Václav Havel

Disturbing the peace : a conversation with Karel Hvížďala

On the eve of his fiftieth birthday, Vaclav Havel looks back on his life in the theatre, the literary politics of his early years and the stagnation that followed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Havel also discusses his part in his countrys struggle to restore morality and civic responsibility to public life and the price he has paid for this. Havel spent several years in prison, faced constant harassment by the police, and had his plays banned. Despite this, the account is lacking in bitterness. Czechoslovakias leading playwright emerges as a man of profound moral conviction and clarity, a master of absurd theatre who, paradoxically, was in 1989 elected president of his country.

The Power of the Powerless

Inevitably, when revisiting a work I translated many years before, I am struck by things I might have done differently. My regrets run the gamut, from nuances of meaning missed or fudged, through omissions I can no longer properly explain, to outright, face-grabbing errors. This is true of all the novels, plays, and short stories I have translated. It is also true of The Power of the Powerless. Because I’m usually my own harshest critic, I’m never dismayed when people, as several of the contributors to this volume have done, point these lapses out. On the contrary they serve, in an odd way, to confirm the basic soundness of the work. It’s worth reminding ourselves that if the underlying work is good, its essential impact will survive even a flawed translation. Recent scholarship has revealed serious errors in the english translation of arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, but that did not prevent the work from becoming a modern classic. I could cite many more examples. Moreover, a well-written work, like a good wine, will mature over time, to reveal nuances of meaning that neither the author nor his translator could have anticipated. Both these factors—the shortcomings and potential new interpretations—might tempt one to consider retranslating it to remove the former and enhance the latter. But in this case, I believe it’s a temptation firmly to be resisted. The Power of the Powerless derives its primal strength from its deep rootedness in its own time and circumstances. Were I, or anyone else, to attempt a new version of it now, I would worry, as one does when transplanting an already established tree, that some of its vitality might be lost. The editors’ proposal that I provide an annotated version of the translation seemed like a better way of addressing the issues raised both by myself and by some of the contributors. My suggested alterations fall into roughly five categories:

Václav Havel, or, Living in truth : twenty-two essays published on the occasion of the award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel

Gathers essays by the Czech playwright, and includes writings by other authors in his honor.

Six Asides About Culture

While I consider it highly unlikely, I cannot exclude the theoretical possibility that tomorrow I shall have some fabulous idea and that, within the week, I shall have written my best play yet. It is equally possible that I shall never write anything again. When even a single author who is not exactly a beginner and so might be expected to have at least a rough idea of his abilities and limits cannot foresee his literary future, how can anyone foresee what the overall development of culture will be? If there is a sphere whose very nature precludes all prognostication, it is that of culture, and especially of the arts and humanities. (In the natural sciences we can, perhaps, make at least general predictions.) There is a countless number of possibilities for culture in our country: perhaps the police pressure will intensify, perhaps many more artists and scholars will go into exile, many others will lose all desire to do anything and the last remnants of imagination with it, and the entire so-called second culture will gradually die out while the first culture will become entirely sterile. Or again, perhaps that second culture will suddenly, unexpectedly blossom to an unprecedented extent and form, to the amazement of the world and the astonishment of the government. Or again, perhaps the first culture will massively awaken, perhaps wholly improbable new waves will arise within it and the second culture will quietly, inconspicuously and gladly merge into its shadow. Perhaps wholly original creative talents and spiritual initiatives will suddenly emerge on the horizon, expanding somewhere in a wholly new space between the two present cultures so that both will only stare in amazement. Or again, perhaps nothing new will come up at all, perhaps everything will remain as it is: Dietl will go on writing his TV serials and Vaculik his feuilletons. I could continue listing such possibilities as long as I please without the least reason to consider one of them distinctly more probable than any other. The secrets of cultures future are a reflection of the very secrets of the human spirit. That is why, having been asked to reflect on the prospects for Czechoslovak culture, I shall not write about those prospects, but will rather limit myself to a few, more or less polemical and marginal comments on its present. If anyone chooses to derive something from them for the future, that will be his business and on his head be it.

Stories and totalitarianism

The destruction of the story means the destruction of a basic instrument of human knowledge and self-knowledge

The Emperor Has No Clothes

During my first presidential visit to the United States more than fifteen years ago, I received an important gift here in Washington, on behalf of my country. It was the original manuscript of the Czechoslovakian Declaration of Independence from the year 1918. This rare and valuable document had, until 1990, been the property of the Library of Congress. It was hand-written in Czech by our first president, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, who deserves a great deal of the credit for the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia and who, when he was in exile in the United States, worked closely with President Woodrow Wilson. It is highly likely that, in writing this Declaration, Masaryk was inspired by the American Declaration of Independence. There are several such documents in modern history that have had a significance similar to that enjoyed to this day by the American Declaration of Independence. I need only mention, for instance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted after World War II by the United Nations, or the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference in 1975. These documents are so much more successful for having been written in simple, clear, eloquent language, if only because that makes it easier for school children to learn them and take them to heart, so that they become a permanent part of their civic understanding and their system of values. Along with the precision and the elegance of such basic documents, of

Václav Havel: Living in Truth

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The Anatomy of Hate

or apathetic. Rather, their hatred seems an expression of an unsatisfiable desire, a kind of hopeless ambition. In other words, it is the result of a necessary evil. In a sense, their hatred is stronger than they are. I do not share the belief that hatred is the pure absence of love or humanity, a simple gap in the human spirit. On the contrary, hatred shares many of the characteristics of love, especially its self-transcending aspects: the fixation on another, which turns into dependency and finally the relinquishing of a portion of one’s own identity to the other. Just as the lover sighs for the beloved, and can’t live without him or her, so does the hater sigh for the object of his hatred. Just like love, hate is essentially an expression of a burning and absolute desire, although here tragically inverted. Haters, at least the ones I’ve known, seem to suffer a pain that nothing, absolutely nothing, can assuage: a feeling that, quite naturally, does not correspond to reality. It is as though these haters wanted to be endlessly honored, loved, and respected, as if they constantly suffered from the painful feeling that others were not

Breaking the Ice Barrier

In October, the Czech playwright Václav Havel received a sentence of 14 months, suspended for three years, at the end of a trial at which he and three other defendants (see p.68) were accused of ‘subversion of the Republic’ for having sent banned manuscripts out of the country for publication abroad. The day after the trial ended the BBC in London showed part of an interview with Havel, filmed clandestinely in Czechoslovakia, in which the writer discussed his arrest the previous January, his feelings about his four-month-long detention, and the imminent court case; he also gave his views on Charter 77, of which he was one of the three spokesmen when the document was first made public in January of last year. The following is the full text of the interview.

The Period after 1989

This guest column amounts to a conversation between two of the crucial figures in the world of Soviet bloc dissidents about developments in their part of the world since the overthrow of communism there in 1989. They agree that a “creeping coup d’etat” is underway, in which not only the government administrations of their countries have changed, but also their systems of governance—for the worse. “It is not,” they agree, “what the democratic opposition spent twenty-five years fighting for.” Their apprehension is that, under new forms, the old authoritarian impulses are returning to East-Central Europe as well as Russia.