Although he does not say so in simple or straightforward terms, Havel partly acknowledges that the great tragedy of the third act of his life was that he stayed on the political stage too long. His great, historic achievements were his role in liberating his country from tyranny and overseeing its return to the centre of Europe as a thriving democracy. If not for him, the peaceful Velvet Divorce between the Czech lands and Slovakia in 1991/2 could have become as bloody as was the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. If he had given up politics after, say, one presidential term and returned to writing, his reputation as an epoch-making statesman would have been secure.
The Czechs admired his courage, his moral integrity, his honesty and his sense of humour. They grew bored of his idealistic speechifying against rampant market capitalism, when all they wanted was to get as rich as possible as fast as possible. His popularity plumbed the depths in his last term as President when shortly after the death of his first wife, the respected Olga, he married an actress. Because he is so honest, he does not shy away from writing about any of these controversies, often with lacerating self criticism and always with self-deprecating charm.
For most of the post-Communist period the big story in Czech politics was the mutual loathing between Havel and Václav Klaus, a dissident economist in the 1980s, Prime Minister for many years when Havel was President, and his successor (and still the resident) in the castle. Long passages of this book, where Havel scores points against various opponents or complains about the behaviour of the other Václav on issues long forgotten by everyone else, read like any other politician’s memoirs.
Yet elsewhere the writer and philosopher Havel makes observations on subjects no other politician of recent times would have touched. In particular, he devotes a fascinating chapter to politics as theatre because ‘politics has to work with signs, symbols, rituals … which often convey the meaning of what is happening.’
And who else, out of power, can look forward to this life afterwards? Before the 1989 Revolution he was working on a play — inspired by The Cherry Orchard and King Lear — about a statesman who has lost his position, is forced to move out of the official residence, cannot accept it and goes mad. Recently he completed the play, called The Leaving, and it has just opened in a Prague theatre, a neat companion work to this quirky memoir.
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