BOOKS
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The best and most informative parts of Keane's book deal with
Havel's youth, family background, and his relations with the protodis–
sident circles in Antonin Novotny's Stalinist Czechoslovakia . Keane
writes vividly about the great expectations of the Prague Spring, the bit–
ter disillusionment following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968,
and Havel's role in the emergence of the
samizdat
culture of the resis–
tance to Husak's regime of "normalization." Absorbing, too, are the
pages dedicated to the formation of Charter 77, the ordeals with the
secret police, Havel's long years of imprisonment, isolation, discomfi–
ture, and even despondency. Keane documents Havel's crucial role in
the articulation of the dissident concept of freedom, including the dyna–
mite notion of the power of the powerless. He explores Havel's dispute
with Western pacifists, his insistence on the peculiar nature of Soviet
imperialism, his critique of modern instrumental rationality and tech–
nological manipulations (not only in Soviet-style regimes).
Much less persuasive are the chapters focused on Havel's postrevolu–
tionary tribulations: in these pages Keane accuses Havel of Machiavel–
lianism, in the pejorative sense, over and over again. The hero of the
Velvet Revolution, Keane suggests, has become a victim of his long-con–
cealed attraction to power, the result of psychological features that
many of Havel's former friends conveniently recall for his latter-day
biographer, and the consequence of political involvement
per se.
In
other words, Keane affirms that the Actonian vision of an irresistibly
corruptive virus of politics fully applies to Havel's post-1989 career. To
remain clean, he should have abandoned the political arena. But Havel
has often emphasized that it is precisely because politics can be (and
more often than not is) sordid, even tenebrous, that it is important for
those who have a vision inspired by trust, transparency, and morality to
remain involved . Thus, Keane treats his subject unfairly: there are
moments when he writes Havel's name, but in reality must have in mind
Vaclav Klaus or Lech Walesa. In enumerating with bizarre satisfaction
Havel's relatively minor peccadilloes, Keane misses the bigger picture,
which should have included the Czech thinker's commitment to the
preservation of an ethos of civic liberalism, and his unmitigated rejec–
tion of the politics of vindictiveness and ethnic discrimination. Where,
for example, is a thorough analysis of Havel's role in lambasting the
ugly features of the "postcommunist nightmare"? Keane tells little
about the conflict between Havel and Klaus, beyond their personal
incompatibilities: he overlooks the more important clash of their visions
of the role of civil society in the shaping of democratic polities. Indeed,
the Havel-Klaus controversy on the nature of an open society is one of
