Pete Hausler

A Strange Kind of Exile-Hope and Despair in Ivan Klíma

In the early 1990s, thousands of young westerners flocked to Czechoslovakia, where a recent, and relatively bloodless, coup-the Velvet Revolution of 1989-had deposed the forty-one-year-old communist government. At its peak, this mini-migration placed an estimated 30,000 young foreigners in Prague alone. While this estimate most likely erred on the high side, the story was intriguing enough to reach the status of "media darling" in the American popular press. A slew of print articles and television reports documented this phenomenon for posterity. Unarguably, bored Anglo kids running around Prague yearning to be Musicians, Writers, and Artists constituted a story; but there was a built-in absurdity to this situation, a grand irony that was hard to ignore. Namely, this ersatz role-playing by youngsters who chose to emigrate, paled in comparison to the real thing: Czech musicians, writers and artists of the 1970s and 1980s who were forced either to expatriate themselves or go underground for the sake of their art.

What attracted these multitudes to Bohemia-besides the easy answer of cheap living-was that Czechoslovakia, with Prague as its spiritual heart and soul, had never lost its reputation as a literate and arts-friendly country, despite forty years of communist-induced malaise. Indeed, as Bruce Sterling effused in a January 1995 article in Wired magazine, "[Prague] is probably the most utterly literary city on the planet." And certainly, the Czech capital has the cultural pedigree to back up such a bold assertion. For one of the world's so-called minor languages-there are approximately fourteen million native speakers of Czech-the proportion of its authors who have been translated to English is astoundingly high.

The two most obvious writers associated with Prague are Franz Kafka-whose Elvis-like kitsch value competes with his literary achievements-and Václav Havel, the former dissident playwright and current president. Beyond these two, though, there are dozens of Czech writers who have long had the attention of western literary circles. A short list of Czech writers translated into English includes: notable pre-war authors Jan Neruda (from whom Chilean poet Pablo Neruda allegedly took his pen name, out of admiration), Karel Capek, and Jaroslav Hasek; Communist-era émigrés Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, Arnost Lustig and Pavel Kohout; writers who stayed in Czechoslovakia (some were allowed to publish eventually, most were banned) such as Ivan Klíma, Miroslav Holub, Ludvíg Vaculík, Bohumil Hrabal, Eva Kanturková, Jirí Grusa, Jirí Weil, Ota Pavel; and finally, post-Velvet Revolution Czech and Slovak voices, including a few from the Diaspora: Iva Pekárková, Jan Novak, Martin Vopenka, Jáchym Topol, and Martin Simecka.

How have we come to know so many Czechs? While some of the allure of publishing Czech authors stemmed from the extra-literary appeal of the forbidden writer, this doesn't explain it entirely. One dissident writer who stayed in Czechoslovakia through all the bad years was Ivan Klíma. In an essay titled "Culture vs. Totalitarianism," from the 1994 collection, The Spirit of Prague, Klíma muses on why there seems to be such a relatively large number of translated Czech writers: "The appearance of being cultured and civilized is particularly important in the Czech lands, where centuries of national and cultural repression have made culture, and especially literature, popular and highly respected."

As much as anyone, Klíma would know about repression, for he has suffered for most of his life under dictatorships of both the extreme right (Nazism) and the extreme left (Stalinism). He was born in Prague in 1931 and spent his early childhood as a relatively privileged offspring of an upper-middle-class Jewish engineer. The serenity of young Ivan's childhood-and his very innocence-ended abruptly in December 1941. Ivan and his mother, father and younger brother were sent to Terezín, a Nazi concentration camp near Prague. He would spend the next three and a half years there, until the end of the war. While Terezín wasn't as brutal as death camps like Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, conditions were harsh. Summary executions were carried out, malnutrition was common, disease and illness killed thousands. Plus, the ever-visible transports were a constant reminder that one could be shipped to one's death on a mere whim.

In an essay about his Terezín experience, "A Rather Unconventional Childhood," from The Spirit of Prague, Klíma discusses how this early stint as a prisoner profoundly affected his life. First, simply, he started writing there, as a means of emotional escape. Secondly, he began to feel the sting of the pariah, and an already-shy child withdrew further into himself. "You build in yourself a kind of wall behind which you conceal what is fragile in yourself. . . . This is the only way to bear the repeated, despairing and inevitable partings." He then poses the rhetorical question, "If you construct such an inner wall when you are still a child. . .can you ever manage to destroy it completely?" Thus began a long life of exile.


Klíma's literary world, understandably, is not a shiny, happy place. The protagonist of most of his stories is a banned writer forced to find other work. His books written during the stagnant, final two decades of the Czechoslovak Communist regime (1968-1989)-like the heavily-autobiographical triad composed of the novel Love and Garbage and the short story collections My Merry Mornings and My Golden Trades-are thematically linked by the loneliness of exile in one's native land. Klíma writes in Love and Garbage, "I had been living in a strange kind of exile. . .hemmed in by prohibitions. . . . I was not allowed to enter into life except as a guest, as a visitor, or as a day-wage laborer in selected jobs."

Klíma's outlook is often bleak, though the author argues that his bleakness is tempered by optimism. Like the harassed dissident of "The Engine Driver's Story," who, after losing his driver's license to trumped-up DWI charges, subtly defies the authorities by spending a day with his friend, the train-engine driver. His friend allows him to drive the engine after minimal training. At a level crossing, as two police cars wait for the train to pass, the narrator gives a long, loud blast on the horn, "as a sign that I was still alive."

When reading Klíma's work, one realizes the emotional toll taken by years of official banishment. Klíma's stories often create a scenario where a discussion weighs the pros and cons of expatriation, mirroring the ongoing internal struggle that Klíma must have had through his years of isolation. In "A Sentimental Story" from My Merry Mornings, a former lover who emigrated years earlier and has returned to Prague for a brief visit, asks the narrator bluntly, "Well, why don't you [emigrate]?" The narrator struggles to find a satisfying answer; when he does, it is as if he is trying to convince himself as much as his friend. Klíma writes, "I could have repeated that it was because this was my country. Because here I have several friends whom I need just as they need me. And because people here speak the same language." However, as soon as he gives a reason, he himself quickly refutes it: "But equally, I could have said: My country is not to be found any more, it has vanished. . . . Most of my friends have left, or are preparing to leave. The language I love daily is being violated by every means at their disposal."

His comment here on the violation of language is significant. One of the tacit assumptions of being born into freedom is that when we read something, we tend to believe in its veracity. That is, we like to believe that a reasonable attempt has been made by the author and publisher toward accuracy. Having never lived in a country where all publishing was controlled by the state, we can only imagine the profound psychological damage of constant, official lies in magazines, books, and newspapers. Especially for a writer, these lies must have cut deep: a person whose very livelihood depends on his skill at combining words, one who lives and breathes semantics and respects the subtleties of language. It must be devastating for a writer of literary fiction-someone who, in theory at least, seeks to assert universal truths-to see the tools of his trade debased in unspeakable ways.

Klíma's last job in his field of expertise was in 1968 when he worked as an editor at a Czech literary magazine. In August of that year, Warsaw Pact troops, led by the Soviet Union, invaded their recalcitrant ally Czechoslovakia and crushed the resurgent hope of the Prague Spring. From that time until the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Klíma was a stranger in his own country, an all-too-common type of East bloc foundling, one of the cultural elite officially banned from publishing and teaching. Though many of his books were printed abroad, not one scrap of writing was allowed to be published in Czechoslovakia during this period. Klíma and other Czech writers who stayed, such as Bohumil Hrabal and Václav Havel, had to content themselves with clandestine discussions of literature, and reading type- or hand-written samizdat editions of their work.


A subtle, almost paradoxical weave of hope and despair saturates Klíma's texts, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the soulful Love and Garbage. As in much of Klíma's work, the unnamed, first-person narrator is a writer who knows that when he sends a manuscript to publishers, he will "get a one sentence reply: We are returning your manuscript because it does not fit into our editorial plans." Consequently, this man of letters sweeps the streets of Prague with a cleaning crew. Through small details, this wistful novel achingly draws the portrait of a lonely man.

Scenes from the novel tumble into one another like a dream; without so much as a space break, a night of passion in a garret studio segues into a day in the life of a street cleaning crew. The novel's central event, a decade-plus love affair between the narrator and his lover, Daria, is recalled in flashback. This relationship and its aftermath rumble through everything in the narrator's life. It is even the reason he first applies for the street cleaners' job: when the affair ends, he can't stand the emptiness of his days. This intense relationship becomes an extended metaphor by drawing an analogy between the narrator's imperfect marriage and his imperfect homeland, and the temptation of a different lover and a different place. Klíma opts to stick with that which is familiar. He is tempted to leave, but he can never quite find it in himself to abandon his wife or his homeland.

Sadly, the camaraderie he experiences with the cleaning crew is fleeting. He ultimately quits because he feels a vague guilt that he is, again, an outsider, an observer mining the stories of his co-workers for literary material. His poignant departure conveys all the sadness and hope, the pleasure and pain, of Klíma's artistic predicament: "[The foreman] got to his feet, ceremoniously shook hands with me, addressed me by my name, and said: 'Thank you for your work!' It was a long time since any superior of mine had thanked me for my work."


When cultural historians want to know what everyday life was like for banned Eastern bloc writers, they will look to Klíma's work from that period. But what happens when these oppressive governments fall and an era of artistic freedom is ushered in? Do these writers turn out memorable works with the same sharpness? Klíma's two latest novels address the sweeping changes to Czechoslovakia that the Velvet Revolution wrought. Waiting For the Dark, Waiting For the Light explores the theme of "what do we artists do now." The conclusions in the novel aren't very hopeful. Oddly enough-despite depicting the political about-face of 1989-this is perhaps his darkest novel.

The novel's protagonist is Pavel, a cameraman and documentarian for the former state television station. Before the revolution, Pavel had dreamed of making a real movie, unfettered by state censorship. When this finally becomes feasible, he inexplicably quits working on it. Pavel eventually leaves his job at the TV station to start an ad agency with a friend. They produce vacuous commercials, rock videos, and even porno films, but nothing high-minded like the screenplay Pavel left half-finished. Pavel laments this fact, without doing anything to change.

Even when Klíma's protagonists are invited into the midst of some group they still don't feel at ease. Perhaps this hearkens back to the author's days in Terezín, when friends and relatives disappeared suddenly and forever. This fear of intimacy is revisited in Klíma's latest novel The Ultimate Intimacy. In it, a pastor, Daniel Vedra, struggles with opening up to his second wife after his first wife dies of cancer. Along comes an attractive parishioner, an unhappy, married woman who reminds Daniel of his first wife. His temptation and ultimate seduction force him to question the very things he holds dear: his family and his faith in the biblical commandments.

Despite a feeling of guarded optimism for the former Czechoslovakia, Klíma's protagonists still wrestle mightily with self-doubt. At best, they are introspective; at worst, hapless. His characters are still not strong in the classical literary sense, and they tend toward an overwhelming vacillation. Yet, as exasperating as his characters are at times, they are also disturbingly familiar. And therein lies their appeal: how many of us have not been in situations where we seemed powerless to make a choice to decide our fate?

In the wake of the Velvet Revolution, Klíma was often asked by foreign journalists a question he found irksome: "What will you write about now?" The 'now,' of course, meant now that the old, repressive regime was dead. His answer, from the essay "On Conversations with Journalists," was to point out that regardless of the political climate of his part of the world, Eastern bloc literature always addressed, and would continue to address, the same everyday issues as countries where freedom reigned. "People love and hate each other, they work, look forward to their holidays, fall ill, get well, die. . .they cheat each other, have deep friendships, go hungry, get drunk, tell lies and seek the confidence of others-in London, Prague, Berlin, or Vladivostok." Klíma's writing continues to make a strong case for reading literature in translation: people don't seem all that different. And this is a fundamental, universal truth of literature.