A Selfless Art

I’m in Prague today, for a symposium about the arts in rural areas. I called my talk ‘Heroic Optimism’ and took resistance as my theme. I will write about that next time, but now I want to salute Ivan Klíma, whose death has just been announced, and who really knew about resistance.

Born in 1934, Klíma spent four years of his childhood in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezin which, extraordinarily, both he and his parents survived. After the war his life was lived under the Communist regime, which also imprisoned his father. He became a writer and editor, trying always to keep his own voice in a totalitarian culture. He was in London when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 but went back two years later, believing that exile was a terrible fate for a writer. He was forced to take menial jobs and banned from publishing for two decades.

• Ivan Klíma Obituary, The Guardian

Ivan Klíma was one of a gifted generation of Czech writers, including Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, Miroslav Holub, Bohumil Hrabal and many others. Some were forced out of their homeland, some suffered oppression at home, but they each found ways of keeping faith with humanist traditions of literature and freedom. In days when these values are once again under threat, it’s good to remember their example.