The introduction to the play Jacques and his Master connected the arrival of these vehicles to Dostoevsky’s elevation of feeling above truth, prompting a riposte from Joseph Brodsky. For 10 points each:
[10m] Name these vehicles. A part-time waitress photographs women in “unbelievably short skirts” kissing random passersby in the streets to tease the drivers of these vehicles.
ANSWER: Russian tanks [or Soviet tanks; prompt on armored or combat vehicles]
[10e] Tereza photographs the arrival of Russian tanks in Prague in this novel, whose author also used the tanks as a motif in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
ANSWER: The Unbearable Lightness of Being [or Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí] (by Milan Kundera)
[10h] The narrator of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting notes that this character is right to care more about ripe pears than the invasion, since “tanks are perishable, pears are eternal.” Part II of the novel is titled for this character, who almost walks in on Karel having sex with Marketa and Eva.
ANSWER: Mama [or Karel’s mother; or Marketa’s mother-in-law; prompt on mother or synonyms by asking “whose mother?”]
<JB, European Literature>