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In January 1977 Václav Havel, the writer, dissident, and future president of the Czech Republic, was arrested by the Communist regime for his part in organizing the groundbreaking Czechoslovak human rights initiative Charter 77. After his release four months later, he wrote a detailed account of his time in detention and then hid it so well that he forgot where it was. In 2014, three years after his death, it was found among the papers of his close friend Zdeněk Urbánek. Paul Wilson’s translation of the report, the first in English, will be published this fall as Lost and Found: Hidden Notes on My First Incarceration.

In the Review’s October 22 issue, we are publishing a text drawn from that account, running from Havel’s arrest on the streets of Prague—“the ambush must have looked like a scene from a gangster film”—through the ordeal of his imprisonment and the bewilderment and relief of his release. Through it all, he remains focused on analyzing the dehumanizing and disconcertingly human methods of repression in a totalitarian state.

Beginning in 1979, not long after his release from prison, the Review published dozens of Havel’s essays and remarks. Below, alongside his recently translated recollections, are five articles from our archives by Václav Havel.

Václav Havel

Getting into Trouble

Almost fifty years after the Czechoslovak human rights initiative Charter 77 was first reported in the Review’s pages, Václav Havel’s own long-lost account of his imprisonment now appears in English for the first time.

A Farewell to Politics

There is no more relying on fairy tales and fairy-tale heroes. There is no more relying on the accidents of history that lift poets into places where empires and military alliances are brought down. The warning voices of poets must be carefully listened to and taken very seriously, perhaps even more seriously than the voices of bankers or stock brokers. But at the same time, we cannot expect that the world—in the hands of poets—will suddenly be transformed into a poem.

—October 24, 2002

Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State

There is every indication that the glory of the nation-state as the culmination of every national community’s history, and its highest earthly value—the only one, in fact, in the name of which it is permissible to kill, or for which people have been expected to die—has already passed its peak.

—June 10, 1999

A Dream for Czechoslovakia

In the first place, I hope, the atmosphere of our lives will change. The shock of freedom, expressed through frustration, paralysis, and spite, will have gradually dissipated from society. Citizens will be more confident and proud, and will share a feeling of co-responsibility for public affairs. They will believe that it makes sense to live in this country.

—June 25, 1992

Paradise Lost

They say a nation has the politicians it deserves. In some senses this is true: politicians are truly a mirror of the society and a kind of embodiment of its potential. At the same time—paradoxically—the opposite is also true: society is a mirror of its politicians. It is largely up to the politicians which social forces they choose to liberate and which they choose to suppress, whether they choose to rely on the good in each citizen, or on the bad. The former regime systematically mobilized the worst human qualities, like selfishness, envy, and hatred. This was far from merely being something we deserved: it was, at the same time, responsible for the way we became. Those who find themselves in politics therefore bear a heightened responsibility for the moral state of society, and it is their responsibility to seek out the best in that society, to develop and strengthen it.

—April 9, 1992

Kicking the Door

Paragraph 202 is thus one of the many means by which the centralized authority—originally a czarist power, now our own—keeps citizens in a cage. Most of the people know very little about the paragraph, and yet they smell it in the air. It is the appropriate symbol of a government that does not like citizens to meet or organize (unless of course the meeting is supervised), a government that prefers that people do not go out—or if they must leave home, that they behave themselves silently, discreetly, and humbly. It is a government that encourages spying and paranoia, an authority that sees society as a docile herd with an obligation to be eternally grateful for the little they have.

—March 22, 1979

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