Ivan Klíma

Ivan Klíma (born 14 September, 1931, Prague) is a Czech novelist and playwright. He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

Less well known than the work of his contemporary Milan Kundera, Klíma' s writings are generally seen to be much more overtly political, though there are numerous similarities between their works, most notably a tendency towards adultery in their protagonists.

Klima's early childhood in Prague was happy and uneventful, but this all changed with the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich Agreement. He had been unaware that both his parents had Jewish ancestry; neither were observant Jews, but this was immaterial to the Germans.

In November 1941, first his father, and then in December, he and his mother and brother were ordered to leave for the concentration camp at Terezín, where he was to remain until liberation by the Red Army in May, 1945. Both he and his parents survived incarceration - a miracle at that time - Terezín was a holding camp for Jews from central and southern Europe, and was regularly cleared of its overcrowded population by transports to "the East", death camps such as Auschwitz.

Klima has written graphically of this period in articles in the UK literary magazine, GRANTA, particularly "A Childhood in Terezin" (GRANTA 44, 1993, pp 191-208). It was while living in these extreme conditions that he says he first experienced "the liberating power that writing can give", after reading a school essay to his class. He was also in the midst of a story-telling community, pressed together under remarkable circumstances where death was ever-present. Children were quartered with their mothers, where he was exposed to a rich verbal culture of song and anecdote.

This remarkable and unusual background was not the end of the Klima's introduction to the great historical forces that shaped mid-century Europe. With liberation came the rise of the Czech Communist regime, and the replacement of Nazi tyranny with proxy Soviet control of the inter-war Czech democratic experiment. His childhood hopes of fairy tale triumphs of good over evil became an adult awareness that it was often "not the forces of good and evil that do battle with each other, but merely two different evils, in competition for the control of the world" (ibid, 1993, 205).

The early show trials and murders of those who opposed the new regime had already begun, and Klima's father was again imprisoned, this time by his own countrymen. It is this dark background that is the crucible out of which Klima's written material was shaped: the knowledge of the depths of human cruelty, along with a private need for personal integrity, the struggle of the individual to keep whatever personal values the totalitarian regimes he lived under were attempting to obliterate.

Bibliography

*Between Security and Insecurity (2000)
*No Saints or Angels (Ani svatí, ani andělé) (1999; English translation, 2001)
*Lovers for a Day (1999)
*Loď jménem Naděje (1998)
*Kruh nepřátel českého jazyka: Fejetony (1998)
*O chlapci, který se nestal číslem (1998)
*Fictions and Histories (1998)
*The Ultimate Intimacy (1997)
*Čekání na tmu, čekání na světlo (1996)
*Poslední stupeň důvěrnosti (1996)
*Milostné rozhovory (1995)
*Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1995)
*Jak daleko je slunce (1995)
*The Spirit of Prague: And Other Essays (1995)
*Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1994)
*The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays (1994)
*My Golden Trades (1994)
*Čekání na tmu, čekání na světlo (1993)
*Judge on Trial (1993)
*My Golden Trades (1992)
*Ostrov mrtvých králů (1992)
*Hry: Hra o dvou dějstvích (1991)
*Judge on Trial (1991)
*Už se blíží meče: Eseje, Fejetony, Rozhovory (1990)
*Ministr a anděl (1990)
*Rozhovor v Praze (1990)
*Moje zlatá řemesla (1990)
*Milenci na jednu noc (1988)
*My First Loves (1988)
*A Summer Affair (1987)
*Love and Garbage (Láska a smetí) (1986; English Translation 1990)
*My First Loves (1986)
*Soudce z milosti (1986)
*Ma veselá jitra (1985)
*Moje první lásky (1985)
*My Merry Mornings: Stories from Prague (1985)
*Ma veselá jitra (1979)
*Milostné léto (1979)
*A Ship Named Hope: Two Novels (1970)