Word: havelent
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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...
Zealous idealists rarely get a chance to lead, and when they do, they rarely show much aptitude for the give-and-take of politics, the careful timing, the restraint. Yet in an irony more exquisite than any he ever envisioned for the stage, Vaclav Havel became not only the conscience but also the commonsense leader of the mass movement that led to Czechoslovakia's orderly ouster of its communist leaders. Having inspired fellow citizens by his rhetoric and unrelenting example, he heard them demand that he take over as head of state. That was not for him, he said...
Last Thursday the Parliament amended the presidential oath of office to eliminate the customary pledge of loyalty to socialism, a vow that the nonsocialist Havel likely would have refused to take. In the same session, Parliament honored Havel's determination to have "close by my side" another revered ghost from 1968. Alexander Dubcek, the former leader who launched the Prague Spring, was restored to a post of power, after two decades of internal exile, by being elected the legislature's new presiding officer. The stately transition was completed on Friday, when Prime Minister Marian Calfa, whose Communist Party colleagues...
...Havel insists he will serve only until elections for a new Parliament are held, probably in June. Like the political figure he is increasingly compared to, Poland's Lech Walesa, he seems to prefer being kingmaker to being king. But in the brave new world of Eastern Europe, all axioms have been reduced to theorems and all vows rendered interim. Many Czechs think Havel will seek a more permanent role in politics, a pursuit he seems to love -- at least for this heady period of symbolizing freedom and basking in praise, before the hard task of transition sets...