Togliatti, who was standing at the podium. In 1956, after Stalin’s crimes were exposed, Zemánek quickly changed his rhetoric to win student applause, became an associate professor, and took mistresses. Helena remained faithful to party dogma, earning her the nickname "Bloodhound" from her radio colleagues. Recently, after meeting Ludvík during an interview, she fell in love with him from the first walk along the Vltava.

Three lines on a postcard and black buttonholes

Strolling along the murky Morava River, past peeling stucco cherubs and garbage dumps, Ludvík recalls Ostrava and the events that transformed his youth. After February 1948, he studied in Prague, held a position in the Student Union, and courted a nineteen-year-old first-year student, Markéta. That summer, the girl was sent to a two-week party course at a Czech castle, from where she sent an enthusiastic letter about a healthy spirit and the imminent revolution in the West.

Wanting to tease the naive girl, Ludwig bought a postcard and wrote: "Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy spirit reeks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludwig."

In the fall, he was summoned for questioning by three students from the party committee. They took away his office key and forced him, under surveillance, to remove personal belongings from his desk — dirty socks and dried-out slices of his mother’s rum baba on oiled paper. At a faculty plenary session, Ludvík’s friend, Pavel Zemánek, a lover of Moravian songs, delivered an indictment, and a hundred people in the room unanimously raised their hands in favor of Jan’s expulsion from the party and expulsion from the university.

The autumn draft took him to Ostrava, to a penal unit for politically unreliable soldiers with black collar tabs. They weren’t trusted with weapons, forcing them to spend days chopping coal with jackhammers in the mines. In a twenty-man barracks, Ludvík became close with the former prisoner Honza from Brno, the pacifist Bedřich, who wrote letters to Truman and Stalin, the draftsman Čeněk, and the eccentric Prague native Stana. During their rare Saturday leave, the penal soldiers plied girls with rum at suburban dances and fought with artillerymen, but in March, Ludvík escaped from the group on an old narrow-gauge tram and met a silent worker named Lucie near an unnamed movie theater in the suburb of Petřkovice.

For six months, they wandered through smoky groves beneath coal trucks and kissed at the dormitory doors. Lucie couldn’t write letters without mistakes and instead brought Ludvík flowers, while he read her poetry by the disgraced poet František Halás and bought several dresses from a department store with his miner’s wages. When a new twenty-five-year-old commander, obsessed with jiu-jitsu and drill, was appointed to the company, and the soldiers responded by staging a mockingly slow relay race, leave was banned for four months. Aleksey, the punitive prisoner, the frail son of an arrested party functionary who had disowned his father in the newspapers, attempted to run at full speed, collapsed from groin pain, and received two weeks in the guardhouse for sabotage.

Lucie began coming to the camp’s barbed wire fence every day, wearing an old brown coat and a pair of patent leather high-heeled shoes that had been given to her. For one meeting, Ludvik rented a room from a widowed miner he knew for three hundred crowns, crawled under the nicked wire at night in his army underpants, drank some alcohol from his neighbors, and changed into someone else’s baggy suit, tying the trousers with a rope. In the room, under a bare lightbulb, Lucie desperately resisted his attempts to undress her. Enraged, Ludvik slapped her in the face and kicked her out into the street.

The next morning, in the barracks, a sergeant poured a ten-liter pot of water over the sleeping Alexei, who had been expelled from the party the day before. The soldier didn’t move: two empty tubes of the sleeping pill "Dorminal" lay on the nightstand. When letters to Lucia were returned two weeks later, marked "the recipient has left," Ludwik ran away from his shift in the mine to search for him, was caught by a patrol, and received a ten-month prison sentence from a military tribunal. During this time, his mother died, buried by wealthy relatives, the Koutecki family, in a crypt that belonged to someone else.

Harmonium and paper ribbons

The first violinist of the local ensemble, Jaroslav, wakes up at home on a modern ottoman with curved metal legs. He loves only his father’s wooden harmonium in the corner, old Moravian songs with their archaic modes, harking back to Great Moravia and the ancient Dionysius, and an imaginary world where he dreams of deserting horsemen on the banks of the Danube. After his father’s stroke, Jaroslav abandoned his studies in Brno and married a peasant’s daughter, Vlasta, arranging for her a model old-fashioned wedding with a groomsman and a rosemary wreath. Ludvík, expelled from university, silently left, refusing to pick up the clarinet.

On Sunday, Yaroslav’s fifteen-year-old son, Vladimir, is supposed to ride at the head of the traditional "King’s Horse," dressed in women’s clothing and with his face covered in ribbons, just as Yaroslav himself did twenty years earlier during the German occupation. On Friday evening, the violinist spots Ludvik in the square, who averts his gaze and passes by.

Saturday calculation

On Saturday morning, Ludwik drinks cocoa and croissants at a milk café, kills time at the town hall’s official birth registration ceremony, presided over by his overweight classmate Kovalik, and at eleven o’clock meets Helena at the bus station, wearing a blue Bologna raincoat. His courtship is a coldly planned revenge on Pavel Zemanek. After a lunch of szpekački and grain vodka at the People’s House, he takes the journalist to Kostka’s apartment.

Helena tells the story of the Kremlin keychain, supposedly given to Pavel by the dying Soviet lieutenant Sasha, and Ludvik, undressing her, mentally transports himself to the university auditorium under the portrait of Fučík by Švabinský and looks at the plump, middle-aged woman’s body through the eyes of a hated husband, seeking to rob his intimate world, and in the midst of intimacy begins to slap Helena on the cheeks and thighs.

A devastated and happy Helena drinks vodka, turns on jazz on the radio, tries to dance the twist naked, and then confesses that she and Pavel have been living in the same apartment for three years like strangers and that she is finally truly in love. Revenge turns out to be a dud: Ludwik stole something Zemanek no longer needed.

Preacher in the Greenhouse

That evening, Kostka reflects on his fate. After February 1948, he voluntarily resigned from his university chair, seeing the pressure from his superiors as an evangelical call to abandon the nets, and went to work as an agronomist at a state border farm in Western Bohemia. In the fall of 1951, the farm’s director and the chairman of the national committee caught a feral girl with a leatherette suitcase in a hay barn. The village children nicknamed her "Zaplutana" and secretly fed her baked potatoes.

The fugitive turned out to be Lucie Šebetková, and Kostka hired her to work in the greenhouse. That winter, she confessed to him: at sixteen, in her native Cheb, six street gang members had passed her around under a reproduction of the Virgin Mary during a drinking bout, after which she was beaten at home and sent to a correctional facility for a year. In Ostrava, she stole roses and gladioli from graves for a soldier, who then attempted to force himself on her in a strange room, not realizing that physical intimacy filled her with a primal terror.

Kostka read the Bible to Lucie, taught her submission to God, and in the spring, in a blooming apple orchard, he succumbed to weakness and shared a bed with the healed girl. Fearing the responsibility he owed to his wife and son, who he had left behind in Prague, he exploited the political case against the director of the state farm, resigned, and went to work as a simple bricklayer, abandoning the weeping Lucie.

A diarrhea in an Algen tube and a heart attack

On Sunday morning, Kalashek from the district committee brings Helena and nineteen-year-old technician Indra to record a radio interview with Jaroslav, after which horsemen carry the silent king away from the courtyard, under ribbons. Pavel Zemanek arrives there directly from Bratislava by car with his new lover, a tall, dark-eyed student named Miss Brozova. Inspired by the previous night’s encounter, Helena proudly announces to her husband that she is divorcing him, as she is leaving him for Ludvík Ján.

Soon, Ludvík encounters Zemanek himself in the crowd at the "Konnica": a former Stalinist transformed into a fashionable liberal professor of philosophy, adored by the youth for his courage and advocacy of hitchhiking. Zemanek shakes Ludvík’s hand amiably, compliments his choice of wife, and leaves with Brozová for Prague. Shocked by his own uselessness and shame, Ludvík takes Helena aside and bluntly declares that he doesn’t love her and that they will never see each other again.

In the empty National Committee office, a sobbing Helena finds a full glass tube of Algen painkiller in Indra’s coat pocket. She swallows all the pills at once, writes a farewell note, and sends a technician to find Ludvík, giving the young man a passionate kiss as she leaves. Meanwhile, old Koutecký mockingly informs Jaroslav on the street that his son Vladimír had left that morning with his grandson Miloš on a motorcycle to Brno to watch motorcycle racing. Returning home, Jaroslav learns from Vlasta, standing with her back to the stove, that a stranger is riding behind the king’s mask, and that the son is ashamed of his father’s folklore and patronage. Enraged, the violinist smashes the plates from the sideboard, breaks the legs of the chairs, and walks off with his violin to the banks of the Morava.

Ludwik reads Helena’s suicide note over a schnitzel lunch in the restaurant garden and runs with Indra to the National Committee. After searching the attic, he breaks down the door of the wooden garden outhouse, locked with a rope, and sees a pale, alive Helena standing there, her elastic panties and stockings pulled down to her knees: Indra had secretly kept a strong laxative in an Algena tube. The disgraced woman, screaming "Beast!", spits in Ludwik’s face and locks herself in the outhouse again, while a technician punches Jan in the mouth.

With a split lip, Ludvík wanders across the field toward Morava, finds Jaroslav lying in the grass, and asks permission to play the clarinet in their chapel, just like in his high school days. At four o’clock, in the restaurant’s summer garden, under a linden tree, five musicians begin playing old Moravian songs. The garden quickly fills with drunken, long-haired youths, whose noise and fighting disturb the musicians. A cultural inspector with a double bass forbids anyone from leaving the field until nine o’clock, and right in the middle of the melody, a green-faced Jaroslav suffers a massive heart attack, after which Ludvík helps lead his old friend through the indifferent crowd to a white ambulance.