Lost Dreams of an
Old Apparatchik
Ivan Klima's "Judge on Trial" is a very important book. I read it
just lately in a hotel room overlooking a central square in an Eastern European
country where, until 1989, the one-party state ruled. Beyond the window the old
state apparatus already lies forlorn. The official monuments are dismantled;
the leader's tomb is empty; fire marks and graffiti lick over the windows and
walls of the party building; there are no more parades. We know the history of
what happened: Russian "liberation" at the end of the war, the rise
of the one-party Communist state, the growth of state surveillance, the
suppression of all dissident thought that went with it. We know it from within,
because for 45 years Eastern European writers, writing in code, in secrecy or
in exile, gave us their reports, producing one of the most important forms of
late modern literature.
What we know far less well is the mind-set -- the political,
moral and emotional history, the doubts, guilts and
necessary compromises -- of the people, the apparatchiks, who administered the
great new socialist states that were to advance progress and human history.
Now, in a large, enormously powerful novel that takes us
back to the heart of the postwar Marxist age, Mr. Klima,
a Czechoslovak writer and author of the fine novel "Love and
Garbage," gives us his vision. He wrote this book first as an underground
text in 1978; he reworked and extended it when the Marxist era was coming to
its end. It was first published in London in 1986, in
Czech, and has now been translated by A. G. Brain.
This is the book that is likely to survive as the key version
of the late-20th-century Eastern European political novel -- along with the
work of his compatriot Milan Kundera, which offers
its own more spirited, magical, post-modern commentary on the days of laughter
and forgetting.
MR. KLIMA'S book is a work of complicated layering and
troubled memory (with interchapters called
"Before We Drink From the Waters of Lethe,"
about the wartime past that helped to make the postwar present), but it is
eminently a novel from the center of political life. His central character,
Adam Kindl, is a lowly judge in the Czechoslovak
system, a party man and apparently a proven figure. He is priggish and
self-enclosed, puritanical and dedicated to success, a man who acts prudently
in his emptiness. He cannot quite see what is happening around him: the failure
of his marriage, for instance. But as a young child of part-Jewish background,
he saw the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, where his real story starts.
Then, the war over, he receives, and piously accepts, an
official Marxist education, even going so far as to report on his fellows as he
dreams of the ideal postwar state. His own father, a scientist and engineer, is
falsely condemned to prison, and Adam comes to see the ambiguity of the law.
But he still pursues it. He is an educated man, inheriting much of the best the
European tradition has to offer. As a learned young man in the cosmopolitan,
multicultural Czechoslovak world, he bears the weight of several humanist
cultures: the Jewish, the Protestant, the Stoic. Even at school he has set down
his ideas about how the world should be run, his dream of the ideal state
("When, some time ago, I opened the black exercise book . . . I was amazed
to find that most of the pages were missing"). He believes that even in unfreedom it has always been possible to stay free.
The crisis comes a little time after the Prague Spring of
1968, when the contradictions in Adam's life are suddenly tested. He has
continued to believe that "when confronted by idiotic rulers and stupid
laws, almost everyone feels enlightened and discovers within himself the capacity
for useful counsel." He has kept up relationships with friends who are
critical of the regime, and he remains in contact with a brother who has gone
into exile in Britain. As his marriage collapses, he acquires a mistress and
commits various other indiscretions. Then suddenly the case of a seemingly
brutal man who has murdered his landlady and her granddaughter lands on his
desk, to trap him, since he opposes capital punishment and has so far avoided
cases requiring it. Meanwhile, just as his doubts increase, the regime starts
to show a fresh interest in his activities.
Mr. Klima's novel is the story of an
imperfect and limited man -- a man on the inside, who, when his own trial of
conscience starts, still considers that he has done everything properly:
"He was faithful to his wife, he did not drink to excess, he was a
nonsmoker, he ate in moderation and, like his father, he regarded diligence as
the supreme virtue." By the end of the novel this whole regulated and
limited world has dissolved, through sexual need and human sympathy, and his
entire life has been tested, until little remains. But the ending, though
bleak, is not entirely pessimistic. In his emotional and political confusion,
Adam Kindl has at least entered onto the path toward
a greater truth, and he has never entirely lost his faith in real justice. The
novel appropriately ends on a note of ambiguity, perhaps even a promise for the
future. The elements of virtue in the Western tradition are never finally
eliminated, and complex images of freedom continue to emerge from the prison of
state law and totalitarian repression.
"Judge on Trial" is a serious and wise book, a
meditation on the ideals that remain present in European democracy and justice.
It looks at the means by which they are corrupted, but it glimpses, somewhere
in human nature, the possibility of their survival. By its skillful technique
the novel is able to place the moment of Communist repression in a vastly
larger history, and raise some hope for the political orders of the future.
Adam's dreams of an ideal state where honest justice prevails are revealed in
their innocence and their imperfection -- but they are not entirely lost
dreams.
As the Marxist world unravels, as the monuments and systems
fall, the questions of what has been destroyed and what, despite 45 years of
repression, might also be able to endure become fundamental issues of the time.
Written on a large scale, created with a genuine intellectual and moral
ambition, Mr. Klima's novel asks such questions. Here
is a book that belongs in the same tradition as the work of Elias Canetti and
Arthur Koestler, a work that, looking honestly and atmospherically at the
agonized pain of Middle European history, suggests that it still has something
to disclose to the moral future. The book's Western publication is timely, and
its importance, as a work of thought as well as a work of art, is clear.
Published in April 18, 1993
By Malcolm Bradbury
On The New York Times On The Web
Copyright
1998 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/specials/bradbury-klima.html
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articles written by Bradbury: [Next]
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Creada: 06/110/2008
Última Actualización: 06/11/2008