'To Live Within the Truth'

...Havel's calls for free speech and an open society, genuine and impassioned as they are, belong to another era...

...to unprincipled and spineless men, prepared to do anything in their craving for power and personal gain...

...It was circulated throughout Eastern Europe and helped inspire the formation of Solidarity in Poland...

...Anyone who did would simply appear ridiculous, doubly so because Communism presents too many day-to-day troubles to worry about...

...Perhaps the best we can hope for in modern politics is a succession of faceless men (and now women...

...But to cling to the notion of traditional parliamentary democracy as one's political ideal and to succumb to the illusion that only this 'tried and true' form is capable of guaranteeing human beings enduring dignity and an independent role in society would, in my opinion, be at the very least shortsighted...

...At a later stage, Solzhenitsyn found the strength to challenge the Kremlin's tyranny in his religious faith and, to a lesser degree, in his Russian nationalism...

...Havel is no authoritarian...

...it might be an appropriate transitional solution that would help to restore the devastated sense of civic awareness, to renew democratic discussion, to allow for the crystallization of an elementary political plurality, an essential expression of the aims of life...

...At a time when American politicians have forgotten what George Bush could only call "the vision thing," it is gratifying to discover a leader who can think of the ends as well as the means of governing, and who is still trying to inspire...

...He can infuse even the most tired or outdated theme with his engaging personality...

...The word itself, he notes, has been part of Soviet propaganda for over 35 years, and therefore has been drained of all content...

...Yet neither is he a creature who would fit comfortably into the American political system...

...Seldom in recent times," Havel wrote in 1975, "has a social system offered scope so openly and so brazenly to people willing to support anything so long as it brings them some advantage...

...Happily, there is a great deal more to the pieces that follow than "detail and nuances...

...Power existed for its own sake, not for some higher purpose...

...But as Open Letters amply demonstrates, so long as Vaclav Havel remains the President of his country, Czechoslovakia will be a very interesting place to watch...

...Skepticism about speaking out has been bred into Eastern bones, and nobody is likely to put his career, his family, his life on the line for so Utopian (and, Havel suggests, so meaningless) a notion as world peace...

...His descriptions of police harassment and political trials already have the aroma of political documents...

...Two other long essays, "The Power of the Powerless" and "Politics and Conscience," can also be read for simple pleasure...

...Quite the opposite: He favors pluralism everywhere—in government, economics, thesociety as a whole...

...The conference participants in Amsterdam are free to criticize their governments' defense programs without fear of retribution, whereas dissidents in Eastern Europe risk long prison terms...

...As if the proper pigeonhole were more important than the substance of an opinion...

...No effort was required to confront the artificiality of late Communism because the most natural, most mundane activity —playing rock music, for exampleconstituted a challenge to the authorities...

...They asked only to be allowed to live truthfully, according to their natures, as free individuals...

...Long experience with democratic practice has taught us that politics as we understand the term is precisely the art of the possible...

...Though he welcomes democracy, he does not embrace it as a panacea, an answer to the problems of the 21st century...

...For Havel, it seems, the key to finding that "something" was the period in which he began his intellectual career and his dissidence...

...Vaclav Havel was his country's most famous dissident, a world-renowned figure who spent the years from 1979 to 1983 in a Communist prison...

...He arrived at a moment when Communism had entered its decadent, bankrupt phase, when the bureaucrats and apparatchiks were going through the motions, but nobody really believed in the system or in the ideology...

...But one can understand why a person living under a system that will not let him or her be might turn to the century's foremost philosopher of Being...

...to born lackeys, ready for any humiliation and willing at all times to sacrifice their neighbors' and their own honor for a chance to ingratiate themselves with those in power...

...Perhaps Havel will fail...

...In the years when the Communist faith was still strong, the writings of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler revealed the psychological stresses these questions posed for people who were not sure a genuine alternative existed...

...I am taken aback," he says, "by the extent to which so many Westerners are addicted to ideology, much more than we who live in a system which is ideological through and through...

...in Czechoslovakia, to be publicly in favor of "peace" is to be in agreement with the policies of the Soviet Union...

...Selfishness and careerism prevailed...

...they weren't even on the political spectrum...

...Idealists in politics are either foolish or, worse, dangerous, fanatical...

...Few topics can have less relevance today than the European peace movement of the 1980s, which grew to disquieting proportions in the early years of the Reagan Administration when the battle over intermediate-range nuclear missiles was raging...

...Not surprisingly, many of the writings here are devoted to telling the by now old and familiar story of totalitarian oppression...

...Havel goes on to raise a broader issue that, as it happens, has resonance now when aspiring Stalin:, on our campuses and elsewhere are trying to weed out those who fail to meet their standards for politically correct thinking...

...The second, from 1984 and showing the influence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, expresses, among other things, Havel's environmental concerns, while pointing up his hope for finding a standard of value in "the natural...

...As crafted and as appealing as these pieces are, however, they are not the main reason forthebook'sinterest...

...Any thoughtful dissident must, at some point, consider the ground he is standing on...

...Havel notes that the signers of Charter 77, the human-rights declaration, came neither from the Right nor the Left...

...Seeing a writer only through his 'major' works may deprive us of detail and nuances...

...but they have been replaced in modern times by the manager, the bureaucrat, the apparatchik...

...Why is he willing to sacrifice everything...

...Havel also reminds his audience of the fundamental asymmetry that exists between East and West (or did when he was writing...

...And the editor, Paul Wilson— who has otherwise done an excellent job—does not help matters by implying that Open Lettersis meant to fill out the record...

...Nevertheless, one of the most enjoyable articles in this volume is "Anatomy of a Reticence," written for an Amsterdam peace conference in 1985...

...The book appears, after all, with two strikes against it...

...Nonetheless, who, even in the jaded West, can fail to respond with a nod of recognition upon encountering his observation that "rulers and leaders were once personalities in their own right, with particular human faces...

...Second, almost everything has changed in Eastern Europe since 1989...

...Havel is an utterly charming writer, with an intimate, conversational style...

...if conditions were to be created for democracy in some countries in the Eastern bloc...

...Solzhenitsyn-like, he sees decay everywhere...

...Havel has earned the right to have his say on this subject, yet prospective readers in the West could be forgiven if they responded more with politeness than enthusiasm...

...That endless, exhausting examination of this or that attitude, opinion, or person to determine whether they are Rightist or Leftist, left of Center or right of Center, right of the Left or left of the Right...

...In this sense, theopposition is every attempt to live within the truth...

...But Havel is not religious, and although he demonstrates a kind of patriotism in some of the essays, he appears to have understood that Czechoslovakian nationalism was a rather fragile moral reed to lean on...

...With understated grace and civility, Havel presents the Eastern European perspective on the "peace question" and, in the process, skewers the position of his intended audience...

...To many in the West all of this will sound like mush, and maybe it is mush...

...What, exactly, is the Truth he is speaking to Power...

...The first, written in 1978, is an Orwellesque dissection of totalitarianism and a meditation on nonviolent resistance...

...The debate between capitalism and socialism has become outdated, he says, beside the point...

...To him, the East is merely an extension of tendencies already evident in the West—the obsession with consumer goods, the overreliance on technology, the encroachment of bureaucracy, the avoidance of personal responsibility...

...Something more universal and more personal was required...

...Reviewed by Barry Gewen New York "Times Book Review" preview editor This collection of past articles, interviews and public letters by the current President of Czechoslovakia is far more interesting than one might expect it to be...

...It is deals and maneuvering and, above all, compromise...

...Who, besides a dedicated scholar, is likely to read on after an editor's preface announcing: "I realized that the distinction between major and minor works is, in many ways, a false one...

...What gives Open Letters its currency, makes it more than a space-filler for library shelves, is the source of Havel's dissidence as it is described throughout the collection, and its implications for Czechoslovakia's, and Europe's, future...

...everything in which the genuine aims of life go beyond the limits placed on them by the aims of the system...

...Everything had become false —social institutions, language, human relations...

...The title refers to the "reticence" if not "outright distrust and uneasiness" that, Havel says, Eastern Europeans feel about Western campaigns for peace...

...In "The Power of the Powerless" he explains: "Certainly...

...In an environment of that kind, Havel stresses, a dissident did not have to turn to religion or posit a counterideology or offer a political program...

...It may well be that Havel will prove himself one more airy intellectual who falls on his starry-eyed face when confronted with the real world of budget deficits, credit crunches and ethnic disturbances...

...For such people, words like "autonomous" and "existential" come naturally, and some of Havel's readers will be disturbed to leam that the thinker he apparently most admires is the existentialist and one-time Nazi Martin Heidegger...

...For whom or what is he sounding his dissent...

...It employs a stylistic device common to many of the articles in the collection, beginning from a personal experience or encounter of the author's—in this case, his boyhood memory of seeing a smokestack belching brown fumes into the air—and expertly expanding out from the quotidian to the cosmic...

...It is from his "orientation toward Being" that Havel criticizes not only the East of Communism but the West of capitalism as well...

...I cannot overcome the impression that Western culture is threatened far more by itself than by SS-20 rockets...