{"product_id":"open-letters-isbn-9780679738114","title":"Open Letters","description":"Spanning twenty-five years, this historic collection of writings shows Vaclav Havel's evolution from a modestly known playwright who had the courage to advise and criticize Czechoslovakia's leaders to a newly elected president whose first address to his fellow citizens begins, \"I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.\" Some of the pieces in Open Letters, such as \"Dear Dr. Husak\" and the essay \"The Power of the Powerless,\" are by now almost legendary for their influence on a generation of Eastern European dissidents; others, such as some of Havel's prison correspondence and his private letter to Alexander Dubcek, appear in English for the first time. All of them bear the unmistakable imprint of Havel's intellectual rigor, moral conviction, and unassuming eloquence, while standing as important additions to the world's literature of conscience.\"Brilliant and perceptive analyses...of the abuse of power by bureaucracies driven by cynical self-interest.\" -- Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"An inspiring collection...a fitting tribute to a cultural and political hero, and a valuable resource for anyone seeking reassurance that the principles of democracy are still cherished in our time.\" -- Kirkus Reviews\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Havel's essays...show a complex political and moral sensibility. [Writing] with wonderful clarity and directness, he has a rare gift for metaphor and example. He can capture, with a phrase or a word, the dishonesty of an era.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e-- Times Literary SupplementVáclav Havel was born in Czechoslovakia in 1936. His plays have been produced around the world, and he is the author of many influential essays on totalitarianism and dissent. He was a founding spokesman for Charter 77 and served as president of the Czech Republic until 2003. He died in 2011 at the age of 75.\u003cb\u003ePreface\u003cbr\u003eby Paul Wilson\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eToronto, March 1991\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eI  am unwilling to believe that this whole civilization is no more than a  blind alley of history and a fatal error of the human spirit. More  probably it represents a necessary phase that man and humanity must go  through, one that man—if he survives—will ultimately, and on some higher  level (unthinkable of course without the present phase) transcend.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eVáclav Havel, \"Thriller\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  idea of putting together a selection of Václav Havel's nondramatic  writing seemed at first like a simple enough proposition. The purpose  was, and remains, for this to be a companion volume to \u003ci\u003eLetters to Olga\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDisturbing the Peace\u003c\/i\u003e, and his plays. \u003ci\u003eOpen Letters\u003c\/i\u003e will round out the picture these other works give us of Václav Havel as dramatist, writer, thinker, and future statesman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  problem, however, was that many of Havel's major essays and articles  had already been translated and published, and some, like \"The Power of  the Powerless\"—Havel's most penetrating analysis of the totalitarian  system and how people resist it—had been widely reprinted. It still made  sense to bring these essays together in a single volume, but the risk  was that such a volume might not have given readers who had been  following Havel's work much that was new.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThinking about this  problem, I realized that the new distinction between major and minor  works in what I was trying to do was misleading. Havel's lesser-known  pieces—his speeches, letters, newspaper articles, his \u003ci\u003esamizdat\u003c\/i\u003e reports meant mainly for friends, the profiles of people he admired, the  conversations and interviews—provide us with the humus of this thinking  and give us glimpses of the man that are sometimes missing from his  more substantial works. Therefore, they belong in a book that intends to  present the reader with Havel the man, not just Havel the dissident  thinker.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe twenty-five items assembled here cover Václav  Havel's nondramatic writing from 1965—when he was a young playwright  with the Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague—to his New Year's address  to Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1990, shortly after he had become the  country's president. The chronological arrangement (with the exception  of the first item, \"Second Wind\") comes naturally out of the book's  purpose. Havel is, in the best sense of the word, an occasional writer;  he responds, in his writing, to events, experiences, insights,  arguments, states of mind. When his pieces are assembled in the order in  which he wrote them, they become a chronicle both of his intellectual  life, and, implicitly, of his times as well.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany of Havel's  essays were, in fact, agents of history. I don't know whether his  private letter to Alexander Dubček in 1969 influenced the agonizing  decision Dubček had to make at the time, but I remember clearly the deep  transformation in the mood in Prague brought about by \"Dear Dr. Husák,\"  Havel's widely circulated open letter to the Czechoslovak president in  1975. This essay raised the hope that Husák's regime would one day end,  made that end seem inevitable, and thus brought it closer. But the best  testimony to the power of Havel's prose comes from the Polish politician  and former Solidarity activist Zbygniew Bujak. In the late 1970s when  Bujak was a young activist trying to organize resistance to the  communist bosses in the Ursus factory near Warsaw, he became discouraged  at the lack of response and began to doubt the meaning of what he was  doing. Then he came across a copy of \"The Power of the Powerless,\" by  Havel. \"Its ideas,\" he told me, \"strengthened us and persuaded us that  what we were doing would not evaporate without a trace, that this was  the source of our power, and that one day this power would manifest  itself. . . .When I look at the victories of Solidarity and of Charter  77, I see in them an astonishing fulfillment of the prophecies contained  in Havel's essay.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e* * *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor readers as yet  unfamiliar with Havel's other work, it may be worth reviewing, briefly,  the phases of life encompassed in this volume. In the earliest stage, up  to the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and its  immediate aftermath, Havel was known mainly as a playwright, and only  occasionally as an essayist. When he became active in public life, in  the mid-1960's, he spoke chiefly as a member of the editorial board of \u003ci\u003eTvář \u003c\/i\u003emagazine  and a member of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers. His chief target was  not so much communism as it was the ideology of reform communism, that  \"peculiar dialectical dance of truth and lies\" which suggested that with  certain minor adjustments, the beast that Marx conceived, Lenin  unleashed, and Stalin goaded into a fury could be tamed and  domesticated. In an early speech to the Writer's Union (\"On Evasive  Thinking\") Havel talks, with remarkable prescience, about the  destruction and tragedy that result when language and ideology turn away  from the world, when writers avoid problems by putting them in false  contexts. Later, his quarrel with the reformers becomes more specific.  \"On the Theme of Opposition,\" written during the Prague Spring of 1968,  is his most openly political clash with that viewpoint.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the  1970s, along with many of his old reform communist adversaries, Havel  became an outcast and later an active dissenter. As a dramatist without a  stage, he continued to write plays (some of his best, in fact, come  from this period), but his impact as a playwright was now almost  exclusively abroad. Inside Czechoslovakia his influence now came through  his power as an essayist. He dissected aspects of the new repression,  examining its effect on culture and everyday life (\"Dear Dr. Husák\"), on  the way laws were applied (\"The Trial,\" \"Article 202,\" and \"Article  303\"), and on the growth of an \"anti-political politics\" in which  dissidents of all hues harnessed the power of truth (\"The Power of the  Powerless\"). He was a founding member and spokesman of the human rights  \"initiative\" Charter 77 and the Committee to Defend the Unjustly  Prosecuted, and he published his own \u003ci\u003esamizdat\u003c\/i\u003e series of books called \u003ci\u003eEdice Expedice\u003c\/i\u003e.  These activities, as well as his essays, landed him in prison in 1979  where, in a remarkable series of letters to his wife Olga, he was  compelled by circumstances and the prison censor to dig deeply into his  own personality and beliefs and explore their broader, more  philosophical implications.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe essays Havel wrote on his return  from prison to 1983 reflect this deeper view of things. In \"Politics and  Conscience,\" for instance, he returns to his old themes, but in a  broader context this time, arguing that the problems the world faces are  rooted in \"the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal and inhuman  power,\" and that while the crisis is deepest and most acute in  communist countries, it is a worldwide phenomenon. In the meantime,  Havel had become an international cause célèbre, which meant that he  spent a good deal of his time talking to journalists, intellectuals, and  activists from the West. This gave him the opportunity to reflect, as  he does in \"Anatomy of a Reticence,\" upon why there were such deep  misunderstandings between people on either side of the Iron Curtain,  when they should find themselves natural allies. Finally, when Mikhail  Gorbachev, about whom Havel was initially skeptical, becomes head of the  Soviet Union, a period begins in which Havel can see the end of  communism, or at least its gradual transformation into something more  tolerable. All his writing from the mid-eighties on is strongly colored  by this conviction. In one of the last pieces in this book, \"A Word  About Words,\" he returns to an early theme: the destructive power of  language, this time to examine the words that have contained the hopes  and the horrors of this century. By now he has the experience of the  dissident movement behind him, and he writes as someone who knows, at  first hand, about \"the mysterious power of words in human history.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e* * *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI  have excluded far more of Havel's prose than I have included. The most  painful omissions were two of Havel's youthful essays, \"The Anatomy of a  Gag\" and \"On Dialectical Metaphysics,\" because they were too long and  too abstract, and two of his later essays on theatre, because Havel had  said much the same things elsewhere, more forcefully. I have included  none of Haven's introductions to \u003ci\u003esamizdat\u003c\/i\u003e books or anthologies,  and only one of his many profiles of friends and colleagues (\"Thinking  About František K.,\" which is more than just a reminiscence). Havel  drafted countless declarations, protests, and brief public speeches,  most of which are too occasional and too slight to use.  Nor have I  included any of the several statements he made in his own defense in  court, mostly because the texts we have are not necessarily from Havel’s  own hand, but rather based on clandestinely procured transcriptions. As  he became better known, Havel was asked for, and granted, many  interviews. Some of these provide excellent surveys of his thought, but  precisely for that reason they are repetitive; thus, with two exceptions  they too were excluded. Finally, in the year and a half before the  “revolution” of 1989, Havel was a regular contributor to the underground  (now legal) newspaper \u003ci\u003eLidové noviny\u003c\/i\u003e. As interesting as these articles are historically, I felt they were too closely tied to specific events.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003eIf  there is one class of items I regret not being able to include, it is  Havel’s polemical articles. Havel never shied away from a good debate  not even when he ran the risk of alienating a colleague or disturbing  the solidarity of the Charter 77 community. One important exchange was  with Milan Kundera in late 1968 over the meaning of the popular  resistance to the Soviet invasion—and more broadly, over how the Czechs  and Slovaks view their own history. Another, in the late 1970s, was a  debate with Ludvík Vaculík and Petr Pithart over the kinds of activities  that were worth risking jail sentences for. In both cases, I felt it  would have been unfair to publish Havel’s side of the polemic without  also including the texts he was responding to.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e* * *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs  I write this preface, more than a year has elapsed since the miraculous  and sudden collapse of communism in Central Europe. The euphoric hopes  of a year ago seem dampened, though not extinguished, by the stark  economic difficulties faced by the new democracies, by the resurgence of  old, hard-line habits of rule in the Soviet Union, and by the war in  the Middle East and its aftermath. It is a tribute to the vitality and  depth of Václav Havel’s writing that, though these essays were written  in a different world and a different time, the still illuminate the  present. For did not Havel warn that the damage to individuals and  societies left behind by totalitarianism would be worse than even its  victims could imagine, and take a long time to repair? Did he not point  out that the root cause of war does not lie in the weaponry that each  side deploys against the other, but in the political realities of a  divided world, and that the greatest danger—one that should be clearly  foreseeable—comes from willful indifference to regimes that humiliate  and oppress and silence their own citizens in the name of some  expediency, or grand, utopian scheme? And does he not remind us, both in  his words and by his example, that the starting point for change must  be the human conscience at work in the “hidden sphere” of society, and  that not to believe in its power, despite all the forces arrayed against  it, is at the very least a matter of bad faith?","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305187037413,"sku":"NP9780679738114","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679738114.jpg?v=1767734226","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/open-letters-isbn-9780679738114","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}