Fading Czech Velvet (Page 3)

In his first novel after the revolution, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1994), Klima portrays a middle-aged television producer, Pavel, who before 1989 worked for the widely despised government TV--justifying his collaboration by telling himself that by going along, someday he'll be able to make one of his dream projects. He is lying to himself in his professional life, as he is in his love life. When the revolution hits, Pavel is lost--unable to determine what that dream project ever was or should be, and now his credibility is shattered in the newly democratic environment. It's not a smoothly written book; it's even clumsy at times. But the novel conveys the stories people tell themselvesto keep going in an insulting and humiliating system--a particularly vivid portrait in a country in which the ludicrous, anti-Austro-Hungarian pinpricks by "Soldier Schweik," the post-World War I creation of Jaroslav Hasek, have taken on iconographic status. Unlike in the case of Schweik, the system oppressing Pavel actually does disappear within the context of Waiting for the Dark; the characters' disorientation is evoked when the oppression to which they've devised personal, private responses is lifted.

Klima has no explaining to do himself when it comes to devising a response to absurdity and oppression. He spent three and a half years as a young boy in the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt; though Klima was baptized a Catholic, his mother was Jewish. Klima's experience in the camp would later inform his response to the brutalities of the Communism that was soon to come. "I came to realize that few things are harder to restore than lost honour, an impaired morality, and perhaps that was why I tried so hard to safeguard these things during the communist regime," he writes in "A Rather Unconventional Childhood," an essay in The Spirit of Prague. That collection includes autobiographical reflections and essays on life during and after Communism.

Klima was in the United States on a yearlong fellowship when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968. He returned to find his work banned as part of the Soviet-led "normalization," along with that of many other of the nation's leading writers. He subsequently was one of the founders of what would become a thriving network of illegal, underground literature and political commentary. The range of samizdat publications was vast; during my visit he rifles through a pile of yellowed mimeographed pages, as well as professionally bound books, containing works by Havel, Kundera, Hrabal, Josef Skvorecky--an archive of the country's then-thriving underground press.

"We got together and decided to hold readings each month to share each other's works," he recalls. Samizdat took advantage of a gap in the banning law, which allowed for typewritten manuscripts to be distributed among friends but not sold through official channels. Between 1973 and 1976, fifty titles were published in this informal fashion, loosely bound on typing paper. By the late seventies and early eighties, a parallel universe of underground publications had evolved, including magazines and books, and translations of American writers like Arthur Miller and Philip Roth (the most popular single title was George Orwell's 1984, which appeared in no fewer than twenty-four different samizdat editions). Klima was repeatedly harassed by the regime and had a permanent tail on his movements and a tap on his telephone, experiences rendered, often hilariously, in one way or another in virtually all of his pre-1989 works. He survived off foreign royalties; his books have been translated into numerous languages. He used his relative good fortune as the head of the Czech PEN club to assist other writers not so lucky, administering a special fund providing support to banned writers.

Repeatedly given the opportunity to emigrate, Klima refused. He explains this decision to a former lover in "Tuesday Morning," one of the autobiographical selections in My Merry Mornings,after she demands to know why he didn't follow her abroad:

Because here I have several friends whom I need just as they need me. And because people here speak the same language as I do. Because I'd like to go on being a writer, and to be a writer means also to stick up for people whose fate is not a matter of indifference to me.... All this I can do here, where I grew up, where I became part of whatever is happening and can therefore understand it.

The Velvet Revolution offered redemption for those, like Klima, who labored for years in the cultural wilderness. According to the National Library, more than 13,000 books were published in the Czech Republic in 1997, nearly triple the number of titles published in 1989. But that has not translated into a literary boom: In the mid-nineties publishers of serious fiction could expect to sell upward of 5,000 copies; today, they're happy to sell 2,000. Several of the nation's top-quality publishing houses--which flowered in the early years after the revolution--have either folded or adapted to the market with romance novels, nonfiction, self-help books or works in translation.

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