"His whole life was just an endless waiting in an abandoned telephone booth in front of the receiver of a phone he couldn't call anywhere from." However, he manages to escape from there, mainly thanks to poetry. Because he is a poet. He was first named by his mother, who directed his life before he was born, and she baptizes him Yaromil, "which means the one who loves spring or the one who is loved by spring".

Yaromil grows up, carrying as a mark on his forehead maternal love, the one "that repels the sympathy of his classmates" at school, endlessly alone, awkward with girls. And he desperately seeks his maturity and recognition, from poetry, but more so from life. Thus, he is caught up in the era, the early communist years in Czechoslovakia - where he walks, following the common human fate, in the fog, as Kundera himself formulates it in his later "Betrayed Testament".

In the fog, Yaromil becomes not only an expression of the new era and regime, but he also becomes a betrayer. Because he always seeks life, which is always elsewhere from where he seeks it. Just like it was elsewhere for Shelley, Rimbaud, Lermontov, Mayakovsky.

Childhood, motherhood, revolution, poetry itself, taboo values, are methodically eroded by Kundera's ironic gaze and humor, but without lacking tenderness, even emotion, as they are born from the deep understanding of human fate that distinguishes the author's entire work.