Václav Havel by Kieran Williams (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 790 rewarding participation. Despite these mechanisms, which reduced historywriting to the mere accomplishment of sophisticated propaganda in a scholarly form in a general context of de-professionalization of the discipline, educated historians participated, alongside Party activists and veterans untrained in history, in the struggle for resources, positions and privilege’ (pp. 337–38). That said, Romanian historiography under Ceaușescu was not entirely subservient to the dictates of the Party. One has only to read the contributions of respected historians in Revue Roumaine d’Histoire and Revista de Istorie to find support for such a view. UCL SSEES and Georgetown University, Dennis Deletant Washington D.C. Williams, Kieran. Václav Havel. Critical Lives. Reaktion Books, London, 2016. 237 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £11.99 (paperback). Williams’s biography of Václav Havel is less a conventional narrative of his life and influence, though it does touch on all the key moments, than a search for the deeper forces which gave rise to his thought and actions. Williams sees Havel as a figure who was always consumed by a poetic instinct to unsettle and disturb, to continually force others to step outside of their ordinary routines. The analysis relies on Williams’s deep immersion in Havel’s writing — not just the standard essays and plays but also his earliest poetry, multiple drafts of all his works, and the writings of his main influences. Though its informational density may be overwhelming to casual readers or those not familiar with the history of the region, it will be that much more rewarding to students of Havel’s art, philosophy and politics, especially ones not fluent in Czech, who will find much needed context and a number of original interpretations. Williams begins with the fact that biography was a problem for Havel. As the son of a wealthy and well-known family, he was the object of envy and some isolation in his youth. This same background then made him a class enemy for the Communists and limited his formal education. His dissident activities, however, also became the source of his moral authority. And by the end of his life he was an icon, whose reputation was so great that it became an impediment to communication. Much of the interest in the work comes from Williams’s excavation of the roots of Havel’s thought in family traditions — a preference for harmony and the moral improvement of public life — rivalries with an older generation that included Milan Kundera and the screenwriter Jaroslav Dietl, and early encounters with philosophy. He finds the main key to Havel’s thought in the REVIEWS 791 work of the Czech thinker Josef Šafařík who argued that each individual was morally bound to avouch a personal truth. The effect of Havel’s personality on his politics and art are a constant underlying theme in the text. These character traits include his desire to embrace life in all its forms, his optimism and ability to see the good in even forced experiences like the army and prison (which Williams cleverly terms ‘a sabbatical from the nerve-wracking life of dissent’), and his inclination to legalistic thinking (an inspiration for the strategy of Charta 77). Two more intellectual habits of mind were his belief that small actions could have wideranging consequences and his constant worry about how consumerism and technology estrange people from real being. Along the way Williams takes issue with some misconceptions about Havel’s political thought. He argues that Havel was not opposed to political parties as some have contended and in fact thought them essential both in 1968 and after the revolution. He similarly says that Havel was not against economic reforms and instead believed that the architect of the Czech reforms, Václav Klaus, was creating a ‘big-state conservatism’. The problem in both cases may have been that Havel’s arguments were too subtle and nuanced for easy consumption, a tendency he parodied in the title of his memoir (its Czech title is Please Be Brief, a request he often received from journalists). An interesting question about Havel is the extent to which he is a distinctively Czech thinker...