The last two letters I’ve sent out begin Havel’s term in Heřmanice, the prison in Ostrava, far from Prague and their country house in Hrádeček. About a four-hour drive. This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve read these letters now, and they seem less headlong and rambly than I’d thought at first; this is a guy trying as quickly as he can to come to terms with where he is, get himself situated and organized, and get himself mentally prepared for a dangerous stay. Dangerous both because it’s a work camp, and him a middle-aged, known-enemy writer, and because it’s a much longer term than he has any practice handling. There’s some effort at trying to sound hearty, and putting a field-trip silver lining on things, with his two comrades right there imprisoned with him and much material to glean for future plays, but it isn’t a joke and throughout he’s shouting YOU MUST HELP ME.
I was looking for more on this prison, what it was like, and I came across a 25th-anniversary Solidarność conference programme (posted below) –the conference is held under the aegis of the EU, how strange for a revolutionary movement, and Havel is there speaking, but so is Zbigniew Brzezinski. I met Brzezinski in the mid-80s, just after he’d been Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, when he was a fixture on the international relations academic circuit. He must have been teaching at Columbia at the time — Rajan, you’ll remember, you were there by then — because he was also professor to a young man named Barack Obama. The school I went to was in the habit of bringing through diplomatic and financial and military people for us to hear and shake hands with, but a lot of them were pretty well embalmed by the time they got to us — old NATO generals and former this and that. Brzezinski was the first one I heard who was quite, quite alive. Electrically so. The only one who came through with more life in him was Jesse Jackson, whose preaching managed to make a chapel full of rich white children feel, however briefly, culpable. Maybe for the first time in their lives.
I was too young to understand what Brzezinski was talking about; it was more important and more ominous than anything I’d touched, and he was insistant at us, but I don’t know that any of us understood what he was urging at us. Here, in this programme of collected speeches, 20 years after that school talk, he says:
Solidarność was born in Gdańsk. I was born in Warsaw. That is why I will speak in Polish.
Dear countrymen! Our Solidarity hinges on the answer to a fundamental question: did Solidarność, apart from being a rising and an overthrow, also constitute a breakthrough? A rising or a breakthrough? I shall return to this issue in a moment, but I must, of course, begin by underscoring Solidarność’s geopolitical import. It is certainly – and without exaggeration – guaranteed a place in the pantheon of great revolutions, on an equal footing with the American, the French and the Indian (Gandhi’s). Solidarność was the explosive epicentre of a political tsunami that swept away the Soviet Bloc, followed by the Soviet Union itself, and buried a vicious ideology which at a certain point strove for world domination. Today it is easily forgotten how mighty the Soviet Union looked, how selfassured
the communist authorities appeared, when you in Gdańsk threw down the gauntlet with the world watching. From Solidarność … to Freedom! It was an act of remarkable historical courage and a prodigious social uprising.
And he goes on to make a picture of himself and President Carter, shoulder to shoulder, throwing America’s moral weight and hegemonic might against Moscow to allow this democratic liberation movement some air, aid, and room for maneuver. These things happen, and the actors are still alive.
There are things from that time that also come back. A thing that was usual in the fiction of the Other Europe was cowardice: writers’ examination of their own cowardice, of course, but also, richly described, the cowardice of functionaries. Apparatchiks and lower creatures, all thoroughly corrupt, also pickled, because what else had they to do. Not one of them burned with vicious Communist ideology, but they did enjoy better apartments, favors, protection, and rights to extortion and other petty, predatory viciousness. I can’t think of any counterpart in American fiction of the time, which was still full of wise guys and beatniks and sloppy antiheroes, immigrants living their immigrant stories, political villains and tinpot police, self-seekers. But — maybe because it hasn’t been part of our stories — now we have a thing that I think is taking us a long time to recognize because it doesn’t seem obviously American: organizedly corrupt and cowed politicians, like any Party hacks. They aren’t specially villainous, just small-time. But that’s all that’s wanted: all they have to do is show up, take the money, live in the mansions, and be willing to be brutal as directed, say the things they’re told to say. Imagination is neither required nor wanted. Questions of democracy don’t pertain. There isn’t any point scolding and protesting at them, because there isn’t much there to scold. There’s an overdramatic scene at the end of The Lives of Others that tells it: the playwright Dreyman runs into his old Party minder in a theatre lobby, the two of them now free men of the West; the Party man is as crude as ever, and Dreyman gives him a stare and replies, “To think that people like you once ran a country.” Which goes home, but only because the revulsion in it comes as a minor surprise to the Party man, not because he has some idea of what sort of people ought to run a free and functioning state. The same people run my state now, and many others in the US of A, and they’ll vote against impeaching Trump in a few days, and go on trying to take back power with force and lies. We have this now, too, and apparently it’s here to stay for a while.
So this new prison of Havel’s is going to be dangerous, and — though Havel doesn’t say so in the letters — he and his friends will be regarded as special dangers the entire time they’re there. His friend Jiři Dienstbier describes the prison boss as “the last real Stalinist I met in my life”. As I send out the next year’s letters, I have a feeling I’ll be more aware of p.s.i., the pressure all around Havel as he starts to write to Olga more seriously. Not as a future president — I don’t know how that could’ve gotten past the prison censors — but as a playwright.
I’m reminded of an assignment I had long ago, writing science curriculum for schools in Florida, whose statehouse had been captured by Christian evangelists and didn’t allow discussion of evolution in its science textbooks. Any direct discussion of evolution in a biology section would’ve killed the textbook, taken it off the approved-for-sale list. It never occurred to them to look in the chemistry sections. You’d have to understand some science to know to look for that, and these Party people are always the same. So are the writers and intellectuals.
The Havel Project 