Spirit of Prague

Ivan Klima has written novels, short stories, and essays. I have read much of Klima and discovered them in that order. I wish I had discovered his essays, particularly those found in the Spirit of Prague, first. This is not because Klima's novels and short stories are not consistently excellent. They are. However, these essays are so well written and so laden with Klima's own views on his life and thought processes that reading them can only enrich the enjoyment one gets from his fiction. To the extent that a writer's life must inform his writing, our window into that writer's life informs our understanding of his work. The Spirit of Prague consists of a series of essays or speeches written by Klima over the years. Many of these essays were written in samizdat form during the years in which Klima's work was not published by the Czech communist regimes. It also includes the transcript of an interview between Klima and the author Phillip Roth that was originally published in the New York Review of Books in 1990. The first essay, A Rather Unconventional Childhood details Klima's childhood years in a Nazi concentration camp. As one might expect such a childhood left an indelible mark on Klima's world view. One lesson learned was a simple one, "that few things are harder to restore than lost honour". In describing his life under the Nazis and then the Czech communist regime Klima avers that and society founded on dishonesty "while depriving another group, no matter how small, of its honour and even its right to life, condemns itself to moral degeneration and, ultimately, to complete collapse." This world view colors Klima's fiction and is evident in his novels, such as Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light and in his short stories (My Golden Trades and My Merry Mornings). It also colored his response to living under the old regime and the honourable choices he made to return to Prague from London after the tanks rolled in 1968 and on his refusal to make compromises with the regime that would have allowed him to publish his work. In his essay, Literature and Memory, Klima addresses the oft-asked question, why does someone write? Drawing on Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Klima asserts that if "we lose our memory, we lose ourselves." For Klima, a truly literary work is, in essence, a protest against the forgetting that looms over him. The Phillip Roth interview of Klima was marred to a degree by Roth's perceived need to establish his own bona fides as a member of the intelligentsia at the expense of drawing more out of Klima. Nevertheless, it had a fascinatingly exchange in which Klima provides a glimpse into the forces that propelled the writer and dissident V. Havel into the Presidency of the Czech Republic. The Powerful and the Powerless, written in 1980, is an extraordinary piece that pretty much summarizes what Klima's life bears stark witness to; the struggle between the powerful and the powerless. It is at once

Like Klima's fiction, this collection reveals his characteristic ruminative style as he ponders his and his nation's pasts, his mission to write to express his yearnings, and his thoughts on salt, garbage, totalitarianism, language, and Kafka. Surprisingly, I found the concluding essay on his famous predecessor rather mundane in its insights compared to his more focused thinking about how a writer must find himself true to himself rather than an ideology--this theme connects many of the essays. There's repetition of even some of the same phrases and motifs from overlapping essays and his fiction, but this makes for a more coherent, if less dazzling, overview of his mental landscape. For, despite the title, most of the essays dig inward rather than expand outward into Czech views. Klima's passion makes him--and you--delve within the human spirit to investigate how it endures pre- and post-1989 reality--in the Nazi camp at Terezin, under the rule of fascism and communism, and in the uneasy transfer to uncertain capitalism: Klima observes them all.His shorter, more casual pieces remind me of Karel Capek's in their humanism and attention to the everyday's intersection with the infinite. While they feel less weighty, they still help to widen your perspective on the often elusive, unreal qualities of the harsh world within which Klima has had to hack out his own hardwon wisdom, to keep going as a creative artist despite camps, jails, and decades of forced manual labor and samzidat, clandestine survival as a writer who refused to give in. None of the essays, besides, feel dated. His interview with Philip Roth proves fascinating, and the title piece serves as essential reading for any visitor, armchair or actual, to his native city. If you've read Klima's novels or stories first, you'll recognize many familiar concerns. The concentration of his thoughts here, as opposed to their more leisurely inclusion as they drift in and out of his (often nearly identical to their author, it seems to me) protagonists, makes an appropriate guide to Klima's world view. Paul Wilson's translations live up to his usual fluency. An annotated bibliography by Wilson of Klima's publications, or a preface that aimed at showing Western readers more of the scope of his fiction, plays, and non-fiction would have improved this volume, for Klima makes passing references to what he's working on at the time. Without more knowledge of his ouevre, however, it's hard for a newcomer to relate the particular essay to the other writing that had engaged him at the time.For all its circling around the same concerns, for better and worse, Klima does manage by repetition to remain stubbornly faithful to his vocation: to combine the human wish to seize the day with the realization that the days pass and soon no more will we able to seize time at all. His refusal to ignore mortality makes for rather uncomfortable but ultimately honest reading. This serves as a portal into Klima's interior realm.

This wonderful short work by prominent Czech author Ivan Klima could do much to provide insights and understanding into the heart of Prague: the Czech people-- their history, what they've seen and who they've become. If you haven't read any Klima, this collection of essays is a fine place to start.Essay, A Rather Unconventional Childhood: "...I remember every detail of the day when I stood by the razed prison fence, which I had once understood I would never be allowed to cross, and watched as endless columns of Red Army soldiers, tired horses, exhausted people, dirty tanks, cars and cannon, all filed by, and for the first time I saw a portrait of Marshal Stalin, a man whose face I long afterwards associated with that moment, and I sobbed uncontrollably at the knowledge that I was free. As I watched, a German civilian was beaten to death, and a tank ran over a prisoner who too greedily flung himself on a pack of cigarettes someone had tossed on the ground, but none of this could spoil my mood..."Essay, The Powerful and the Powerless: "The strength of the powerful never (or almost never) derives from some higher mandate, or from spiritual values, or because they had a corner on truth or wisdom, though the powerful may have tried to claim this. It comes only from a preponderance of strength. The strength is then generally based on the number of souls dominated, on the power of their weapons and on their ability to organize...The author explores literature, journalism and trends among other things. But it is not a textbook. It is pure art.