SOURCE: Klíma, Ivan, and Philip Roth. “A Conversation in Prague.” New York Review of Books 37, no. 6 (12 April 1990): 14-22.

In the following interview, Klíma discusses the political situation in Czechoslovakia and its effects on the literature of the country.

Born in Prague in 1931, Ivan Klíma has undergone what Jan Kott calls a “European education”: during his adult years as a novelist, critic, and playwright his work was suppressed in Czechoslovakia by the Communist authorities (and his family members harried and punished right along with him), while during his early years, as a Jewish child, he was transported, with his parents, to the Terezin concentration camp by the Nazis. In 1969, when the Russians moved into Czechoslovakia, he was out of the country, in London, on the way to the University of Michigan to see a production of one of his plays and to teach literature. When his...