An intimate history of Czechoslovakia under communism; a meditation on the social and political role of art, and a triumphant statement of the values underlying all the recent revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Havel discusses his transformation from absurdist playwright to activist to president of Czechoslovakia in interviews conducted during 1985 and 1986 by exiled journalist Hvizdala. "Mingling autobiography with discussions of politics, literature and theater, his ruminations add up to a disarming and involving self-portrait," said PW .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In 1986, as his 50th birthday approached, then-dissident Czech playwright Havel submitted to a mail interview with exiled Czech journalist Hvizdala. The essays written as answers for that interview, here translated into English, range over all aspects of a varied life: Havel's childhood in a bourgeois family in Prague during the 1930s, as well as his unusual education--adolescent intellectual circles in the 1950s, experimental theater, and Charter 77 activities. A complex portrait emerges of a man long involved with his community and his state because he considers such involvement a moral imperative. With Havel as president of a newly organized Czechoslovakia since December 1989, expect interest in this title. Highly recommended for all libraries. Previewed as Long Distance Interrogation , Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/90.
- Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
- Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Whenever I need a moral boost I go back and reread Vaclav Havel's
"Disturbing the Peace". This book is a series of essays by the
dissident Vaclav Havel that were smuggled out of communist
Czechoslovakia and translated by a Havel friend in the West. Vaclav
Havel was a playwright who became a Czech dissident who became leader
of the Velvet revolution (which ousted the communists) and who finally
became president of the republic.
"Disturbing the Peace". This book is a series of essays by the
dissident Vaclav Havel that were smuggled out of communist
Czechoslovakia and translated by a Havel friend in the West. Vaclav
Havel was a playwright who became a Czech dissident who became leader
of the Velvet revolution (which ousted the communists) and who finally
became president of the republic.
Vaclav Havel was the foremost
dissident under the communist regime. He openly challenged the ruling
government with such essays as "Power to the Powerless" and
"The Soul of Main under Communism". (Actually I forgot the name
of the latter essay. I think "The Soul of Man under Communism"
is an essay written by Oscar Wilde. But Havel did address this theme
in "Disturbing the Peace" and in essays he forwarded to the
communist rulers.)
One of the most exciting parts of the book is
where Havel describes the dissident communitie's efforts to publish a
Havel essay advocating that the Czech government adhere to the terms
of the Charter 77 human rights accord to which they were a signatory.
The story is spine tingling thriller complete with car chases and
obscure drop points. It reads like a John le Carre novel except it is
real.
After you read "Disturbing to Peace" I also recommend
"The Magic Lanten" by Timothy Garton Ash. This is a first hand
account of the fall of the communism as the democratic revolution
rolled across Czechoslovakia, East German, Hungary, and Romania.
Garton Ash was privy to the inner circle of people who plotted and
executed these bloodless coups. (Bloodless everywhere except, of
course, in Romania.)
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
We Americans tend to forget that Vaclav Havel was an Artist, poet, writer and existentialist thinker long before we seized upon him as our own private "anti-communist hero extraordinaire." And as with most other things, we in the West tended to "fixate" on Havel as just the one-man anti-Communist sideshow: the singleton hero of the Prague Spring. That is to say, we saw in him only what we wanted to see -- only what was comfortable for our myopic vision and only what tended to calm our democratic sensibilities. For had we looked and drank just a bit deeper, there was a lot more of this self-made "artist turned political activist," to see than just our knee-jerk recreation of him through our own eyes as our own larger-than-life anti-Communist hero.
This book offers another vision of him that looks deeper into his very troubled, but nevertheless very important soul. Having had this book on my bookshelf, left unread for almost 20 years, this oversight alone makes me as guilty of seeing only the "shadow Havel as anti-Communist caricature," as the rest.
In this very thoughtful series of autobiographical interviews, the "deeper Vaclav Havel," comes through loudly and clearly. And here I mean of course the one just beyond the popular anti-Communist Western created veneer. Havel has always used his very subtle, supple and artistic mind to become more than just an Anti-Communist firebrand. In the grand tradition of other Europeans, and more than anything else, he is an existentialist humanist thinker, with much practical advice for democrats. However his primary concerns have never been just with the fetishized political games that superpowers play. Whether they be the brutal class-based politics of Communism which, before it committed suicide, had morphed into a softer form of equally fetishized version of socialism; or about the equally brutal racist-based capitalist consumer-driven democracies, which as they begin to see their own self-inflicted deaths just over the horizon, have also morphed into a "kinder and gentler" form of American racism, or what amounts to about the same, Mandela's softer version of South African Apartheid: Either way, none of these has been Havel's primary concern.
In this book we see Havel's real concerns spread out on the table, as he tells us how his keen sensibilities evolved until he learned to reject his own bourgeois class-based Communist upbringing. He learned to reject it because as he puts it "it gave me unearned privileges and alienated me from myself and from the rest of society in ways that could not be undone until I became aware enough to develop a refined sense of fairness, and until I could develop a "social emotion" that was antagonistic towards the class privileges I had inherited." Havel's "social emotion" was one that was also antagonistic towards unjust social barriers, and towards any pre-determined status awarded at birth, or based on the "false consciousness" of race superiority or any other forms of unearned status whose existence is designed specifically to humiliate, dominate and dehumanize others.
Although Vaclav rebellion against his parent's wealth is classic and familiar to us in the U.S., he did not blame them -- as he saw them as decent people merely caught up in and locked into the social customs and way of life of their time, perhaps in the same way that we Americans do when we use the same lament to excuse our own parent's evils of Jim Crow and slavery. Like his American counterparts, Havel too, even as a member of the bourgeois, preferred a sensibility that sided with the oppressed rather than with the ruling class of which, through inheritance, he was a member in "good standing."
However, unlike the typical American or South African racist, who would never grant moral superiority to those they oppress, even though classism was his natural inheritance, Havel opposed his social station at an almost instinctual level because with all of its undeserved advantages it was seen by him as morally inferior to those it oppressed. He also opposed it because of its inherited privileges, the sponging off of the powerless, due to its social injustices and the immoral barriers that tended to degrade man and condemned those it oppressed to the status of sub-humans. Havel said that by the time of the 1968 uprisings, he had become what he called "an emotional" and a "moral socialist." But even this was just a half way house on his journey to greater personal awareness and enlightenment.
As his social consciousness evolved he began to see the crisis of the world as deeper than just particular ways of organizing the economies, their respective peculiar social arrangements, or the politics of a particular system. What he saw long before it became obvious to the rest of us, is that both the East and West are suffering from the same dilemma: a crisis of alienation, a malaise in which man is isolated from himself; a conflict between an impersonal, anonymous, irresponsible, corrupt and uncontrollable juggernaut of power (the power of mega-corporations, mega-technology, and mega-dollars in politics and mega-churchs), and the elemental and original interests of man as a concrete individual.
In this sense, Havel sees this conflict in the same terms that Ernest Becker saw them: as a nostalgic loss of metaphysical certainties, a lack of a capacity to experience the transcendental, of any super-personal moral authority, or any kind of higher moral horizon. As he puts it: "As soon as man begins to consider himself the source of the highest meaning in the world he begins to lose his human dimension, and control of his humanity. We are going through a great departure from God, which has no parallel in history: we have become the first atheistic civilization."
But again, as in the case with Becker, we must resist the temptation to force these comments about God and the need for a return to spiritualism, into our own facile, lifeless and morally compressed Procrustean Beds. His reference to God and an "extramundane authority" is similar to that of Professor Cornel West's version of his own self-styled version of "Chekovian Christianity:" They both represent "Existentialist revolutions" more than they represent traditional rearrangements of existing religious norms of morality. Anyway you cut it, both West and Havel's versions of "God" seek to drive the moneychangers from the Temple.
Havel, Becker and West all put at the foot of our collective dilemma, man's arrogant anthropomorphism, in which he attempts to know and control everything. As we go about, bouncing between obscene consumption on the one hand and novel but obscene repression on the other, these great men all agree that we need to find a deeper sense of responsibility to the world and to something higher than ourselves. We need a new moral order based on returning man to his genuine human dimension, which can eventually lead to new social structures where personal humanity may again begins to rule supreme.
Far be it for me to suggest that these great men and their shared vision may have missed an important point: that man's humanity is not what it used to be. It has changed and been transformed in fundamental, perhaps even in irretrievable, ways. We cannot "walk the cat back" to an earlier more pristine moral time. Moral ground zero has changed, perhaps forever. Like everything else, our humanity too has been corrupted. We can't un-ring that bell; there is no way to back.
Sadly, the new humanity that we have created is what it is, period. There is lots of practical advice for democrats here, but Havel's larger message is, in my view, much more important.
Ten Stars
This book offers another vision of him that looks deeper into his very troubled, but nevertheless very important soul. Having had this book on my bookshelf, left unread for almost 20 years, this oversight alone makes me as guilty of seeing only the "shadow Havel as anti-Communist caricature," as the rest.
In this very thoughtful series of autobiographical interviews, the "deeper Vaclav Havel," comes through loudly and clearly. And here I mean of course the one just beyond the popular anti-Communist Western created veneer. Havel has always used his very subtle, supple and artistic mind to become more than just an Anti-Communist firebrand. In the grand tradition of other Europeans, and more than anything else, he is an existentialist humanist thinker, with much practical advice for democrats. However his primary concerns have never been just with the fetishized political games that superpowers play. Whether they be the brutal class-based politics of Communism which, before it committed suicide, had morphed into a softer form of equally fetishized version of socialism; or about the equally brutal racist-based capitalist consumer-driven democracies, which as they begin to see their own self-inflicted deaths just over the horizon, have also morphed into a "kinder and gentler" form of American racism, or what amounts to about the same, Mandela's softer version of South African Apartheid: Either way, none of these has been Havel's primary concern.
In this book we see Havel's real concerns spread out on the table, as he tells us how his keen sensibilities evolved until he learned to reject his own bourgeois class-based Communist upbringing. He learned to reject it because as he puts it "it gave me unearned privileges and alienated me from myself and from the rest of society in ways that could not be undone until I became aware enough to develop a refined sense of fairness, and until I could develop a "social emotion" that was antagonistic towards the class privileges I had inherited." Havel's "social emotion" was one that was also antagonistic towards unjust social barriers, and towards any pre-determined status awarded at birth, or based on the "false consciousness" of race superiority or any other forms of unearned status whose existence is designed specifically to humiliate, dominate and dehumanize others.
Although Vaclav rebellion against his parent's wealth is classic and familiar to us in the U.S., he did not blame them -- as he saw them as decent people merely caught up in and locked into the social customs and way of life of their time, perhaps in the same way that we Americans do when we use the same lament to excuse our own parent's evils of Jim Crow and slavery. Like his American counterparts, Havel too, even as a member of the bourgeois, preferred a sensibility that sided with the oppressed rather than with the ruling class of which, through inheritance, he was a member in "good standing."
However, unlike the typical American or South African racist, who would never grant moral superiority to those they oppress, even though classism was his natural inheritance, Havel opposed his social station at an almost instinctual level because with all of its undeserved advantages it was seen by him as morally inferior to those it oppressed. He also opposed it because of its inherited privileges, the sponging off of the powerless, due to its social injustices and the immoral barriers that tended to degrade man and condemned those it oppressed to the status of sub-humans. Havel said that by the time of the 1968 uprisings, he had become what he called "an emotional" and a "moral socialist." But even this was just a half way house on his journey to greater personal awareness and enlightenment.
As his social consciousness evolved he began to see the crisis of the world as deeper than just particular ways of organizing the economies, their respective peculiar social arrangements, or the politics of a particular system. What he saw long before it became obvious to the rest of us, is that both the East and West are suffering from the same dilemma: a crisis of alienation, a malaise in which man is isolated from himself; a conflict between an impersonal, anonymous, irresponsible, corrupt and uncontrollable juggernaut of power (the power of mega-corporations, mega-technology, and mega-dollars in politics and mega-churchs), and the elemental and original interests of man as a concrete individual.
In this sense, Havel sees this conflict in the same terms that Ernest Becker saw them: as a nostalgic loss of metaphysical certainties, a lack of a capacity to experience the transcendental, of any super-personal moral authority, or any kind of higher moral horizon. As he puts it: "As soon as man begins to consider himself the source of the highest meaning in the world he begins to lose his human dimension, and control of his humanity. We are going through a great departure from God, which has no parallel in history: we have become the first atheistic civilization."
But again, as in the case with Becker, we must resist the temptation to force these comments about God and the need for a return to spiritualism, into our own facile, lifeless and morally compressed Procrustean Beds. His reference to God and an "extramundane authority" is similar to that of Professor Cornel West's version of his own self-styled version of "Chekovian Christianity:" They both represent "Existentialist revolutions" more than they represent traditional rearrangements of existing religious norms of morality. Anyway you cut it, both West and Havel's versions of "God" seek to drive the moneychangers from the Temple.
Havel, Becker and West all put at the foot of our collective dilemma, man's arrogant anthropomorphism, in which he attempts to know and control everything. As we go about, bouncing between obscene consumption on the one hand and novel but obscene repression on the other, these great men all agree that we need to find a deeper sense of responsibility to the world and to something higher than ourselves. We need a new moral order based on returning man to his genuine human dimension, which can eventually lead to new social structures where personal humanity may again begins to rule supreme.
Far be it for me to suggest that these great men and their shared vision may have missed an important point: that man's humanity is not what it used to be. It has changed and been transformed in fundamental, perhaps even in irretrievable, ways. We cannot "walk the cat back" to an earlier more pristine moral time. Moral ground zero has changed, perhaps forever. Like everything else, our humanity too has been corrupted. We can't un-ring that bell; there is no way to back.
Sadly, the new humanity that we have created is what it is, period. There is lots of practical advice for democrats here, but Havel's larger message is, in my view, much more important.
Ten Stars
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By Kris Tuttle
Format:Paperback
Other reviews are right on the money in terms of this being a very good book and of course it covers many key elements of the events and times during the changes in Czechoslovakia. However the are several key messages, and lessons for anyone interested in managing, motivating and leading people; particularly through difficult or uncharted changes. There are also some good reflections on the role, character and nature of theater and other individual and group activities in the arts.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
The story of a hero
Havel is a man I greatly admire. Unfortunately, too few people in the West know of this remarkable man who led The Velvet Revolution in what is now the Czech Republic. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Eurocat
5.0 out of 5 stars
Human-Centric Self-Governance--Take Back the Power
Edit of 17 Apr 08 to add links.
This book should be read as an adjunct to the author's other major book along these lines on power to the powerless. Read more
This book should be read as an adjunct to the author's other major book along these lines on power to the powerless. Read more
Published on June 26, 2002 by Robert David STEELE Vivas
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing Book, Amazing Man
This is a fine book about an amazing man. I was truly inspired by Vaclav Havel after reading this book. Read more
Published on December 29, 2000 by J. A Gant
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Revolution BEFORE the Revolution
This is the most insightful book I've ever read on the spirit of political dissent. It was published as Havel's responses to a series of written interview questions smuggled to him... Read more
Published on April 23, 1999 by Martin E. Stein
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 32
books:
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100
books
cite this book:
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- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera on 4 pages
- Letters to Olga: June 1979-September 1982 by Vaclav Havel in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Front Matter (3)
- Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts by Samuel Beckett on page 48, and page 53
- New Writing in Czechoslovakia (Writing Today Series) by Various Contributors in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- The Guinea Pigs by Ludvik Vaculik in Back Matter
See all 32 books this book cites
- Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990 by Vaclav Havel on 5 pages
- Leading Creators of Twentieth-Century Czech Theatre (Polish and Eastern European Theatre Archive, 13) by Jarka M. Burian in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Ontopoietic Expansion in Human Self-Interpretation-in-Existence: The I and the Other in their Creative Spacing of the Societal Circuits of Life ... ConditionBook III (Analecta Husserliana) by A-T. Tymieniecka on page 262, page 263, and page 265
- The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe by Gale Stokes in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Philosophical Papers (Cambridge)) (Volume 3) by Richard Rorty on page 236, and page 240
See all 100 books citing this book
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