Ivan Klima, the Czech novelist whose survival of two totalitarian regimes — one Nazi, the other communist — made him one of Eastern Europe’s most perceptive distillers of the human condition under authoritarianism, died on Saturday at his home in Prague. He was 94.
His son, Michal, confirmed the death.
A writer of more than 40 books, as well as a dissident, teacher and critic, Klima was deeply affected by an early experience in his life: incarceration as a boy by the Nazis at Terezin concentration camp north of Prague. While living there in 1941-1945, he faced the daily prospect of being transported to Auschwitz. Some of his most memorable short stories and novels, including Judge on Trial, touched on the horror of those years.
But his writing dwelled most heavily on the communist era, including the aftermath of the Prague Spring in 1968, a period of relative freedom when he and other intellectuals supported the reformist efforts of the leader Alexander Dubcek, who hoped to create a “Socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia. Their optimism was thwarted when the Soviets sent an estimated 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops to suppress the Prague reforms later that year.
Unlike dissident writers who left the country or were pushed out — among them Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky and Pavel Kohout — Klima returned to Prague in 1970 from an authorized sabbatical in the US. He became an important publisher of underground texts, smuggling some out of the country to Western publishers. He also defied the government by organizing an influential (and wine-fuelled) clandestine literary salon, attended by other dissident writers, including the Czech playwright and future president Vaclav Havel.
“Ivan Klima is one of the greatest Czech writers and, having experienced concentration camps and the communist period, is a walking symbol of what our country endured in this century,” said Jiri Pehe, director of New York University in Prague. “He was more than a literary figure, he played a crucial role in publishing banned works and challenging the communist regime.”
As a dissident, Klima found himself compelled, like many others, to take menial jobs, including street sweeper, bricklayer and hospital orderly. He turned this experience into a collection of stories, My Golden Trades. None of his protagonists were heroic; all had made some kind of compromise with the dictatorial systems that governed Czechoslovakia for half a century. Some of the stories were published in clandestine or “samizdat” copies and circulated among friends in Prague.
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His international reputation was later cemented in a 1990 New York Review of Books cover story by his friend, the American novelist Philip Roth, who had visited him several times in Prague. He called Klima, with his signature pageboy Beatle haircut, a “much more intellectually evolved Ringo Starr.”
After the fall of the Communists in 1989, Klima depicted the lives of those who had obediently served the dictatorship, only to find themselves adrift and lost amid the newfound freedoms of a newly democratic country. After 1989, his books My Merry Mornings and Love and Garbage were rushed into print and sold more than 100,000 copies each. His work has since been translated into dozens of languages.
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In 1958 he married Helena Mala, a psychotherapist. In addition to his wife and son, a journalist, he is survived by his daughter, Hana, an artist; a brother, Jan; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
While his work is suffused by existential angst, it is also offset, Klima once said, by an underlying optimism. “My books may seem somewhat depressing,” he said after Judge On Trial was published. “But they always offer a little hope. I could not write a book without hope.”
— This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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