Source — "Fiction of Nature" blog, "Litost" (2008)
- Title: Litost
- Publication: Fiction of Nature (personal blog)
- URL: http://fictionofnature.blogspot.com/2008/09/litost.html
- Accessed: 2026-09-03
- Type: tertiary (personal blog commentary), credulous toward Kundera's framing.
Extract
Restates Kundera's definition ("a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery") and summarizes a second anecdote from the same Part Five of the novel (distinct from the violin-lesson story): a young man who is a weaker swimmer than his girlfriend experiences litost when she swims ahead of him, and strikes her — described as "circuitous revenge... the indirect blow." The post glosses litost's mechanism as: the collapse of an illusion of parity/identity between two people in love, where the beloved's superiority in some respect (here, athletic) exposes the sufferer's own inferiority, which is then avenged indirectly rather than confronted directly.
Gaps
- A personal blog, not scholarship; its reading of the swimming-pool episode is corroborated only by search-snippet-level agreement from other secondary sources (WebSearch), not independently checked against another directly-read source in this project's file.
- Like other secondary sources used for this word, does not specify which English translation (Heim 1980 or Asher 1996) it is drawing on.