Fading Czech Velvet (Page 4)

Of course, such an ineluctable process is not unique to the Czech Republic. The free market does not work in mysterious ways. But here, if nothing else, the country's steps off the literary pedestal have been particularly painful, given the high expectations of those who labored for years in the limited space of the cultural underground. The same goes for the country's dissident folk singers, who used to be able to rouse a packed hall, and now are lucky to be playing small clubs where they compete with the beer.

"After the revolution," Klima says, "many of my friends dreamed of starting a good publishing business. Writers, theater people--they wanted to publish all of us from the samizdat, they wanted to show Beckett, Ionesco. But the big theaters found it difficult to survive showing Beckett and Ionesco, and most publishers of good books are now very poor creatures. Dreams are dreams, and reality is reality, and reality that demands money has a quite difficult time facing the dreams."

Today, ironically, those writers who sustained the country's cultural lifeblood in the underground face an audience not dramatically different or expanded from the days when their works could be obtained only on the sly. "Most of this society collaborated with the regime from the first moment [in 1948]," Klima comments. "Later, samizdat did not represent them. Samizdat was for a small number of people, a few thousand at most, who opposed the regime and lived according to their own beliefs. And it's no different now in terms of who reads the [quality] literature."

In a remarkably prescient colloquy between Klima and Philip Roth, published in the New York Review of Books six months after the revolution, Roth cautioned Klima of the coming pressures of the marketplace, and how writers would "come to mean far less to readers here than you did when you were fighting to keep alive for them a language other than the language of the official newspapers...and books." Klima recalls being confused by Roth's admonition at the time. Now, he says simply, "Roth was right."

But Klima does not seem particularly perturbed by this development; in fact, he conveys a certain fatalistic optimism. "My dream was to get my books published," he says with a wry smile.

"I argue with those who complain about how writers are less important today. Because now, you know how to write or you don't know how to write.... For some people, it has been difficult to accept. They are less famous, less heroic than they were before. On the other hand, you might have been famous for your bravery, but not for your mastery."

He refers to the statement he made to Roth a decade ago, which he still holds to today: "I believe that, for the time being at least, the fall of the totalitarian system will not turn literature into an occasional subject with which to ward off boredom at parties."

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