Under a cloudless sky, by the banks of the Vltava beneath Prague Castle, a
young man in jeans is knocking out REM’s Losing My Religion for smiling beer
drinkers at waterfront terraces and tourists in their pedalos.
Prague in spring 2008 could be a mirror image of that blindly optimistic
season 40 years ago - except that there are no clouds on the horizon in the
form of thousands of Warsaw Pact tanks massing on the borders.
The man chiefly responsible for the Czech Republic’s resurgence, a small, shy,
fragile figure who has survived the ravages of cancer, sits in his private
office a few streets away, anxiously reading the reviews of his first play
in 20 years.
Having reinvented his country twice, Vaclav Havel is in the midst of
reinventing himself at the age of 71. A brutally disillusioned young
playwright in 1968, he became a thorn in the Communist party’s side during
the 1970s, only to be swept to power as president in the velvet revolution
of 1989. He then buried the Warsaw Pact himself, presiding over its
dissolution at a formal meeting in Prague in 1991, only to find the country
he had accidentally inherited falling apart.
Politics, cancer and repeated operations have left him frail, but he still has
a ready wit and easy charm. He is also fastidiously neat: his hair retains a
faint trace of red amid the grey and he is dressed on the day we meet in
crisply pressed grey trousers and a short-sleeved blue pinstripe shirt.
He left office in 2003 and has no idea what a former president should be
called: “Mr President, Mr Ex-President, Mr Havel or just Vaclav.” He wishes
there were something set in stone, but is too shy to set it himself. “I, I
don’t like to do this,” he says, looking embarrassed, “it’s something for
other people.”
The sudden end of the totalitarian nightmare was as much of a shock to him as
anyone. I vividly remember his expression, as he sat on the stage of the
Magic Lantern theatre in central Prague - which had become the unofficial HQ
for the Civic Forum opposition - on the night of November 28, 1989, when an
aide rushed in to tell him the Communist party had relinquished its monopoly
on power under the weight of public protest. Disbelief, wonderment, joy and
once again disbelief passed over his features in quick succession.
What happened next was little short of a miracle: within a few weeks, on a
tide of popular acclaim expressed by jangling keys and factory hooters,
Civic Forum became the government and Havel the president.
It sounds like a fairy story, and has often been retold that way – which Havel
hates, because he is still not sure whether becoming leader was the right
decision for him personally. He also feels that the myth can obscure the
years of hard work and stress. Certainly, he has never relished the
spotlight in which fate has forced him to live for the past 20 years, and
least of all the intrusive public interest in his private life.
Havel first met his current wife, the glamor-ous actress Dagmar Veskrnova, who
is 17 years his junior, at a theatrical party in the autumn of 1989, shortly
before the velvet revolution. They immediately hit it off, though it was
only in the aftermath of the dramatic events at the end of that year that
they became close.
After he had become president, he danced with her, he recalls, at the
Prague-Vienna ball in the spring of 1990, just after returning from a state
visit to Israel. Later, he went back to her place for coffee, instructing
his bodyguards to drive quietly with their headlights off.
It was the beginning of an affair that continued in secret until the death of
his first wife Olga from cancer in January 1996. Just a few months later,
Havel proposed to Dagmar, whom he always refers to as Dasha, and they
married the following January. Many Czechs considered that the wedding had
taken place with indecent haste.
In the meantime, however, Dagmar had saved his life. In November 1996 he had
been feeling wretched and was diagnosed as suffering from pneumonia and the
“president’s illness” - exhaustion. It was Dagmar who insisted that he
undergo a secret CT scan. The results were analysed by outside experts who
discovered a tumour on his lung that required an emergency operation within
the week. Subsequently, because of poor hygiene and postoperative care in a
hospital that has since closed, he nearly died.
Although Dagmar had saved the president’s life, Havel’s official doctor made
no secret of the fact that he felt snubbed by her actions. His evident pique
exacerbated the already ambivalent feelings of Havel’s entourage towards
Dagmar and added to the couple’s difficulties when they married soon
afterwards.
Today, Havel explains the public’s reluctance to accept his new bride as a
backlash that followed its early enthusiasm for postcommunism’s first “first
family”. The whole country, he says, had “married into our family”, and
therefore felt generally betrayed by his affair and quick remarriage. The
revolution was seven years in the past and public affection was on the wane.
Meanwhile, Dagmar complained of having official duties but no title or
budget to carry them out.
The couple’s joint relationship with the public has not been wholly eased by
Havel’s retirement from politics. His new play, Odchazeni (Leaving), was due
to have been put on at the National theatre in Prague, but when the
producers refused to let his wife have a starring role, he pulled it and
rearranged the premiere in the rival Divadlo Archa. The unfortunate irony is
that Dagmar has since been unwell and had to withdraw from the part.
The play - not quite coincidentally - concerns a man leaving high office and
being forced to give up the state villa he loves. Havel says that the idea
goes back to well before 1989, and contains strong echoes of Chekhov’s
Cherry Orchard and Shake-speare’s King Lear. Nonetheless, it is inevitable
that audiences will also see echoes of his own experience, both in taking
power from a collapsing communist dictatorship, and then leaving it - and
his beloved presidential villa of Lany - to a man whose politics he dislikes.
The current president, Vaclav Klaus, had been an economics don in 1989, as
bemused as Havel by what was happening. At the Magic Lantern, he would talk
wonderingly about events in Poland, where academics had ended up holding the
reins of power.
When Havel became president, Klaus organised the rump of the Civic Forum into
a political party and carved himself a role first as a minister, then prime
minister. He was heavily involved in the 1993 divorce of Slova-kia, with its
agriculture and heavy industry, from the more technologically advanced new
Czech Republic.
While Havel embraced Europe and an enlightened “social market economy”, Klaus
became a neo-Thatcherite Eurosceptic, whom Havel has described as “not
overly burdened by principles”. Yet the president quickly realised that the
early postcommunist government had to rely on ambitious politicians such as
Klaus as well as much of the old civil service and judicial machinery.
Nearly 20 years on, however, he is less sanguine about Klaus as president.
Havel is also not without fears for how the country will evolve. He cites
one anecdote from the early 1990s, when he was one of those who argued
against a “generous proposal” from the US to build a vast new international
airport on wasteland outside Prague. It was never built.
Havel knew full well that a new airport on that scale could have transformed
the tiny Czech Republic into “an important world hub like Singapore”.
However, he also wanted people to consider “the destructive influences of
globalisation. . . influences that could lead to a situation in which, in 50
years, our country would no longer be our country and would become a single
gigantic and unattractive agglomeration in which everything flourishes, but
most of all crime”.
Now, with a booming Tesco just yards from his office, he still frets about the
effects of big capitalism on small shopkeepers, breweries and artisans – the
things that he considers make a country unique.
He never had any doubts, however, about joining Nato, even though critics
claimed that “having liberated ourselves from one alliance and become an
independent country, it made no sense to don another yoke”. Then, as now, he
emphasised that communism was designed to restrict its members’ freedoms,
Nato to guarantee them.
Havel is also, perhaps disingenuously, unconcerned that Nato membership may be
dragging Czechs into conflicts they do not want to join: “There are
structures that allow the little countries to have their say. People don’t
think they work, but there is no proof of that. I have repeated until I was
blue in the face that Nato is meant to serve citizens and not just generals.”
Against the current tide of public opinion, he remains a strong believer in
the doctrine of liberal intervention: he supported the invasion of Iraq -
albeit passively - and is positively enthusiastic about what happened in the
Balkans. “When you think of Serbia and Kosovo, the intervention against
Milosevic, many people were not sure we should go in. I think we were too
slow,” he says.
When asked to reflect on his own role in the revolution of 1989, Havel is
modest: what happened across eastern Europe, he says, was a swell in the
tide of history fuelled by communism’s systemic failure and abetted by the
good grace of one man, Mikhail Gorbachev, who lifted the lid, even though he
did not know at the time that the pressu-rised contents would explode.
Recently, he wrote his memoirs - now translated into English and recently
published here - under the title To the Castle and Back. Unlike the
ghostwritten tomes of British politicians, they are deliberately literary:
details from instructions he wrote over the years are scattered alongside
his own musings and a series of interviews.
Among the fascinating details that emerge is his fastidious paranoia about the
new country not coming up to scratch: “Clean the disgusting rugs by the
elevator . . . Prince, when he saw it, vomited,” he writes. Not an actual
event, he reveals, but a phobia he had about Prince Charles’s possible
reaction to the state of Prague Castle.
“When they served half-cooked potatoes to the Japanese emperor, I almost had a
nervous breakdown. Fortunately, he took them to be a Czech culinary
speciality,” Havel says.
He no longer has such worries, of course, but he is still concerned about
establishing a meaningful postpresidential role – if bemused to find himself
representing “an ongoing latent opposition” to the present government.
His play, meanwhile, has had a stupendous reception among his fellow
countrymen, with not one bad word from the critics. There has been talk of
it being turned into a movie, though he denies there are any plans for this.
“Hollywood, no,” he says, smiling. “It has to go round a few theatres first.”
The first foreign production will be at the Orange Tree in Richmond, London,
in September.
He is also winning back the love of the public: he came third in a recent poll
for the greatest figures in Czech history, after King Charles IV of Bohemia
(who built much of Prague) and just behind Tomas Masa-ryk, who won
independence from Austria in 1918.
There is no doubt that his name still has resonance with the man in the
street. “I was there, in Wenceslas Square, in 1989,” recalls Svetoslav, a
rotund man in his late forties, over a frothing Pilsner beer in an “old
town” bar.
“Doing this,” he adds, lifting up his keys and jangling them in the air, “and
shouting ‘Havel na hrad’ [Havel to the castle]. Havel was a good man. Still
is. He has a new play. Have you seen it?”
To the Castle and Back, by Vaclav Havel, is published by Portobello Books,
priced £20. Copies can be ordered for £18, including postage, from The
Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Great Man ,real gentleman and champion for human freedom and peace.
James Muraguri Gichohi, Nairobi, Kenya
A real and true hero - a man who relaises the truth about democracy !!!!! Our PM should talk to him sometime.
ian payne, walsall,