A few months after the 1968 Soviet invasion ended the Prague Spring of intellectual freedom in his homeland, Czech playwright Vaclav Havel joined many of his countrymen lining up at the U.S. embassy in quest of a visa. Like most of those in the queue, he had something to flee from: the hard-line new government wanted him out and had banned his works from production or publication. Unlike most of the others, Havel had someplace to go: three of his plays had won acclaim in the West, and he had been offered both a job at New York City's prestigious Public Theater and a foundation grant to underwrite him in the U.S. for a year. But when a friend in the queue asked Havel if he really intended to leave, he said, "No, I don't think so. I think things will get very interesting here."
Interesting the past two decades have been. Also turbulent, irritating, at times humiliating and occasionally frightening. As one of a handful of prominent Prague intellectuals who chose neither to flee nor to fall silent but to fight back, Havel was jailed three times for a total of almost five years on the flimsiest of charges. One four-month stretch was served in a cell 12 ft. by 7 ft., which he shared with a burglar. A second imprisonment ended when he nearly died of pneumonia that was neglected, perhaps deliberately, by prison doctors. His last internment, four months of a scheduled eight, was in 1989 for participating in a flower-laying ceremony in memory of a student who set himself afire to protest the 1968 invasion.
When nominally free, Havel endured nonstop surveillance; friends who came to visit were sometimes turned away and harassed for the attempt. His homes and car were repeatedly and imaginatively vandalized, doubtless by ever present security forces; repair workers whom he hired were threatened with police reprisals. The country cottage where he celebrated his 40th birthday was officially ordered vacated, one day later, as unfit for human habitation. Havel was never physically tortured, although on at least one occasion a policeman threatened, "Today you're going to get so beat up that you'll have your trousers full."
Through it all, Havel kept writing, kept publishing, kept denouncing the communist system as a concatenation of lies, no less corrupting for being universally recognized as lies. He spurned every chance to redeem his fortunes by recantation or silence. When the system made him suffer, his suffering became the subject of his art. Forced for a time to work stacking empty beer barrels, he turned even that into two brief satires. Although the obvious villains in his writings were communist leaders, whom he sometimes denounced by name, his ultimate targets were fellow citizens, whose crime lay in getting along by going along. His moral courage was accompanied, as is often the case with self-selected martyrs, by flashes of stiff-necked arrogance. He seemed to mirror himself in the descriptive name of his most autobiographical character, Nettle, pricking the complacency of what he saw as a materialistic nation.