Ivan Klima, the best Czech novelist of his generation, has died.

One of the great Czech writers of the 20th century, Ivan Klima, died over the weekend at his home in Prague, at the age of 94. Klima lived an incredible, principled life, having survived both the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin as a boy, and post-1968 Soviet repression in Czechoslovakia.

Having been an outspoken voice for literary freedom leading up to the Prague Spring in 1968, Klima was driven underground by the Communist regime, forbidden to publish and denied the opportunity to make a living as a writer. And unlike similar novelists of his generation (among whom he was the best) Milan Kundera (Paris) and Josef Skvorecky (Toronto), Klima stuck around in Czechoslovakia doing menial labor and writing when he could; he was also active in Prague’s underground literary scene, publishing samizdat writing and organizing clandestine salons.

Klima’s most well known works, Judge on Trial and Love and Garbage, written during the 20-year silence imposed upon him by the Soviet puppet regime, were finally published in the early 1990s and became immediate best-sellers; among many other works, Klima published a memoir in 2013, appropriately titled My Crazy Century.

On a personal note, reading his novel Love and Garbage as a young twentysomething teaching English in Prague was a revelation: not only was the story itself—that of a dissident writer struggling to find meaning in the world while working as a street sweeper—a compelling study in personal responsibility and moral self-reflection, the life behind it, Klima’s, was hugely inspiring.

Here was a writer who wrote because he had to, not for the hope of recognition or fame, who could not have dared to think his books would one day see the light of day. And yet he wrote anyway. As a young writer desperate for recognition, for public validation, reading Klima was an essential corrective in understanding why, exactly, I wanted to be a writer. It also helped that Klima showed a way to live a creative life (though not by choice) beneath the dull routine of menial labor, a future I’d long assumed would be my lot.

Rest in peace, Ivan Klima, your life, and the way you lived it, should stand as an example to us all of what it means to hold to your principles under the worst of regimes.