Art Needs Its Enemies : I AM SNOWING: The Confessions of a Woman of Prague, <i> By Pavel Kohout</i> . <i> Translated from Czech by Neil Bermel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $27.50; 308 pp.)</i>

The collapse of totalitarian communism in the nations of the former Soviet bloc has left their literature almost as rudderless as our foreign policy. Their great dissident writers produced a renaissance under the fertile sign of the third-person plural. Images of humanity took shape in apposition to the ever-present and abominable “they.” In Europe’s new or newly re-established democracies the crisis for the writer is to find that suddenly “they” have become “us”; and where do we find the shadows that once made our light so bright? By itself the light is only so-so.

Pavel Kohout’s “I Am Snowing” takes these new uncertainties and makes mordant and exuberant use of them. His novel is a portrayal of the great unraveling that began with Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. If at night, as the phrase goes, all cats are black, by dawn they are all gray and it takes a keen eye, a joyful sense of paradox and a considerable ethical purposefulness to figure out which cat was which an hour or two earlier.

In “Snowing” we glimpse a crusading “Communist-hunter” journalist who for years wrote the party line. We meet a former dissident painter who is now a cultural bureaucrat and wears a necktie, which he hastily yanks off whenever one of his old friends visits him. And many more such metamorphoses.

Kohout was prominent among the artists and intellectuals in the 1968 Prague Spring. Nine years after the Soviet invasion Kohout, along with Vaclav Havel, was one of the authors of the Charter 77 manifesto that again challenged the official repression. Havel was jailed and Kohout was exiled to Vienna.

Kohout shares with Havel a quality of moral spaciousness, along with a sense of the particular and the absurd that the latter--now that he is a president and not a playwright--is less free to indulge. “I Am Snowing” is a novel of ideas but of ideas that refuse to be dull. It is a novel of extraordinarily well-managed suspense whose question is not who done it or who will get done; but what was it they did and what was its meaning. And finally it is a novel about a charmingly expansive woman who bumbles and plate-smashes her way through the ambiguities of the day to find out the truth about two former lovers; and whose erratic trail sketches the picaresque portrait of a post-Communist society.

Petra Marova is approaching 50 with her fires only partly banked. A former husband and at least a dozen lovers lie--or lay--in her past; and a weedy young colleague at the newspaper where she works is conducting a calf-like siege. She has a punk daughter for whom she tries to set a good example, and she is a devout if not exactly docile Catholic. None of this is proof against her real passion. Victor, a former lover who was exiled to Canada, is back as a high-level economic adviser to a government that is energetically restoring capitalism. He is her “king” and they make ecstatic love, but only once or twice since he is terribly busy and has, besides, brought his wife Vanesa with him.

Much to Petra’s embarrassment, Vanesa, mousy and plain, comes to her for help. Victor’s name has turned up in the newly disclosed files of the security police as a collaborator; a shocking thing since he has always been known as a man of humane principles and intellectual integrity. Surely it must be a mistake, Petra and Vanesa agree. In reality, police files have proven to be the most damning and the most suspect of sources in the wake of the Czechoslovak revolution, and decidedly vulnerable to manipulation. The names of a number of dissidents have turned up in them, and there is no possible way of establishing either their innocence or guilt.

Petra, however, was once the lover of Jozef, himself a former police official though seemingly--almost everything is “seemingly” in the book, which is one of its points--one of the decent ones. In fact he was jailed by his superiors after putting his own signature on the Charter 77 document. Petra goes to see him; he reveals that it was he who entered Victor’s name in the files, but for a good reason. Victor, a friend, was near breakdown; listing him as an agent seemed harmless at the time and made it possible for him to get a passport to emigrate. In any case, Jozef--now a flourishing agent for Austrian investors--will be glad to absolve him.

It is not so simple, though. Besides politics, there are passions. Throughout “Snowing” the trail of political and personal motives is hopelessly entangled. Jozef still loves Petra, he is jealous of Victor and finally he is stung by Petra’s lofty condescension about his former police status. (Her break with him, years earlier, came when in the course of a marriage proposal he revealed his identity.) Spitefully, perhaps--always perhaps--he tells her that although Victor’s dossier is a fake, he was in fact an informant for another security agent, now dead.

Petra is in agony. She loves and reveres Victor; she loved and had finally come to respect Jozef. In a number of beautifully written scenes, set both in the present and the past, Kohout makes us share her sympathy with both men along with her wrenching doubts. The onion-like layers of revelation disclose a variety of other figures, emblematic of the times and rendered with wit, humanity and a full assortment of their own paradoxes and contradictions.

Kohout’s heroine is not one to languish in her doubts. She pursues them, clumsily, comically, furiously. Petra is in one venerable tradition of the Eternal Feminine: the woman who loves not wisely but too well and too often, but whose earthy instincts end up making her unstoppable. She wins us over though sometimes we may wish she would stop a little. She is greatly wordy about almost everything.

Kohout can be loose and self-indulgent. But the tension of his and Petra’s pursuit of the truth rarely lets up; and in the course of it we get some extraordinary human portraits. Vanesa grows luminously out of her apparent mousiness; her own story is one of the book’s high points. Another has the force of a one-act play. It is Petra’s visit to Jozef’s family--mine workers who suffered atrociously and for whom communism has meant a good and decent life. Even then, over an abundant and hospitable dinner table, there is furious argument between the grandfather (an official who turned against the Party when the Russians invaded) and his daughters on one side; and his wife and Jozef’s brothers, who have their doubts but remain loyal.

Kohout gives a subtle and varied account of the intimately human contradictions and paradoxes that arise in a long dictatorship and live after it. If this were all, he would have written an excellent book but not nearly as good a book as this. To understand all--and we certainly come to understand Victor and Jozef--is not to forgive all. Among our contradictions we must make a choice. Before forgiveness there must be judgment.

The book’s American editor, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, has summed up its theme in a sentence on the jacket too exact not to quote: “After 40 years of terror and submission, who are we now and how much does it matter who we were before?” Kohout wonderfully explores the first part of the question, and he gives a painful answer to the second: It matters, utterly.

At Jozef’s family dinner table the granddaughter, who had remained quiet, finally speaks up. She is to be a teacher. Will you teach them about the heroic pre-war struggle of the Communist Party against the mine owners, the grandmother asks. Yes, the 13-year-old answers, and also about the terrible things the party did in power. And she adds in a phrase that is entirely Kohout’s and entirely hers:

“I’m going to tell my students that they have a choice between the truth and the lie, nothing more.”