R.I.P., Vaclav Havel

A hero of mine has died. Another great intellectual light has left the planet. R.I.P., Vaclav Havel.

Update: Friend (and high school prom date) Trav S.D. has a wonderful reminiscence about Havel and the Havel Festival at the Brick Theatre.

Vaclav Havel wrote once:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

In this detailed piece on him in The New Yorker David Remnick describes the giddy days of the “velvet revolution”, and I love the parts about Havel becoming President, and basically stage-managing the whole thing. What were the costumes? What should the “set” be? He thought like a theatre man. He wanted to eradicate the symbols of oppression. He loved going into “the castle” and discovering what was behind all the secret doors (much like the false front of stage sets, with a cavernous scene shop behind):

During the uprising, which quickly became known as the Velvet Revolution, and for a while afterward, there were graffiti around town proclaiming, “Havel je král“—”Havel Is King.” The King tried to demystify his Castle. He ordered the costume designer for the movie “Amadeus” to create red-white-and-blue uniforms for the palace guards. (Communist-era guards wore khaki.) He himself at first refused the suits that his friend Prince Karel Schwarzenberg brought him. “I can’t wear any of these!” Havel said. “I’d look like a gigolo.” In jeans and sweater, he rode a scooter through the Castle halls. He threw a “festival of democracy” in the courtyards, with jugglers and mimes performing while he wandered around drinking Pilsner and greeting everyone. Later on, when he discovered that the chandeliers in the gilded Spanish Hall were outmoded, a couple of typical visitors, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, paid for new fixtures. For weeks, he drove his staff crazy as he monkeyed around with the remote control, dimming the lights, then brightening them again.

“When I first came here, there were many things that I found absurd,” Havel told me in his office. A sly, can-youbelieve-it smile creased his face. “For example, it seemed to us on the first day that there were three rooms, close to where we’re sitting now, which you couldn’t enter. When we finally got inside, we discovered a kind of communications facility for contacts within the Warsaw Pact. So we took advantage of that and sent a New Year’s greeting to Mikhail Gorbachev. Later, I heard from confidential sources that the K.G.B. chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, didn’t really appreciate the fact that we’d found those facilities.”

It’s a fascinating examination of his years as President.

Craig Whitney wrote in the NY Times:

[Havel] is a man who wrote, in a 1984 acceptance speech for a French university award that the Czechoslovak authorities would not allow him to pick up, “The slogan ‘better Red than dead’ does not irritate me as an expression of surrender to the Soviet Union, but it terrifies me as an expression of the renunciation by Western people of any claim to a meaningful life and of their acceptance of impersonal power as such. For what the slogan really says is that nothing is worth giving one’s life for.”

Through much of Mr. Havel’s work runs the thread of what he calls “the absolute horizon” – the moral and philosophical judgments that give human life its meaning. He repeatedly warned his persecutors that by their repression of human freedom they were ultimately undercutting their own existence as well.

And that, my friends, is one of the reasons why Vaclav Havel was one of my personal heroes.

In 1975, Vaclav Havel had written a letter to Gustav Husak, then the President of Czechoslavakia. He warned Husak of what could happen when a population is kept down for too long. It wasn’t about politics for Havel – it was about “human dignity”, and how such dignity (such natural God-given gifts – a la “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness”) cannot be bestowed by anyone in power. We already HAVE them. We are born with them. If you deprive people of these things, you, according to Havel in his letter to Husak, create “permanent humiliation of their human dignity.” In this daring letter (for which he was imprisoned), Havel wrote:

I fear the price we are all bound to pay for the drastic suppression of history, the cruel and needless banishment of life into the underground of society and the depths of the human soul, the new compulsory ‘deferral’ of every opportunity for society to live in anything like a natural way … No wonder, then, that when the crust cracks and the lava of life rolls out, there appear not only well-considered attempts to rectify old wrongs, not only searchings for truth and for reforms matching life’s needs, but also symptoms of bilious hatred, vengeful wrath and a kind of feverish desire for immediate compensation for all the endured degradation.

Havel’s hat-trick was psychological, in many respects. He had years and years of practice. He lived under censorship and oppression. He retaliated by writing the plays he wanted to write, absurdist ironic masterpieces, which side-stepped literalism and yet left no doubt as to what he was criticizing. He’s an artist. He’s not a politician. He’s a writer. His survival instinct was from a belief in inherent human dignity and also the great make-believe mindset of “as if”. Live in truth. Nobody can tell you how to live. Nobody can say to you that you MUST ignore your basic human dignity, even if the entire political structure appears to be set up that way. Take a leap of faith. Like all actors and artists and writers do on a daily basis – it is their craft. Live AS IF you were free. Truth is not bestowed. It exists in you. Those who sneer at artists often miss the fact that they have a lot to teach regular civilians, about how to live life, and how to survive. Havel is certainly a great example of that.

On January 1, 1990, Havel officially assumed the role of President. He made an acceptance speech on that day that I consider to be one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century (and it is usually included in any such anthology).

Havel’s speech, broadcast on the radio, set the tone for all that was to follow. It is referred to as “the contaminated moral environment” speech. After decades of double-speak, decades of being lied to by their own government, decades of muffling their true sentiments, Vaclav Havel stood up and told the truth. He had been preparing for this moment since the 1960s.

We, as human beings, can recognize truth when we hear it.

Czeslaw Milosz, another famous dissident, brilliant poet, said in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize: “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” This is the atmosphere into which Vaclav Havel spoke, on that momentous day in 1990.

We know when we’re being lied to, deceived. Truth is unmistakable, and Havel knew that. However, and this is key, Havel did not let the Czech people off the hook which is another reason why the “velvet revolution” was so amazing. It was not about pointing fingers, screaming, “YOU DID THIS TO US”. Havel encouraged the Czech people to take responsibility for their destinies, to take responsibility for having endured the tyranny for so long, for having internalized oppression, and through that internalization – participated in it. Willingly. The “contaminated moral environment” was, to Havel, not only about the Communist regime. He addressed that comment to every Czech person who had tolerated living under tyranny. No passing the buck, no blame. Take responsibility.

Vaclav Havel’s Speech, Jan. 1, 1990

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nation is not being used sensibly … We have polluted our soil, our rivers and forests, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe. Adult people in our country die earlier than in most other European countries.

But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous …

The previous regime — armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology — reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production … It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone …

When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere … I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all — though naturally to differing extremes — responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators …

We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly … Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.

If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts …

In the effort to rectify matters … we have something to lean on. The recent period — and in particular, the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution — has shown the enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential and civil culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is not wise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical, and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake from their shoulders in several weeks and in a decent and peaceful way the totalitarian yoke…

There are free elections and an election campaign ahead of us. Let us not allow this struggle to dirty the so far clean face of our gentle revoltuion … It is not really important now which party, club, or group will prevail in the elections. The important thing is that the winners will be the best of us, in the moral, civil, political and professional sense, regardless of their political affiliations …

In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will … always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.

You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just, in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social, or political.

People, your government has returned to you!

You changed the world, sir.

Rest in peace.

This entry was posted in RIP, Theatre, writers and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

17 Responses to R.I.P., Vaclav Havel

  1. Jaquandor says:

    Damn…a hero has departed. Sometimes people question to me the efficacy of the arts and artists as forces to make the world truly better, and Havel is a fine, fine example to be able to cite.

    (BTW and FYI, the link that’s supposed to go to the New Yorker doesn’t go there.)

  2. sheila says:

    Doh! Thanks – fixed the link.

    Yes: Integrity. I am just so admiring of him. I’ll miss knowing he is out there.

  3. Pingback: RULE OF 3 | John W Smart

  4. MJWeber says:

    I too am very sad today. I knew the day was coming, but the reality always hurts. Bless you Vaclav Havel. The world has been blessed by your words and deeds.
    Also thank you for such an eloquent blog post. I will come back to read more of your thoughts. I would like to share this post about Havel it on Facebook with my friends, many of who are now fighting to save Wisconsin from Scott Walker. We can always use the inspiration.

  5. Catherine says:

    Wonderful post, Sheila. The universe has lost a trio of great, difficult men this week (Havel, Hitch, and George Whitman). The one positive that has come out of Havel’s death is, perhaps, the revival of a conversation about him. In 2011, Havel’s words are prescient and vital. We could all do much worse than to reflect on what he stood for. RIP.

  6. Bruce Reid says:

    “He continued to live “as if”, even as President.”

    There’ll be no finer epitaph forthcoming.

    I make a note.

    Bruce.

  7. Bruce Reid says:

    No idea why I signed off, I meant to type Thank you for this.

    And I do.

  8. sheila says:

    // There’ll be no finer epitaph forthcoming. //

    Bruce: Thank you thank you.

    What does one say when faced with someone such as Vaclav Havel?

    He is a HERO.

    and thank you again for your words.

  9. CS says:

    Thank you for this. If you have not been there already, please go, as Prague is an incredible city. It was consolation this morning that I’ve spent some time there.

    “The first surrealist President.”
    Arthur Miller

    My bookshelf has many writers, but two occupy more space than anybody else: Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens.

  10. John Vail says:

    Dear Sheila,

    What a wonderfully eloquent and erudite post on Havel-thank you so much for reposting-it must have taken you ages but it really sings (need to do dig up the Klima book asap). When I was in Prague a few years back, I had the privilege of interviewing some musicians and artists who were involved before 1989 and who, like Havel, did so much to galvanize the incipient protest and one of them took me to the bar where Havel had taken Clinton back in the 1990s when he was visiting as president (making all of the secret service people stand outside). There’s a photo up on the wall of the moment but all the people we were sitting with were keen to let me know just how many beers Clinton had managed to put away that night (8 if I recall correctly) and it was my duty as a fellow Yank to match this total, which I did only to stumble afterwards through the Old Town in search of my hotel. It’s amazing to lose yet another one of the pantheon so soon -hopefully, he and Hitchens are sitting around some cool place smoking fags and critiquing the state of the place.

  11. Bybee says:

    That speech is tough and beautiful.

  12. MsBaroque says:

    Sheila, this is wonderful! You’ve really done it up. This is a shocking death, even though he was 75 and had been ill; some people make such an impression they can never really age in our minds. Havel was a big hero to me in my 20s and I used to seek out books by Klima, too. I seem to recall that their ironic deadpan absurdism made a lot of sense in Thatcher’s Britain, too…

    Anyway I wrote something as well but nothing like this. You’re a star.

    And Arthur Miller, of course: another hero.

  13. Ken says:

    RIP indeed. It’s sort of interesting (I’m not entirely sure why I put the two together, but I do) that Putin is reported (in a few accounts, anyway) this week to be “running scared.”

  14. sheila says:

    Everyone – I am so glad to hear from all of you.

    Ms. Baroque – I loved your piece on Havel. It is true: those who did not experience the Cold War first hand have a hard time actually conceptualizing what the hell this momentous year of 1989 felt like, and what it felt like to have no information of what was going on behind that wall.

    John – Yes – this post took ages to put together! I have a book of the compiled NY Times articles of the years 1988 – 1990 regarding the crumbling of Communism. It is a massive tome, spanning the globe – from Tieneman Square to Siberia to Budapest to the halls of the Kremlin. I certainly remember reading many of these articles when they were originally printed – every day was this massive unfolding exhilarating adventure – and the compiled articles is a book I treasure. I bought it at a second-hand store in Key West for 75 cents. I refer to it often. This is what I used to put together the timeline of events, which still – still – takes my breath away.

    I love your story of Prague. It sounds wonderful!

  15. ted says:

    Your piece makes me want to go out and read the Klima book. Such a hero of our times – a true artist-revolutionary – not just someone who was along for the ride.

  16. Pingback: A psychological observation « Blog of the Nightfly

  17. sheila says:

    Ted – it’s such a good book – I love Klima! I should check out his fiction as well. The book is short and sweet, and pulses with the crazy energy of those days.

    Havel is just a hero of mine. Ach. The world will miss him!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.