Biography Essay

Ivan Klima belongs to the generation of Czech writers who lived through two totalitarian regimes—Nazism and communism. In his creative work Klima includes a great deal of autobiographical material and many keenly observed realistic details. Most frequently he returns to his experiences of these regimes and the moral questions they pose for humanity. Outspoken in his criticism of the communist regime, Klima was expelled from the Communist Party, and his works were banned from publication, following the suppression in 1968 of the Prague Spring reform movement. As a result many of his works first appeared in typewritten volumes with homemade bindings— the so-called samizdat editions—or in German translation before being published in Czech either abroad by emigre publishing houses or, after the fall of communism and the breakup of Czechoslovakia, by publishers in the Czech Republic.

Klima was born in Prague on...