During the long years of censorship and repression, many writers and artists throughout Eastern Europe dreamed of the day when they would be able to express themselves freely in their own country -- the day when they would fulfil their artistic potential. In practice, however, the collapse of communism has failed to create the cultural renaissance that so many hoped for. Writers, in particular, have found themselves -- with nothing to rebel against -- stuck for a theme. Their readers, far from hanging on their every freely chosen word, have developed a taste for the formerly forbidden fruits of Western commercial fiction. And it is increasingly difficult to finance life in the nonsubsidized new world by writing prose.


Ivan Klima, the distinguished Czech writer and dissident, has cannily taken the crisis of the artist in post-communist Czechoslovakia as his theme in his new novel, "Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light." The novel, which according to its publisher is the first to emerge by a former dissident in Eastern Europe, tells the story of Pavel, a documentary filmmaker who lives in Prague. Pavel sustained himself by working on a film script throughout the years when he produced anodyne documentaries for Czech state television. He dreams of one day turning his script about an artist searching for his soul, from which the novel takes its title, into a great film.


But as the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989 gets underway in Czechoslovakia, Pavel's life falls apart. Instead of looking forward to the future, he thinks increasingly of the past. Alienated from everyone around him, he starts drinking heavily. Stripped of the cover of the communist system, Pavel's mediocrity and hopelessness are laid bare, and he succumbs to despair. "There is nothing easier than persuading yourself that you could really do something if you tried, as long as you know that they will never give you the chance. The system never allowed you to win, and so it saved you from defeat as well."


As a child, Pavel believed that "nothing could be more magnificent than directing films." As a young man, he felt so incapable of learning or achieving anything in a country fenced in with barbed wire that he tried to run away, and spent years confined in a smaller prison instead.


Then, with middle-age, came compromise. When Pavel accepted a job in television he was selling out, although he comforted himself with all the usual excuses. What he films is "real life"; it is the editors and the censors who are to blame for the warped version of reality that is fed to the public. He is filming for posterity, for the day when the doors of the film archives are thrown open and the truth will come out. But the only truth Pavel uncovers is that after all those years spent accepting the terms of the system he has lost his soul.


Pavel's life reads like a parable for the saying that you have to be careful what you wish for, because some day you might get it. He always longed to travel, but it was while filming in Mexico that he lost the two things that might have given his life meaning: the love of a woman and the possibility of a child. It is during a night spent in a border town in Germany, with a beautiful porn star in his bed and a brand new sports car outside, that Pavel finally understands how hollow his ambitions are, and how spiritually diminished he has become.


"Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light" is an uncensorious and moving portrait of a pessimist written by one whose own moral courage has not dulled his ability to empathize with the majority of the communist system's complicitous participants.


The novel is written in plain, unsentimental prose. Klima's main indulgence is his penchant for lyrical definitions of the abstract, running through the text like a refrain: "What was greed, and dishonor? What was wretchedness? Greed was a finger down the throat of the satiated, an extra room for useless junk, an unloved lover in one's arms."


Published in tandem with Klima's new novel is "The Spirit of Prague," a collection of 22 essays that provide a fascinating commentary to the novel -- dwelling on the role of the individual artist in totalitarian society, and on the life events that shaped Klima as a writer.


Most notable is Klima's quirky account of being incarcerated as an adolescent during World War II in the Terezin concentration camp for being Jewish. As well as revealing the roots of his sincere belief in the need to sustain one's moral integrity as an individual in the face of institutionalized barbarity, "A Rather Unconventional Childhood" goes some way toward explaining how Klima has retained his profound optimism. In the camp Klima experienced love for the first time, and in the camp he began to write. It was during those four years, too, without formal education, that he came to understand so much about human nature. And it was in taming his instinct for vengeance after the war that Klima came so to love humanity.


"Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light," by Ivan Klima, Granta Books, 234 pages. ?14.99. "The Spirit of Prague," by Ivan Klima, Granta Paperback Original, 188 pages. ?6.99. The books can be ordered through Zwemmer.