Time can be a cruel despot. Acting on a whim, it sometimes pounces on particular lives, pushing them into custody, dragging them to a destination of suffering and unhappy endings. Such has been the fate of Václav Havel. Resembling a classical political tragedy, his life has been clamped by moments of sensation and moral gravity, episodes of joy ruined by sadness, courage mixed with vacillation, honesty tainted by knavery, triumph spoiled by defeat — and deathly climaxes linked to the struggle for power.
Havel is of course currently much better known world-wide for his dazzling achievements as a talented playwright, courageous dissident, and as a moral leader of the democratic world. This reputation is justified, but incomplete. Many pertinent episodes of his life remain unknown, including the one that currently grips the early winter of his life. Abroad, in countries like the United States, Japan, Germany and Britain, the name of Václav Havel is a synonym for integrity, probity, freedom. At home, within the tiny landlocked European country he governs, impressions are different. The final act of a splendid political tragedy is now unfolding. Public grumbling and grave personal illness, like a crowd of blanketed beggars, are huddling at the gates of his hilltop Castle in Prague. It is true that its young soldiers, dressed in red, white and blue, still dutifully stand guard, beneath the fluttering national flag. And each day, tourists with clicking cameras arrive in their thousands to walk its courtyards, marvel at the Spanish Hall, and listen to the chiming bells of St Vitus’s Cathedral. But the harsh fact is that most of the citizens of President Havel’s republic think less of him than they did a year ago. Some say that he is hindering the process of consolidating good government, or that he is too ill to be a statesman. More than a few have been calling for his resignation.
Havel’s political star at home is evidently waning. It may do so abroad as well. Perhaps nobody should be surprised, for final-term, ‘lame duck’ presidencies are commonplace in other democracies around the world. The reason was once explained to me by a wise old politician. Political careers, he told me, usually end in failure. Especially during second or third or fourth terms of office — as Havel has had — politicians often suffer from the hardening of their political arteries, he explained. Their charisma fades. They fall into a pit of narcissism, or become cloth-eared and haughty, or lose their guard. Meanwhile, their critics and enemies have time to group and regroup, which is why the terminal phases of a political career are often scarred by scandals, public grumbling, and sounds of sharpening knives.
Havel is currently in the grip of such trends, and it is therefore unsurprising that in recent times he has swung between dejection and anger, and that he has considered resignation. His opponents smile coldly as they clutch at their weapons, but before they make their next moves, or draw their conclusions, they should read this book. Within its pages, they may be surprised to discover many things hitherto unknown about Havel. They will taste the moments of joy, irony, farce and misfortune through which he has lived. They will see that his life displays great generosity and courage in the face of misery and defeat. They will understand better why he, the ‘post-modern president’, has admirers in the four corners of the earth. Above all, they will discover something that both his critics and supporters must never forget: that Václav Havel suffered the misfortune of being born into the twentieth century, that his fate was politics, that by any standards of reckoning he rose to become a flamboyant political animal who achieved fame by teaching the world more about the powerful and the powerless, power-grabbing and power-sharing, than virtually any other of his twentieth-century rivals.
My grandiloquent suggestion that Havel will be judged by posterity as among the most distinguished political figures of our century is bound to raise eyebrows. He naturally has many competitors. All kinds of famous twentieth-century heads of state — Masaryk, Hitler, Brezhnev, Reagan, Gorbachev, Mandela, Kohl, Clinton, to mention a few — have passed through the magnificent gates of his splendid Castle. Not only that, but to predict that he will be remembered as a great political figure of the century presumes some things about the course of the past hundred years. Our century has had many unique features, including the way in which it stimulated awareness of the difference between historical time and clock time and, for the first time, nurtured the widespread perception that the twentieth century was indeed a century, and that as a century it has meant various things to many different people. So the century was ripe with technical inventions — the radio, the telephone, the automobile, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the television, the computer — whose diffusion has radically altered the sense of time and spatial movements of millions of people. It was the century in which economic life finally went global, for instance in the fields of telecommunications and travel, thanks to which time and space barriers for some people were wiped out and the Grand Tour began to be democratized by becoming financially accessible to millions called tourists. The twentieth century saw the rise of modernist art — and ‘post-modern’ challenges to its penchant for self-edifying abstraction. And as Havel knows from bitter personal experience, the twentieth century will for ever be recorded as the century that perfected the arts of violently misusing power over others. Aerial bombardment became commonplace. There were planned attempts to exterminate whole peoples. Corpses were burned and recycled into gunpowder to make more skeletons from future enemies. There were bombs whose flash proved brighter than the sun. The domination of the world by European colonial empires, dating back to the eighteenth century, came to a bloody end. And just as comrade V. I. Lenin predicted, more people were pushed and bullied and killed in wars and revolutions than in all previous centuries combined.
Comrade Lenin was not completely right, however. His fascination with bossy power, revolution, war and state-building blinded him to the fact, clearer now than in his times, that the twentieth century saw a growth spurt in what can be called the modern democratic revolution. This quiet revolution began long ago, with such events as the Dutch resistance against the government of Philip II in the Low Countries, the bashed-up English revolution of the 1640s, the surprise defeat of the British Empire by the American colonists, and the disturbances that swept through Europe in 1848 — the year that marked the birth of the Czechs’ long struggle for civil freedoms. The twentieth-century quest for democracy started out badly, but it subsequently yielded surprising results. Totalitarian regimes were defeated, not only by military action but also by the peaceful revolution of citizens. In the four corners of the earth, the power-constraining pinch of international humanitarian law, covering such matters as torture, rape and genocide, began to be felt for the first time. Heavily armed, nasty dictatorships were effectively resisted, or simply collapsed, on a breathtaking scale. Within the actually existing democracies, meanwhile, the century saw various experiments in rejuvenating the principle of non-violent power-sharing — think of the suffragettes dressed in purple and green, or the black and white protesters at Little Rock. And the century witnessed as well organized efforts to transport that slippery ideal into concrete institutions — from the workplace to the bedroom — that were previously untouched by the idea of publicly monitored and shared power, the principle for which democracies are justly famous.
Havel has always been sensitive to these trends — not only because from an early age his political instincts were opposed to power-grabbing, but also because his greatest political achievement is that he personally helped to make the growth spurt of democracy happen. As a sandy-haired young boy, he had a healthy disdain for troops in uniform, armoured cars, and the terror of air raids. During Stalin’s times, as a young teenager, he daringly organized a remarkable literary circle called the Thirty-Sixers — so named because he and its other members were all born in the fateful year 1936. Havel soon mounted comical assaults on the socialist theatre establishment. His earliest — still unappreciated — plays like You’ve Got Your Whole Life Ahead of You and Hitchhiking matured into award-winning, side-splitting plays like The Memorandum, which granted him the gift of global fame for defending the view that theatre should raise more questions than it answers, that it should make people laugh at unaccountable power, and that theatre should democratically unnerve, not soothe or patronize its audiences.
Havel offered other gifts to the modern democratic revolution. His first important confrontations with the Communist authorities took place in the early 1960s, when he fancied himself as a bluejeaned poet and essay-writer, and served on the editorial board of a revamped monthly journal called The Face (Tvář). That period blessed him with the reputation of ‘clean hands’ and it helped launch him into prominence as a playwright, radio announcer and street activist during the 1968 Prague Spring — the time when he first met Dubček and began to play something of a public-political role. Havel was soon forced to endure the miseries of the Cold War and Brezhnev-style ‘real socialism’. Struggling to keep his sanity amidst terrible personal suffering, he staged a dramatic undercover version of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and played a key role in convening the human-rights initiative called Charter 77. Praise for his efforts came from the lips of statesmen like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski — alongside bitter Communist attacks on him as the spoiled son of ‘nouveau riche millionaires’, or (as an American congressman once said) as a dropout wearing ‘ten dollars’ worth of clothes and badly needing a haircut’. Then came the revolutionary upheavals during the magical autumn of 1989 — the ‘velvet’ events which transformed him into a leather-jacketed hero, then into a besuited politician politicking on all fronts as his state and its citizens tread the dangerous path of consolidating a new configuration of institutions that are conventionally called democratic: precious institutions like the rule of law, free elections, parliamentary government, a civil society, and independent media and public life.
Havel’s life has been so blown about by the winds of twentieth-century history that it is impossible to understand him without understanding the events that shaped and reshaped, racked and ruined not only the Czechs but the whole of Europe. In this book, I try to retell his life against the backdrop of the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, the rise of Hitler, the Stalin trials, and the horror of the concentration camps. I show how his life and writings were later shadowed by the Berlin Wall and encouraged by the events of May 1968. I emphasize as well the 1989 revolutions against Communism, the collapse of the Soviet empire — the last modern empire in Europe — and all the key events that have since followed: the painful transitions to parliamentary democracy in central Europe, war in the Balkans, the global resurgence of free-market economics, and the accelerated growth of the world’s most advanced experiment in regional integration, the European Union.
My treatment of Havel’s life naturally tries to be sensitive to the Czech context into which he was born. There is admittedly little here about the collage of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, art-nouveau and post-modern architecture that in comparison to Prague makes most other modern cities look like urban eyesores. The spas of Karlovy Vary, known for their beneficial effects on arthritis and constipation, hardly rate a mention. Tripe soup, dumplings, sauerkraut and roast pork are absent fare. So too are the fiery brandies tasting of cloves and plums. There are no stories of Bohemian bears and wolves — or Czech tennis and hockey players. The allure of the Škoda, the ‘foreign’ car that advertisers tell us is less likely than most other cars to be stolen in towns like Edinburgh, Hamburg, and Denver, goes unmentioned. Some readers, unfamiliar with Prague — and having never visited his splendid Castle — nevertheless will happily encounter the influences of Franz Kafka, Karel Čapek and Milan Kundera. They will read as well about Havel’s predilection for Moravian white wine, free-and-easy bohemian nights, good dinners and endless cigarettes. And they will learn about the Czech women in his life, his taste for Anglo-American politics and post-Heideggerian philosophy, and his love of the music of the contemporary Prague scene, from the scores of Smetana and Dvořák to punk bands like Plastic People of the Universe, and elderly pop musicians who are still loved in Prague, like Tina Turner, Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones.
There is more in this book than the minutiae of a remarkable life lived in a hapless country during an extraordinary century. In keeping with the style of Havel’s plays, poems, essays, and speeches, my biography pays attention to its own form. Gone are the days when it could be presumed that biography was about recording the facts, and literature was about experimental fiction. My account of Havel’s life is unavoidably ‘factional’. By that I mean two things. Although I try hard to ‘fill gaps’ and to pay meticulous attention to all of the important details, the story that I tell is based on principles of selection and interpretation that unavoidably highlight certain aspects of his life, rather than others. Where there are ‘facts’ there are ‘theories’, and where there are ‘theories’ there are value-laden ‘interpretations’.
The way a biography is written counts as one of these shaping conditions, which is to say that every ‘factual’ biography is a work of fiction. If that is so, then questioning and overturning the pseudo factual form of old-fashioned biographies becomes important. This I have tried to do, and it is the second sense in which my account of Havel’s life is ‘factional’. I have set out to tell an unusual story about his life by means of tableaux vivants that not merely pay homage to his love of theatre, but also resonate with the fragmentation of his life by historical events beyond his control. More than that, these tableaux vivants are designed to heighten readers’ sense that his actions in the world are understandable as a tragedy; and to have the ‘cubist’ effect of producing deliberately broken narratives that warn readers from the outset that the stories told here are ‘fabricated’ by certain — but challengeable — points of view.
Havel’s closest aides at the Castle — bearded, bow-tied Vladimír Hanzel, for instance — urged me to capture his many faces. The advice reminded me of Nietzsche’s remark that ‘one’s own self is well hidden from one’s own self; of all mines of treasure one’s own is the last to be dug up’. Whether or not Mr Hanzel intended this, his advice in effect urged me not to mythologize Havel, to see that he is not always himself, that his own self-assessments should be believed and disbelieved. Hanzel was implying, probably against his will, that Havel is not fully comprehensible, that he will continually be out of reach, and, thus, that readers should accept that neither he nor anybody else is entitled to exercise ultimate power over defining exactly who Havel is. That being so, it follows that Havel himself — presuming that he has the time and energy to read the book — will not necessarily accept all or most of the viewpoints that I use to structure my account of his tragic life.
My probe into his life and writings also presents a philosophical reflection upon a subject that is of perennial importance, because it is inextricably bound up with the human condition: the subject of power. Philosophers and political thinkers tell us that power (originally from the Latin posse, to be able) is the ability of actors — individuals, groups, organizations, whole states or international bodies — to make a difference upon the people and things within their environment. It is said that the term power refers to humans’ ability to make their marks on the world; that power is the production of desired or valuable effects; and that power is the capacity to achieve whatever effects are desired by drawing upon certain resources, such as money, guns, or images, even in the face of stiff controversy and opposition. It follows from such definitions that to study power in any context is to consider who gets what, when and how, and whether they ought to have done so.
Havel’s life, deeply ensnared as it is with the political crossroads of Prague and the Bohemian lands, provides rich material indeed for taking a new look at the old subject of power. Havel has of course written many essays and plays on the subject. His speeches as head of state sometimes dwell on the same theme. He has also been unluckily privileged to live through virtually all of the major changes of power in twentieth-century Europe. Five-sixths of Havel’s life has been lived under anti-democratic regimes of one kind or another. The hands of a breathtaking variety of power regimes — I count eight altogether — have in fact touched him. He was born into a republican bourgeois family shaped by the Habsburg empire, whose collapse was hastened by the First World War and the birth of the Czechoslovak parliamentary republic led by the philosopher-president Masaryk, who was personally known to Havel’s family. That First Republic was Havel’s Athens: understandably so, since it was the most successful parliamentary republic in middle Europe, until British and French politicians knifed it in the back with the Munich agreement. Havel went on to live his early years under Nazi occupation and the threat of total war. He tasted a brief period of multi-party social democracy that was forcibly terminated by the cunning and violence of the 1948 coup de Prague. As a teenager and then as young man, he and his family suffered under Stalinism, but he contributed actively to Czech efforts, culminating in the 1968 Prague Spring, to liberalize that Soviet model of totalitarian power. For the next two decades, Havel was tormented by various forms of persecution at the hands of what I call ‘late-socialism’ — a post-totalitarian regime that felt like one big grey prison ruled by a single party. Then came the magical ‘velvet revolution’ of the autumn of 1989 — a dramatic upheaval that radically altered the patterns of who got what, when and how and catapulted Havel into the office of President of the Czechoslovak Republic. The wildest of his wild dreams came true. And now, for the past ten years of your life, he has headed a state that has trodden the unknown path of post-Communism.
Since this is a study of these different — mainly despotic — régimes of power that have criss-crossed, moulded and complicated Havel’s life, readers should not be surprised to find that I have chosen to write the book as a political tragedy. As with all tragedies, there are some memorable moments of triumph and jouissance, certainly. Like the assassination of Heydrich. Or Havel’s first public address during the Hungarian Revolution. Or his release after four years in prison. Or the day of his election as unchallenged charismatic ruler of a landlocked country called Czechoslovakia. But these are exceptions, for within the stories that I tell Havel appears more often as a tragedian — as an actor in a prose drama riddled with calamities, injustices, and unhappy endings. Many readers outside the Czech Republic will be surprised to find that the past decade, when supposedly the world has been his oyster, has been no exception to this set pattern. If anything — some will recoil from this claim, even though Havel himself knows that it’s true — this period has been the most crisis-ridden of his life. It is now taking its toll. Death and public grumbling are camped outside his Castle gates. It is as if he is being punished for living most of his life in unfreedom. One of his oldest friends told me recently that Havel still might be rescuable from this sad fate, but that that would require the political kidnapping of the century, followed by strenuous efforts to rehabilitate his best qualities. That friend’s joke was revealing. It suggested that Havel’s greatest misfortune in life is to have found that his final big dream — to become a president — came true. It seems that the words of his favourite relative, Uncle Milos Havel, written after being bullied into exile in Germany by Czechoslovak Communists, applies well to Havel himself: ‘In the free world, I continue to suffer from lack of freedom.’
Aristotle recommended (in his Poetics) that a tragedy should be structured in such a way that those who encounter it ‘thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place’. The sad stories told about Havel here may well leave readers with feelings of sorrow aroused by his suffering. They are not likely to be left with the impression that his life deserves heroization. Typically for someone of my generation, I have never believed in heroes, and I certainly never became interested in Havel and his work because I thought of him as a hero — a substitute for Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, or Jack Kennedy, or Che Guevara, or Chairman Mao, or God. I remember well the first time we met. It was 1984. We were supposed to discuss the English version of his The Power of the Powerless, which I was then editing. Havel had just come from a long spell in prison, and his circumstances were difficult, to say the least. But he didn’t look like much of a hero to me. If anything, I felt sorry and upset for him. He seemed like a hapless victim of the absurdity of so-called reality. He was exhausted, overweight, depressed, his restless fingers shook. He grated the gears and several times got lost when he drove me and a friend around Prague in his old Mercedes. He seemed baffled by the streets of his birthplace. Whisky and cigarettes and words seemed to be his anchor in life.
When, some years ago, we corresponded about my decision to embark on this book, I stressed to Havel that I did not believe in the genre of ‘authorized biography’. I explained that I did not need his permission to tell his life as I thought fit. Nothing subsequently changed. Since Havel too believes in ‘living in the truth’, since this is a new approach to the understanding of power, and since my vocation is that of a political thinker and writer intent on stretching the concept of power into the most private domains — to uncover the naked bodies in the bedroom, or to peek through the keyhole into the top-secret meeting taking place behind closed doors — my book publicly scrutinizes his life in great detail, without apologies, without illusions. I have tried my best to research things meticulously, to write accurately, to draw conclusions and to make judgements without malice — in the same spirit of honesty and openness that Havel himself has championed at various points in his life. There may be comments recorded and tales told in this book that he finds unsettling. Some incidents may cause him discomfort, either because he does not remember them, or because he disagrees with the interpretations proffered, or even because he considers them potentially ruinous of his political reputation. I cannot apologize for these possible reactions. For it is the duty of political writing to call things by their proper name, to refuse nonsense and to scale down the pompous — to say things that shake the world and stop it from falling asleep.
My ultimate aim in writing this study of power in biographical form is to invite comparison with the ‘classic’ attempts to treat questions about who gets what, when and how, and whether they ought to. In early modern times, say from the early sixteenth century onwards, two different but related genres of the study of power began to crystallize, and then to dominate the field. One type is the so-called ‘realist’ account of power. An early version is on display in Niccolò Machiavelli’s research into the contemporary politics of the emergent states around Firenze, which led him to write tracts like Il principe (1513), which aimed to serve as a guide or handbook for rulers like the Medici, to enable them better to rule their subjects. This approach to power concentrates on the political manoeuvring for the levers and resources of government. It emphasizes, for instance, the necessity of foresight and flexible planning for the future; the importance of winning friends and allies; the vital political role of trickery, which depends upon deception, secrecy and surprise; and the need to avoid halfway measures. The aim of political struggle, it is said, is state power over its subjects, the people, just as the military commander’s aim is power over the defeated enemy.
Then there is the inverse approach, let us call it the obedience view of power, an early example of which can be seen in the writings of the seventeenth-century political analyst, Thomas Hobbes. His reflections on the revolutionary upheavals in England during the 1640s resulted in works like De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651), which are less manuals of statecraft than grammars for obedient subjects. This second approach shares with the first a belief in the need for institutions of top-down government, and in the unavoidability of cunning and knavery in human affairs. But in contrast to the first view, it concentrates less on the power dynamics in the alpine regions of state institutions and more on the importance of laying down the ground rules of obedience for subjects living in the valleys and on the plains below. Observing that men and women are proud and passionate and prone to disorder and violent conflict, this approach specifies the morally binding laws that must be observed by everybody in order for a stable political community to survive through time. ‘I put for a general inclination of all mankind,’ wrote Hobbes, ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.’ That being so, individual subjects are required to enter into a peace contract. It specifies that everybody must obey the civil laws laid down by the individual or council whom they recognize as their sovereign ruler. In return for their obedience, all individuals receive the assurance that each will honour their agreement. They have the assurance, backed by the sovereign’s threat of force, that each will abide by the rule: Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. If anybody steps out of line — if at the outset they refuse to enter the contract of obedience, or if they subsequently express infidelity to the contract by breaking the law — then woe betide them. Following the Book of Job, Hobbes with good reason compared the necessary sovereign ruler to Leviathan, whom God called ‘King of the Proud’. The job of the Leviathan is to rule by making subjects permanently afraid — that if they break the laws then they will be punished severely, certainly with death.
Burdened by these two different but complementary approaches, the study of power in modern times has been skewed in favour of the powerful. The capacity for action and entitlements of the governed — the dark side of the moon of modern accounts of power — have been badly neglected. A third approach, one that explores power from the standpoint of the governed, is required. This is what I have attempted here. The new probe into power stands firmly within the modern democratic revolution. It certainly recognizes that state institutions are important for the maintenance of the lives and livelihoods of people, wherever they live; and it recognizes as well that subjects’ consensual obedience to state institutions is critical for the survival of good government. I do not suppose that power contests, hubris and fear can be made to disappear from human affairs. But that is exactly why the inbuilt prejudice of the two orthodoxies against the entitlements of the governed needs to be counterbalanced with a radically different perspective.
So this study of Havel’s life and times might be described as a manual for democrats. It supposes that the lust for power is polymorphously perverse, that power, wherever it is exercised, is therefore always in need of public monitoring and control. It further supposes that such monitoring is best done within a democratic order marked by non-violent power-sharing arrangements, including limits on the scope and potential arrogance of governmental institutions. A democracy, ideally conceived, is a fractured and self-monitoring system of power in which there are daily reminders to governors and governed alike that those who exercise power over others — whether in the bedroom or on the battlefield — cannot do just anything they want, and that (as the Dutch Jewish political philosopher Spinoza put it) even sovereigns are forced in practice to recognize their own limitations, to admit that they cannot make a table eat grass.
The spirit of democracy in this sense is evident throughout this book, for instance in its accounts of the causes and — sometimes grotesque — effects of various power-thirsty anti-democratic regimes that straitjacketed Havel’s life for fifty years. The concern for democracy can be seen as well in the tableaux vivants structure, which aims to discourage readers from ‘understanding’ the text as indisputably True, and instead to encourage them to ‘overstand’ the text, that is, to read the accounts with frowns on their faces in order better to make up their own minds about the subject of power — and about Havel himself. And this is a manual for democrats in a third sense: in its attempt to explore dimensions of power that for too long have been neglected. The tableaux vivants sketched here try to inject life into conventionally stale, power-related topics such as parliaments, freedom of expression, and civil society. But I have tried to do more than resuscitate dead subjects. Topics such as courage, fear, and temptation are also shown to be integral to the subject of power. So too are matters like theatre and literature, prison and sex, folly and cunning, friends and enemies, birth and death.
Such themes conspire to produce a political tragedy, albeit with a difference. Tragedy is of course a form of writing, not of living. The stories I tell display many of the ingredients of classical tragedy, defined as it was by figures like Aristotle and Seneca, Shakespeare and Lessing. In this book, the private anguish of a single individual — an innocent and courageous mortal with marked imperfections — is re-enacted on a public stage that is cluttered with great evil and suffering caused by violent struggles for power over others. Like the classical tragic form as well, my book offers insights into how the tough-skinned victim is exposed and broken by forces that are, in the circumstances, neither fully understandable nor controllable by prudent calculation. This political tragedy, like those written before it, also aims to arouse concern and pity, and so to uplift its reading audience. Tragedy most certainly does not aim to make us love our misery. It is potentially a source of catharsis and pleasure and political wisdom. By confronting readers with some terrible episodes of human history, tragedy can arouse and discharge compassion for the undeserved misfortune of the victims, partly because readers can recognize themselves in the misfortune. Tragedy thereby demonstrates (as Shakespeare observed) that great griefs are powerful medicine, that excessive human suffering can incite human claims to dignity and freedom.
To these familiar ingredients of classical tragedy I add certain ‘modern’ elements, like the absence of Absolutes. Traditional forms of tragedy supposed the omnipresence of the gods, or of a God who although not on stage is always there as a spectator, watching and judging the action, capable even of maddening or destroying the central characters. In this book, the suffering of the main character is not traced to irresistible forces that are divinely destined, cosmic forces that hunger for retribution against those who have bared their behinds to the divine order of things. The cautionary tales about power told here see Havel’s suffering as contingent rather than necessary, as an effect of certain historically specific regimes of power, especially those in which some men — like the Titans who set off to scale Mount Olympus — acted as if they were God. My democratic form of tragedy turns its back on talk of unchanging ‘human nature’. It also rejects the bias of classical tragedy towards fixed hierarchies of worldly power, whose victims were the playthings of aristocracies, armies and monarchs. The political tragedy that follows is simply the sad but inspiring story of an individual whose astonishing life was pushed and pulled, twisted and torn by all of the tumultuous political forces of a century — thankfully — which is now past.
London and Prague
May 1999