He never was a politician. He never wanted to be one. In this, he embodied the post-communist dream of an anti-political politics. Many, very many Czechs could not forgive him just that. When they put him at the Prague Castle, when they saw him in the legendary president T.G. Masaryk’s seat – they wanted him to play a statesman. And play he did, throughout his life he was a man of the theater. But he was a playwright, not an actor. As time went by, voices were heard that he is not fit for the position he holds. When people now say “he was an intellectual, a playwright, and a politician – in that order” it sounds more like a judgment than a description. Yet, little of that domestic criticism seemed to trickle through the borders of the Republic, and so the discrepancy between the international appreciation and the domestic disenchantment grew. Disenchantment is a good word. It was not Havel that changed. It was the Czechs who changed their expectations. He enchanted them with his charisma, his life-story and charm. And they (many of them) later did everything, to escape and deny that enchantment, as if they were ashamed of it. Inarguably, they owe him a lot. And so do the other nations in the region, because to our luck it was him and not any other former oppositionist that became the face of Central Europe in the early 1990s.

Havel appeared in Czechoslovakia’s public life in the 1960s as a writer – a young, avant-garde playwright. He was a declassed bourgeois, a descendant of a great Prague family. His grandfather – Vácslav Havel – was an architect, a leading representative of Czech modernism. His uncle Miloš established the famous film studios on the Barrandov hills. The father, Václav M. Havel, a friend of Masaryk’s, apart from building houses was also building institutions – the Czech Rotary and YMCA. If for the Czechoslovak Communist Party there ever was an archetype of a class enemy, it was him – the young blonde playwright, a frequent to the arty “Slavia” café. They wouldn’t allow him to study at the university; they expelled him from the economic school. However, already in 1963 the Theater on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí), which would become one of his homes, staged his first play. And so, when he spoke out against censorship at the famous 4^th Meeting of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, which pushed the country towards the Prague Spring, he was already recognizable. When in 1968, he clashed with Milan Kundera on the issue of the “Czech fate” (the two writers would differ on many things since), he became an important figure of the country’s intellectual life. And he did not cease to be one even despite the repressions of the so called “normalization.” His open letter of 1975 to the party’s general secretary – “Dear Dr. Husák” – was an early symptom of the nascent Czechoslovak dissent – the morally anchored political opposition dedicated to the defense of human rights.

Although his works were not staged and disappeared from bookstores, the communist regime itself helped to preserve his popularity and public awareness. After the Charter 77 was published, Husák’s bureaucracy unleashed a campaign of hatred and slander known as the “Anti-Charter.” Soon afterwards, the public radio broadcast a piece entitled “Who is Václav Havel?” It is difficult to come up with an example of a worse shot-in-the-foot in the history of Eastern European communism. Those who had not yet heard of the Charter now were aware of it. Those who never heard of Havel, now knew, that he is an enemy of the system. For many that was the highest compliment and a certificate of credibility.

And so when along with other members of the Committee for the Defense of Unjustly Persecuted (VONS) he was sentenced to four and a half years, the defiant Czech bard Jaroslav Hutka dedicated him a ballad: “Havlíčku, Havle.” Playing on the proximity of the names, in the song Hutka replaced Havel with the 19^th century romantic Czech intellectual Karel Havlíček Borovský, who was banished and imprisoned by the Austrians, because his ideas about truth and law were too dangerous. The similarity of both figures was striking. Thus the domestic, Czechoslovak legend of Václav Havel was born.

Soon, however, it was outgrown by the international legend. In search for trans-border allies, the Workers Defense Committee (KOR) of Poland would seek to establish contacts with the Charter. Havel was symbolically put on the editorial board of the samizdat opinion periodical “Krytyka,” although back then he was still nearly anonymous for the Poles (his name – sometimes misspelled). The famous meeting of KOR and Charter representatives on a mountain trail at the Czechoslovak-Polish border in 1978 was a symbolic breakthrough. Rumor has it that Adam Michnik talked Havel into writing an essay, one that would later become internationally acclaimed as “The Power of the Powerless.” It is difficult to judge if that is true. If it is then (in no attempt to reduce the importance of his own writing), this would be Michnik’s greatest contribution to universal anti-totalitarian thought. For Havel, unlike Michnik or Jacek Kuroń, was always able to pinpoint a universal truth in an individual experience. Though he wrote about Czechoslovakia, he never wrote solely for Czechoslovakia. Perhaps it was his fantastic sense of drama that enabled him to see every issue, every conflict, and every choice from many angles. And most importantly – to find a way to very different audiences. “The Dissident” in Havel’s writing becomes a dramatis persona, which the reader observes and gets to understand. In the “Power of the Powerless” he was able to grasp the tragic condition of post totalitarian life, seemingly untranslatable for the Westerners, in the quasi-comic character of the greengrocer. In the same manner, he managed to build an intellectual bridge between Eastern European opposition and the Western peace movement in the extremely important, but somewhat forgotten essay “Anatomy of a Reticence.”

While his essays benefited from an uncommon profoundness because of their dramatization, Havel’s plays became more political, and thus unfortunately flatter. Timothy Garton Ash, the most important constructor of the Czechoslovak dissident-playwright international legend, made a note of that already in the mid-80s. It was the essays, as well as the incredible, thrilling and multidimensional collection of prison letters to his first wife, Olga, that secured a place for Havel in the global intellectual pantheon.

When in November of 1989 the citizens of Prague took to the streets to chant down the dictatorship, to jingle it down with thousands of key-rings, Havel naturally appeared at the head of the movement (the Civic Forum). And when the time came to chant for a new leader to the Prague Castle, the hundred-thousand-strong crowd in unison chose the playwright, whose plays were not seen in Czechoslovakia for twenty years, whose name was supposed to be erased from popular consciousness. “Havel to the Castle – Havel na Hrad!”

This is where a new chapter of the fairy tale begins, about the everyman Vašek, who became king (partly) against his will. Although already in the 1980s he was a western media darling, after he took office a true “Havelmania” erupted. Havel enchanted the world, led Czechoslovakia (later only the Czech Republic) and the whole region “back to Europe,” and singlehandedly built the image of stability and political culture of Central Europe (a concept that was close to his heart). Let us be frank. The fact that three Central European states joined NATO in 1999 and that the European Union let eight formerly communist countries join in 2004 was partly his accomplishment. This first political move, however, became something that many fellow-dissidents could not forgive him. When he assumed office, he wanted to play according to dissident rules, conduct diplomacy based on human rights, morality and truth. The turning point was probably the Bosnian War and the growing domestic tension in his homeland, inevitably sliding towards a divorce (back then it was not yet certain how “velvet” it would be). Havel bet on security, he bet on America. He believed that for certain higher values, such as freedom and human rights, it is worth to fight for – even armed. That is why he supported the bombing of Serbia, the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. It would not be wise, however, to hold this against him. A majority of the former Eastern European oppositionists trotted down that path. But outside the mainstream, the anger and disappointment grew.

As a president, he never ceased being a dissident and an intellectual. He didn’t feel well in a world, where the motto “truth shall prevail” was at times only a sticker on a jar of filth. He quickly made enemies at home, in the Czech Republic. The greatest was probably the current president Klaus, whose entire political career is basically cast around the struggle with Havel and his ghost. Watching the thousands of mourners on Venceslas Square, the thousands of mourners accompanying Havel’s coffin back to the Castle, I guess now his ghost will be more powerful than ever. Even despite the fact that since he left office his political power declined further and further (in 2010 he gave a moral blessing of publicity to the Green Party, which didn’t even make it past the electoral threshold to parliament).

His 75^th birthday in October this year was a kind of festival of nastiness big and small. Many of them even below the region’s press culture average. The most pathetic of titles to my taste was “75 women for the 75^th anniversary”. Havel the womanizer. A very often heard allegation, all the more bizarre that we are talking of a not very prude country. The other allegation was that he drank too much – and that he didn’t treat himself seriously enough. Instead of a king, an artist on the throne – Rex Bohemiae in both meanings. Not a philosopher, not yet a jester – a writer.

Where did this popular antipathy come from? It is easiest to blame the “dissident complex.” Only a few hundred people signed the Charter 77. A few more took part actively in various forms of opposition, which in Czechoslovakia was much riskier than in the neighboring Poland. The dissidents’ legend, with their undeniable civil (and human) courage and a demanding, grandiose, almost highfalutin rhetoric of “living in truth” (Havel and Václav Benda built it on the foundation of the philosophy of Patočka, the Charter’s intellectual godfather) – all this was tiresome and even irritating for the “silent majority.” The antipathy was enhanced by the almost limitless international praise for the president, speaking in his serious, low voice with a characteristic “ahr.” And so the attacks were sometimes cruel and pathetic. “He plays such a smartass, and he cheated on his wife” or “just buried the first one, and now he gets another, younger one.”

All this is history now. Havel described a pessimistic vision of his own descent into oblivion in his last play – “Leaving.” Reality will be, however, different from the theater, because Havel was a man of a totally different format than the self-ironically diminished Chancellor Rieger. With the passing of Václav Havel closes an extraordinarily important chapter (or better – act) in the history or Central Europe. A “Dissident” with a capital “D” – a man for whose sake that word itself changed its meaning – is leaving the stage. His essays, although written under the post-totalitarian condition, show the way for individual’s actions in the face of the state and any other dehumanized system, in relation to certain immovable moral truths. A standing ovation, though with a heavy heart. The curtain falls.

The text first appeared in the Polish internet weekly  Kultura Liberalna on Monday, December 19^th.

While I cannot claim the privilege to have been one of Václav Havel’s friends, he loomed large in my life, first in my teenage years when I was coming of age in Communist Czechoslovakia and later through my extended sojourns abroad – in the United States and now in Poland. Václav Havel is profoundly irreplaceable. Together with millions of other Czechs, I owe him my freedom.

The season’s first snow was falling heavily last Sunday afternoon when I was making my way to Wrocław along winding, mountainous roads returning from my family house on the Czech side of the border. The going was very slow as the line of cars, mostly with Polish tags, headed back toward Poland after spending a weekend in the Czech mountains. My small son was sleeping in the back seat. In the quiet of the ride, I listened to Václav Havel’s voice recorded five years prior when he spoke on Czech National Radio about the place theater held in his life. Czech radio stations were responding to the news of the former President’s death with rebroadcasts of past interviews, as if they wanted to extend his presence among us.

In this moment of deep sadness when time seemed to have stopped altogether, my thoughts turned back to an important moment in my childhood. I must have been eleven when I decided to take part in a school recitation competition. To help me prepare, my mother taught me a poem by the Czech Nobel Prize laureate, Jaroslav Seifert. In the poem, Seifert commemorated the day when the first Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garyk Masaryk died. Masaryk, like Havel, died in early hours of the morning. The poem, which I still remember, is entitled, To kalné ráno – The Grey Morning. My mother read the poem out loud to me repeatedly until I knew the words by heart, stopping to take breaths before each softly sounding refrain: “Remember my child, that grey morning.” Thanks to Havel, I realize today that my mother’s choice of Seifert, an unpopular author with the Communist government, was an example of the power of the powerless, something my mother bestowed upon me along with a sense of agency, as I took the stage to read the verse publicly at a time when we lacked any hope that Communism would ever end. The atmosphere of Sunday afternoon of December 18, 2011 when I was driving back to Wroclaw and the mood reflected in Seifert’s poem about September 14, 1937, connected Masaryk and Havel – those two leaders of Czechoslovak democracy – at the moment of their passing and in my memories.

Havel as an absolute authority began to appear side by side with Masaryk in my family’s discourse and in my imagination even before 1989, when my parents discussed news of Havel’s imprisonment of which they had learned from foreign radio broadcasts. Later, Havel’s at first symbolic and then materialized leadership during the Velvet Revolution was something entirely and magically natural. That happened during my senior year of high school, at a time when I was still excited about being able to distribute illicitly his texts in our small mountain town. I met him the next spring by chance in a restaurant on the banks of the Vltava in Prague, where my sister had taken me for lunch after I successfully passed entrance exams to Charles University. Václav Havel was having a beer with his brother at a table in the corner of the small room and I remember how overwhelmed I became with a feeling of personal gratitude that on the very day that the doors to my university studies in the humanities opened up for me I met Havel. One year earlier it would have been an impossible goal to achieve due to my parents’ political incorrectness. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was Havel to whom I owed my freedom and the opportunity to be who I wanted to be, a privilege that my older sister, who never became the doctor that she deeply longed to be, never had.

When I left Czechoslovakia in 1992 to study and work in the United States, Havel continued to play an important role in my life. Almost everybody I met associated my Czechness with Havel and Prague:  my colleagues at the engineering company in Idaho, fishermen in Alaska and intellectuals in New York. In this way, Havel was becoming somebody in my life who allowed me to become conscious of my national identity. It was a complicated process for somebody who was brought up in a family that nurtured a historically grounded wariness of collective emotions, strengthened in my case through the cultural relativism that I learned in my anthropology studies at American universities.  But still, perhaps unconsciously, I have made decisions to remain Czech and maintain my Czech citizenship even when I had different, seemingly more attractive options. I realize now the key role played by Havel in this process of my national identification. Apart from my family, it was he who represented the only possible reference point for a feeling that I could call national pride.

When I arrived in Wrocław in 2003, Havel was no longer the Czech President. For me and my family, his departure from politics meant undeniably the end of decent politics (slušná politika). And the fact that our expectations were soon confirmed unfortunately came as no surprise for us. At a time when we have witnessed the release of banal private conflicts and interests played out in public and in the guise of public good, Havel seemed to be more appreciated outside of his own country. This was especially true in Poland where he had good friends and where he was always respected and admired. Looking from Poland at a time of the crisis of (post)modernity, I appreciated Havel’s larger European and global dimension. His words, through which he tried to return people and especially politicians to decency, no longer seemed directed only to the Czechs. Instead, they were calls to a broader audience for prudence in times of mad recklessness. But Havel’s voice was increasingly lonely in its moral determination. It seemed as if Havel’s politics, based on certain assumptions about ethics, integrity and morality were no longer understood in the world of contemporary politics, where such notions were treated in instrumental terms. But he never resigned from his principles and in his speech in Wroclaw in 2009 at the award ceremony for the Jan Nowak Jeziorański Prize, he confirmed his conviction that slušná politika is not only possible, but necessary. I am immensely grateful that I was able to meet Havel in Wroclaw. I lead him on a tour through Centennial Hall. He was accompanied by Adam Michnik, a man equally unbending in his moral convictions as Havel. I am also grateful that I could spend last Thursday evening in the company of Havel’s Polish, Slovak and Czech friends following the promotion of a new edition his essays in Polish. The great personalities of contemporary Poland leave gradually – Miłosz, Kołakowski, Geremek, Kuroń. We Czechs only have Havel, which makes the pain of our loss that much greater.

There is no way to replace Havel in my life. I look at the shelf where I keep the books he left us and I hold on to the hope that his departure from this world does not signal such tragic times as was the case in September 1937, when the first President of Czechoslovakia, the great humanist Masaryk, died. But it might be worthwhile to call on Seifert once again, who addresses Europe on the eve of WWII. In the last verse of his poem honoring Masaryk, Seifert writes: “Europe, Europe, when the bells start to ring, you should be the first to cry. Europe, terrible over swords and guns, in the light of the candles that were lit. Remember child, this grey morning.” I will remember.

To kalné ráno

Za sto let možná děti našich dětí

svým dětem budou teskně vyprávěti

o šedém ránu 14. září

navěky označeném v kalendáři.

To kalné ráno, to si pamatuj mé dítě.

Až ze všech nás budou už jen stíny,

či prach, jejž čas klást bude na hodiny

života příštích v ranním šeru

chvíle se ozve bez úderu.

To kalné ráno, to si pamatuj mé dítě.

Tu chvíli před půl čtvrtou ranní,

ten okamžik, a konec umírání,

když smrt se dotkla vrásek čela,

a ranní mlhou odcházela.

To kalné ráno, to si pamatuj mé dítě.

Evropo, Evropo, až zvony rozhoupají,

měla bys první být mezi těmi, ktoš lkají.

Evropo, hrozná nad meči a děly,

ve světle svící, jež se rozhořely.

To kalné ráno, to si pamatuj mé dítě.

Jaroslav Seifert 14.09.1937