SOURCE: "'Freedom Is My Love': The Works of Milan Kundera," in Index on Censorship, Vol. 4, No. 4, Winter, 1975, pp. 41-6.

The author of Milan Kundera: A Voice from Central Europe (1981), Porter is an English educator specializing in Russian literature. In the following excerpt, Porter discerns an overarching pattern in the stories of Laughable Loves.

Between 1963 and 1968 Kundera produced ten short love stories, which depict the comic as well as the tragic side of human relations. In 1970 eight of them appeared in a collected edition, the author having decided to omit two which he had come to regard as weak. Examining the original ten stories we find in them a philosophical progression which is taken up and developed in the novels.

An article by Milan Blahynka (Plomen no. I, 1967) discusses at length the first two volumes and discovers in them a system of theses and antitheses; the first three stories...