The Conscience of Prague

"Seldom in recent times has a regime cared so little for the real attitudes of outwardly loyal citizens or for the sincerity of their statements."

-- Vaclav Havel, an open letter from Prague, 1975

Can any of Czechoslovakia's 15.5 million citizens have more cause to be astounded by the events of recent weeks than Vaclav Havel? Since the Soviet invasion in 1968, Havel has been the conscience of Prague, a world-famed playwright who might have exploited his status as an intellectual superstar to emigrate to the West, but refused to do so. Instead, Havel, 53, stayed behind, suffering censorship, intermittent police surveillance and repeated jailings so he could continue to give voice to the frustrations and yearnings of a frightened -- and until now mute -- populace.

A sharp-witted, courtly man who tends toward diffidence, Havel seems an unlikely folk hero. He was the son of a well-to-do builder and restaurateur, and his early years were filled with governesses and chauffeurs. With the Communist takeover in 1948, the family's wealth became an albatross. Havel was denied the opportunity to attend high school or college. While working as a taxi driver and then in a brewery, he pursued his writing and in 1963 saw his first play, The Garden Party, mounted in Prague. In April 1968 Havel traveled to New York to see the Public Theater's production of his second play, The Memorandum. Four months later, the tanks rolled through Prague, and one of the new regime's first acts was to censor Havel's writings.

For his work on behalf of Charter 77, a human-rights organization he helped found, Havel spent more than four years in jail. His latest internment ended last May; he had served half of an eight-month sentence after speaking on Western radio. The charge: inciting antigovernment demonstrations. It seemed no small irony that last week, largely through Havel's efforts, the street protests were halted to give the government and opposition some breathing space to pursue negotiations.

Newly relaxed censorship restrictions now open the way for distribution of Havel's essays and plays, which are often likened to the absurdist works of Ionesco and Beckett. What Czechoslovaks will discover is a painstaking attention to the elaborate web of falsification that for so long enabled a despised leadership to maintain its grip. Havel's work depicts the idiocy of entrenched bureaucracies and the power of language to twist and distort ideas. It also highlights the unwitting complicity of ordinary citizens in the maintenance of totalitarian regimes. "Everyone is in fact involved and enslaved," Havel once told TIME. "Each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie." Almost alone in his quest, Havel has refused to compromise.