I met Klima in the early 90s. For at least twenty of the Prague Summer Program’s thirty-two years he gave the same lecture on “samizdat,” the system of “unofficial,” underground literary distribution behind the Iron Curtain. He would bring to the lecture hall in the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University, a venerable space packed with more than a hundred English-speaking students, a dozen or more of the original typed manuscripts, most beautifully hand-bound, and allow the students to handle them, pass them around as he spoke in elegant if broken, heavily accented English about being a literary artist under a totalitarian regime. Those texts, I submit, are priceless.
I won’t presume to articulate the obvious connection of this tableau to the historical moment in the United States on this day of the great man’s passing. I don’t have to. The connection is too brutally obvious.
I’ll simply say that in Prague, throughout Bohemia and Moravia and Slovakia but especially in that incredible city, the spirit of the Prague Spring, of Charter 77, of that indomitable community of mid-century Czech and Slovak artists and intellectuals persists. The spirit of peaceful resistance through art is a luminous example that writers like Václav Havel, Eda Kriseová, Ludvík Vaculík and Ivan Klima embodied.
Please read the great Czech writers of the 20th century. History blessed them with a perspicacity that they may now impart to us with an urgency we must feel in our bones, the skeletons onto which our wet flesh clings. Ivan Klima was heroic. He was gentle and wise and funny and, oh, yeah, he was a Jew who survived Terezín, the Nazi’s “show camp.” He was an artist in a world full of such creatures, but few who speak directly to the human condition as he did, as he continues to speak on the pages of his books.
Goodbye, old friend.