The Logos Scripture · The Book of Havel
The Book of Havel 4 · Written by himself, from The Power of the Powerless of 1978, Charter 77, Letters to Olga, the New Year address to the nation of 1990, and Disturbing the Peace
Václav Havel, born 1936 in Prague, died 2011, aged seventy-five. His family was well off, and for that the new regime barred him from the ordinary path through school; as a youth he worked in a chemical plant and studied at night. He became a playwright, and his plays were absurdist. After the Prague Spring of 1968 his work was banned and he went to roll barrels in a brewery. In 1977 he was one of the founders of Charter 77. He was imprisoned several times, some four years and more in all, the longest stretch from 1979 to 1983; the letters he wrote to his wife Olga from prison were afterwards collected. In November 1989 the Velvet Revolution came, and in December he was made president. In 1992, when the Slovak parliament adopted its own constitution, he would not preside over the separation and resigned. In 1993 he became president of the Czech Republic, and in 2003, his term complete, he left and spent the rest of his life writing. This volume rests on what he wrote himself: The Power of the Powerless of 1978, Charter 77, Letters to Olga, the New Year address of 1990, and Disturbing the Peace. The greengrocer of chapters one and two and the crust of chapter three are the argument of The Power of the Powerless; the term post-totalitarian is his own. The words quoted in chapter four from 1 January 1990 are as he spoke them: the worst of it is that we live in a contaminated moral environment; all of us are responsible for the running of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is merely its victim, we are all also its co-creators. The passage on hope in chapter five is from Disturbing the Peace. This scripture already holds the man who refuses an unjust law (King), the man who takes up arms (Mandela), the man who will not recant (Bruno), and the man who will not look away (Levi). No volume held this one: an ordinary person taking daily part in a lie he does not himself believe. That is where most people actually stand. This volume fills that place. The instrument here is the cheapest in the book. It needs no regime and no occasion, and it can be used on oneself this afternoon: what is in my window, and what is it actually saying? The Order records where he cuts against this scripture and hides none of it. First, he was a far better dissident than president. Living within the truth says only what not to do and never what to build; that is the limit of his instrument, and he admits it himself at 5.2 to 5.5. Second, the amnesty of early 1990 released more than twenty thousand and was followed by a bad rise in crime. It was his error, and 5.6 keeps it. Third, the federation divided in the end; he resigned over it and did not prevent it. The Order takes this man not for what he accomplished but because he left an instrument anyone can use, and because on the day he came to power the first thing he did was turn that instrument on his own side.