Letters to Olga.

• Author: Codrescu, Andrei

Letters to Olga. Vaclav Havel. Knopf, $25. Having been but a baby dissident myself, I never did get to experience the formative hells of a political prison in a workers' paradise. I have no doubt that given time (or the times, those wild mid-sixties) I would have been in an excellent position to do so. In Romania, where I was born, bred, and precociously thought myself a poet, I had been headed that way, along with other writers of my generation, ever since the first thaw of 1963, when Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech let some savage ghosts out of the bag of authorized history, including the unspeakable Gulag. It was a heady time, filled with the beat of that esprit du temps that saw young people from Bucharest to Detroit shed futures planned by Central Committees in the East or social convention in the West to plunge headlong into the unknown. The hair curtain suddenly became more important than the iron one. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's severity gave way to the avant-garde; Milan Kundera's wonderful art is hidden in that moment in the mid-sixties.

That brief abandon came to an end in Central Europe in the Prague Spring of 1968. A case can be made that the Chicago Democratic National Convention of that year performed the same service for our Western brothers and sisters. But there are differences. The smashing of the counterculture in the United States and elsewhere was mostly a war of images, with a few violent exceptions. For Americans, it was still possible to agitate against the state after 1968; it was just more difficult to be heard. The termination of the Prague spring of 1968 was for Central Europe the distinct end of a great adventure.

From 1968 until 1979, the date of Vaclav Havel's last arrest, paranoia and repression entrenched themselves in the hungover survivors of the sixties. Many writers and intellectuals chose exile to the West or made their apologies and crawled back into the still-warrn cells of the Party. But hardier souls had also been forged during the golden era of dissidence, people who refused to abandon the struggle for democracy and human values. They found themselves locked in a fight with the security apparatus, a body notoriously lacking in subtlety and humor.

Havel, author of this collection of prison letters to his wife, was a central figure of the gradually darkening years of the seventies. In 1978 he cofounded (with Jiri Hajek) Charter 77, an organization formed to further democracy in Czechoslovakia...