The Book of Laughter and Oblivion by Milan Kundera, author of the novels The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Farewell Waltz, and Immortality, was published in Czech in 1978. This is the writer’s next appeal to the topic of laughter after the novel “The Joke” (1967). In various plots of this amazing book, the realm of the funny extends to “serious matters,” revealing the tragic underside of life. This work by Milan Kundera was first published in Russia in 2003 in a translation made by N. Shulgina specifically for the Azbuka publishing house.