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A Crazy Century of Memories
A Crazy Century of Memories

Author(s): Doubravka Olšáková
Subject(s): Review
Published by: AV ČR - Akademie věd České republiky - Ústav pro soudobé dějiny

Summary/Abstract: Klíma, Ivan. Moje šílené století [My Crazy Century], vol. 1 and 2 (Series Paměť[Memory], vols 17 and 32). Praha: Academia, 2009 and 2010, 526 + 369 pp., illus. The reviewer first acquaints the reader with the extraordinary publishing project called Edice Paměť [The series Memory], which has not only published a great many remarkable memoirs, mostly by important Czechs in the arts and sciences, but has also inspired them. In the two volumes of his memoirs, Ivan Klíma (b. 1931) provides a vivid account of his life as a Jewish boy deported to a concentration camp,an enthusiast young builder of socialism, an intellectual reformist in the 1960's,and a dissident writer in the subsequent twenty years. According to the reviewer, Klíma’s memoirs are chiefly a unique testimony about life under two totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The strongest parts of the memoirs are Klíma’s accounts of his own life rather than his lengthy essayist digressions.

  • Issue Year: I/2013
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 180-185
  • Page Count: 6
  • Language: English