On October 4, Ivan Klíma died at the age of 94 in Prague, one of the most important Czech writers of the 20th century and one of the most prominent in the fight for freedoms during the communist dictatorship that his country suffered.
His real name was Ivan Kauders. He learned that he was Jewish—his parents were not observant—when he and his family were interned by the Nazis in the Terezin concentration camp. They survived that drama, which marked their entire lives, like so many survivors who asked themselves the question of why others died and they did not. In his memoirs, My Silene Century (My Crazy Century), says that that experience led him to join the Communist Party in his youth. His parents were not militants, but they sympathized with communism. Until his father was arrested in 1953: “The experience of a communist prison opened the eyes of him and our entire left-wing family.”
He studied Language and Literature, a “literary science” that, according to Klíma, should have been called “literary pseudoscience.” There he learned that “the only permissive method in art was socialist realism” and Stalin’s “work on linguistics became the Bible.” They taught him that “the name of Sartre had become, for the cultural community of the world, a symbol of decadence and moral degeneration, a prototype of the wasteland in which bourgeois pseudoculture had been lost”; that “Steinbeck’s obscurantism had practically reached the level of mental illness”; that Faulkner represented “organized assassination training”; that Henry Miller, who was called the “American pornographer,” “recommended the transformation of the reader into a brutal murderer.” Authors and books considered the “scum of Western culture” that “had disappeared from bookstores and libraries.” As it says in The spirit of Praguewhen the communists came to power “they repudiated most of what in other times passed for knowledge,” relegating the works of both Kafka and Alfons Mucha. Klíma wrote his thesis about Karel Capek, who had embodied the democratic spirit of the First Republic, and who was banned when the communists came to power, except for his “anti-fascist” works. Reason why Klíma was able to do his thesis by titling it Karel Capek’s fight against fascismalthough in reality it was a study about his work and his life.
In the sixties, Klíma strengthened his career as a playwright, at the same time he worked in different literary publications, managing the weekly Literary Noviny. They are publications that seek the liberalization of the communist system. Klíma was going to become one of the most active writers of the so-called Prague Spring, an attempt to build a socialism with a human face that ended with the invasion of Soviet troops in 1968, as had previously happened in Hungary in 1956. Together with Milan Kundera, Pavel Kohout and Ludvík Vaculík, among the finest writers and dissidents Czechoslovaks of the time, had already participated in the IV Congress of Writers in June 1967, in which the lack of political and cultural freedoms in Czechoslovakia was denounced. As a result, Klíma was expelled from the Writers’ Union along with Vaculík and Liehm, and a case was opened against Kohout and Kundera. Pravdaorgan of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, came to describe that Writers’ Union as a “nest of poisonous snakes.”
After the Soviet invasion of 1968, he spent a couple of years in the United States, where he was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. When he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1970 he was prevented from writing and publishing, so he had to earn a living as a paramedic, ambulance driver, messenger, and typographer’s assistant. Theme of his novel love and trash in which the protagonist is a writer forced to work as a street sweeper, dressed in an orange uniform, on the streets and in a hospital, which he combines with writing an essay about Kafka. Klíma continued writing and publishing, but clandestinely, in the typewritten copies that circulated from hand to hand, the salamatetwo of whose great disseminators were Vaculík and Václav Havel, future president of democratic Czechoslovakia. Klíma became one of the most important Czech writers of his generation. He was one of the hundreds of signatories of Charter 77 in which in 1977 a regime of freedoms was once again demanded and for which most of them were again retaliated against. Some of these aspects of his life, in addition to his memoirs, are addressed in texts of diverse origin grouped in The spirit of Prague.
One of his friends was Philip Roth, who between 1972 and 1977 used to go to Prague in the spring. He visited Klíma, Kundera and Vaculík, among other intellectuals. Everywhere he went he was followed by a police officer. Until one day, in 1977, he was arrested after leaving a museum, and decided to leave the country the next day as the police “recommended.” Klíma and his wife were arrested that same day. Klíma was asked what the reason for Roth’s visits was. He asked them, in turn, if they had not read his books. To the police officers’ astonished faces, Klíma added: “He’s coming for the girls.” Roth did not return until communism fell. This oppressive atmosphere is described by Klíma in one of his stories in a subtle way, because in reality there is little direct political charge in his work. He describes the streets of Prague: “Darkness, cold, the smell of smoke, sulfur and irritability.”
Once communism fell with the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Klíma’s books were freely published and translated into thirty languages. The main theme of much of his work is man’s loneliness and, as he himself says, “love, infidelity and reconciliation.” In 2002 his work was recognized with the Franz Kafka Prize.
I had the opportunity to meet Ivan Klíma at a course at the San Sebastián summer university on Eastern Europe, organized by the Association of European Journalists, in which we shared a table with its Spanish editor, Jaume Vallcorba, from Acantilado. We were able to talk about Kafka, whom he compared to Borges, both literary and personal, and about what communism was. His reflections on Kafka are present in his autobiographical novel love and trashwhich Philip Roth described in his book The job. A writer, his colleagues and their works as “the reverse of The unbearable lightness of being, of Kundera.” Kafka and the soldier Svejk They are very present in the literature and life of Czechs in the 20th century. Also in the work of Klíma, who says that, although they seem to belong to different centuries and continents, they complement each other. the word coffee shop describes the absurdities of life and Svejkovinathe habit of downplaying them, facing them with humor. A very Czech way in which Klíma faced life in the turbulent Czechoslovakia in which he had to live.