Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
In the final one of these five essays, “The Politics of Hope”, you get an amazing sense of the determination of the dissidents, the signatories of Charter 77, in what was one of the most oppressive regimes in Eastern Europe, with no trade unions, of their ability to cling stubbornly to the idea of a society they believed should one day exist. He quotes the Czech philosopher Vaclav Belohradsky saying that, even though the intellectual opponents of the regime felt defeated, “We must not let ourselves be corralled into histories written by the victors.”
And now a collection of Vaclav Havel’s essays.
I like everything by Havel so perhaps this is an odd collection to choose. It first came out in samizdat, illegally, in 1986. I have met and interviewed Havel several times. I even lent him my sleeping bag once, just after he’d become president, when we were on a camping trip together in South Bohemia. In the final one of these five essays, “The Politics of Hope”, you get an amazing sense of the determination of the signatories of Charter 77, in what was one of the most oppressive regimes in Eastern Europe, and their ability to cling so stubbornly to the idea of a society they believed should one day exist. He quotes the Czech philosopher Vaclav Belohradsky saying that “We must not let ourselves be corralled into histories written by the victors” – at a time when dissident intellectuals felt pushed aside, defeated. Havel writes that the intellectual should be the “chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be a witness to their mendacity.”
His writing is often pessimistic and he was asked in the same volume if there was an inconsistency between the pessimism of his plays and his political life. He said the role of the playwright was not to soothe the spectator but “to propel him ... into the depths of the question he should not and cannot avoid asking; to stick his nose into his own misery, into my misery, into our common misery, by way of reminding him that the time has come to do something about it.”
Havel’s humour comes across in these essays and he was always gently poking fun at the authorities. Humour was one of the most important tools in the toolbox of the 1989 revolutions. For the Czechs, they were lucky to have Havel to articulate the process, the energy of the people on the streets. Of course, he was someone who had been thinking about this for so long.
Read full interview
Nick Thorpe lives in Budapest with his wife and five children and began reporting in February 1986 as the first western journalist to be based there. He is the only British journalist to have covered Eastern Europe from the inside for over 20 consecutive years. He witnessed the collapse of Yugoslavia, popular uprisings in Bulgaria and Serbia, and the transformation of non-violent to violent resistance in Kosovo. As the BBC’s Central Europe correspondent he continues to report the successes and the failures of a revolution which never quite reaches its goal.
