The decade immediately following the Second World War was a time of the most horrible Stalinist terror. It was the time when Tereza's father was arrested on some piddling charge and ten-year-old Tereza was thrown out of their flat. It was also the time when twenty-year-old Sabina was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. There, her professor of Marxism expounded on the following theory of socialist art: Soviet society had made such progress that the basic conflict was no longer between good and evil but between good and better. So shit (that is, whatever is essentially unacceptable) could exist only on the other side (in America, for instance), and only from there, from the outside, as something alien (a spy, for instance), could it penetrate the world of good and better.

The greatest conflict that could occur between two Russians was a lovers' misunderstanding: he thought she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final scene they would fall into each other's arms, tears of happiness trickling down their cheeks.

And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that crudest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity.

The feeling Soviet kitsch evoked in Sabina strikes me as very much like the horror Tereza experienced in her dream of being marched around a swimming pool with a group of naked women and forced to sing cheerful songs with them while corpses floated just below the surface of the pool. Tereza could not address a single question, a single word, to any of the women; the only response she would have got was the next stanza of the current song. She could not even give any of them a secret wink; they would immediately have pointed her out to the man standing in the basket above the pool, and he would have shot her dead.

Sabina always rebelled against that interpretation. Whenever she imagined the world of Soviet kitsch becoming a reality, she felt a shiver run down her back.

In the world of the Communist ideal made real, in that world of grinning idiots, she would have nothing to say, she would die of horror within a week.

She would unhesitatingly prefer life in a real Communist regime with all its persecution and meat queues. Life in the real Communist world was still livable.

The current conventional interpretation of these films is this: that they showed the Communist ideal, whereas Communist reality was worse.

Tereza's dream reveals the true function of kitsch: kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.