Milan Kundera's coinage for “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery”.
Milan Kundera's coinage for “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery” — self-pity edged with self-loathing that can flip into an urge to lash out.
Per Kundera, distinguished by its link from wounded self-perception to a vengeful impulse against the perceived cause of one's shame — more than mere regret or self-pity.
No compositional gloss; a deverbal noun from litovat “to pity / regret.”
From the Czech verb litovat “to pity, to regret.”
Best known through Milan Kundera's discussion in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where he calls it untranslatable. The word itself is ordinary Czech for regret/pity, given an intensified literary meaning by him.
Kundera's “untranslatable” claim is authorial rhetoric; the word is ordinary Czech, given an intensified meaning in his work.