Writer and statesman Vaclav Havel, honoured in Dublin this week, didn't plan to be a political figure, he tells Fintan O'Toole.
Last Thursday, in the appropriately named L'Ecrivain restaurant in Dublin, Vaclav Havel was presented by Amnesty International with a large framed print of one of John Minihan's monumental photographs of the great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett. Though Havel would receive later that evening a more formal award as Amnesty's first Ambassador of Conscience, the Beckett photograph had a special resonance. It immediately took the former Czech president back from his current international eminence to his lonely days as the prisoner of a system that seemed destined to last for at least the rest of his own lifetime.
In 1982, Beckett broke the habit of a lifetime. Though deeply engaged with the plight of the victims of state terror around the world and a private contributor to Amnesty, he had always avoided public statements and political gestures. But he wrote a play, Catastrophe, especially for Havel, to whom it is dedicated. The Czech playwright had stepped into the firing-line as spokesman for the dissident group, Charter 77, and after a period of house arrest was sentenced to four-and-a- half years in prison for subversion.
On one of the few visits she was allowed, Havel's wife managed to tell him about Beckett's play. It was, as Havel wrote to Beckett on his release, a moment of "great joy and emotion . . . amidst the dirt and baseness".
Over coffee on Thursday, Havel recalled the impact. It was "the most tremendous surprise in my life at that time".
"To me, Samuel Beckett was a kind of a deity somewhere up in the skies. I would look up to him, and it was just terrific to feel that he would do that for me. I guess he must have understood, even from a distance, that I was not put in prison for political reasons but because I wanted freedom. That is something which goes beyond what politics mean."
The memory of what apparently small gestures of solidarity can mean to the prisoner is one of the reasons why Havel, though recovering from cancer and from a long period at the centre of one of European history's great tumults, couldn't resist Amnesty's invitation.
He is in many ways an extraordinary figure. There are rare times in human history when the epic sweep of events is crucially shaped by a single individual, a mind whose judgment and sensibilities are essential catalysts for change.
In our times, the two individuals who most obviously fit this category are Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel. Of both of them it can be said that a process of great transition would have been far more violent and chaotic without their special qualities of leadership. Yet Havel, unlike Mandela, was not a natural political campaigner or leader. He never even intended to be a political playwright.
"My ambition was to write about human themes, something that would be relevant to the human condition in general, and whenever you do that you are inevitably touching on your own experience and the circumstances of the moment," he says. "However, I still believe that I did not write political plays, and certainly not with the intention of describing the political situation I was experiencing at that time."
Yet that very ambition brought him into conflict with the Communist authorities and his stubborn desire to be free to express himself forced him to become a dissident. It also, somewhat ironically, gave a special kind of power to his writing. The knowledge that it comes from a dangerous place, that every word was a small victory over an imposed official silence, gives an edge to honest writing in oppressive conditions. Looking back, Havel acknowledges that, even if he was not trying to be a political writer, circumstances made it impossible for his desire to express himself not to have a wider meaning.
"The power of free speech, especially in conditions that are not free, is all the more enigmatic," he says. "All the more difficult to describe or to define or classify. So it becomes all the more powerful."
As the tectonic plates of geopolitics shifted, and the Communist bloc began to crumble, Havel's status as a voice of conscience made him, almost accidentally, the figure around whom popular desires congealed. Within months, the political pariah was president. Looking back, he sees himself almost as an actor caught up in a strange, chaotic drama.
"The entire change of regime, what you call the Velvet Revolution, had dimensions of various genres: a bit of fairytale, some suspense, a bit of horror, and a bit of absurd black comedy," he says. "And I was stuck there amidst those events and I knew that I had a role to play, and whatever the situation was, I couldn't worry about my own feelings. I just had to go on."
It was fortunate for his country that he had a sense of the comic side of power, and no appetite for personal rule.
"In the early days after the revolution there was an excess of influence on my side," he recalls. "If I said, 'Oh this dog is ugly', there would immediately be someone who would shoot the dog dead. I didn't like that and I was quite meticulous in trying to push forward the historical momentum to get rid of that kind of exaggerated authority. I actually had to strip myself of power."
Less fortunately, Havel's influence did not extend to the creation of the kind of balance he would have liked to see emerging from the great changes in which he played such a pivotal part. He is unhappy that from the ashes of Communism has emerged, in much of the old Soviet bloc, a new oligarchy of often corrupt wealth.
"There is something dangerous and ambiguous in the developments of the past few years, something which was hidden to us at the time and remained unknown for a period," he says. "Certainly this is not in my opinion a thing which would be particular to the post-Communist countries. It is to do with the current state of the development of civilisation. It certainly has very deep roots which we have to reveal, this sense of the overwhelming importance of profit, which is so prevalent that it pays no heed to the consequences for ordinary people of the pursuit of profit. This is something we will have to pay more attention to in the future."
He is also somewhat ambivalent about the invasion of Iraq, which he broadly supported last year. On the one hand, as a Czech, he is deeply sceptical of the notion that state sovereignty is more important than the need to act against oppressive regimes.
"Generally speaking, I do believe that the international community can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to what's going on in various countries and what atrocities are being committed," he says. "I believe that had it not been for the appeasement policy of the late 1930s, we could have been spared the second World War and the Holocaust, and in my country we are well-placed to know that. On multiple occasions I have insisted that it was my belief that while a state was a human piece of work, a human being was a divine piece of work and you can't stand by without doing anything in the face of atrocities just in the name of state sovereignty.
"On the other hand, if we talk about this particular situation in Iraq, I tend to believe that in terms of political timing and the justification of the war and its effective implementation, it was not the most successful thing to happen, and I understand to a certain extent all the turmoil that's been going on. People have to keep asking themselves what was the real moment that Iraq became intolerable for the rest of humanity? Why at this particular moment in time and not five years earlier or five years later?"
If the language in which he expresses his doubts is carefully constrained, that is perhaps a reflection of Havel's sense of his own position since his retirement from the Czech presidency at the beginning of this year.
"When you are in politics, you really have to mind your tongue and you cannot put things forward the way you would if you were an independent observer or whatever," he says. "Though I don't believe that I ever really lied to people or withheld things from them. But during all that time, I was looking forward to the end of my mandate, to being able to speak up just the way I had been used to before - in rough words and the words I want to use. But I then realised that this is no longer possible for me because I had to continue to be loyal in a certain way and to use diplomatic language. I realised that being an ex-president is a function of its own and it is unlimited. You are president for a certain time, but you can never stop being an ex-president."
Vaclav Havel was born in Prague in 1936, into a prosperous business establishment. Barred from academic studies under the communist regime, he worked as a lab technician, and then as a stagehand in Prague theatres. In the mid-1960s, his absurdist plays came to represent the cultural thaw known as the Prague Spring, but were banned after the Soviet invasion of 1968. While working in a brewery, he became an increasingly prominent dissident and was imprisoned three times for a total of five years. His essay, 'The Power of the Powerless' (1978), described how the totalitarian regime created a powerless, resigned society. Havel became a key figure of the Velvet Revolution, and was elected president of Czechoslovakia in December, 1989, but resigned in 1992, partly in protest at the break-up of the country. He returned in 1993 as the Czech Republic's first president.
The Havel File