A few months back, Havel’s Canadian translator, Paul Wilson, dropped a small grenade in my inbox when he sent me an 1989 interview with Olga that he’d published in 1991, in the erstwhile Idler. My impression of Olga, from various newspaper and magazine pieces written after Havel had been in office for a while, was that she was a thorny, brusque sort of person, nonplussed. Just generally nonplussed, and not all that happy in the role that had been thrust upon her, a determinedly ordinary person. The impression I got from Havel’s letters was that she was, maybe, a woman having a break from an insistent, badgering, anxious-to-frantic, sexist writer-husband, just sitting there breathing, driving the car however she felt like it, arranging her own affairs and not answering until she wanted to. But the Olga who comes through in Paul’s interview is an altogether more interesting person than either of these, and it’s the only place I’ve really heard her speaking for herself. Paul was an old friend by then, and she wasn’t yet the first lady of Czechoslovakia, but even so, the difference between this and other interviews is striking.
What I hear here is a literary, adventuresome woman, a fighter and a real reader, coming from a time and place that expected little of her, freeing her to be exactly herself, without career obligations driving her to use her talents in one direction or another. There’s no conflict between her being a wife and being right in the swim of the cultural and revolutionary life of a nation, which shouldn’t surprise me; how many other literary and artists’ wives of the time were like that, rocky marriages and all. It’s a niche that no longer exists, I think. And it sounds as though it wasn’t so good once she wasn’t to be herself, anymore, but the first lady. But here, read her yourself, rather than reading me talking at you about her, and see who Havel was writing to.
The Havel Project 