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How "in" has Vaclav Havel been? Barbra Streisand announced that he could smoke in her presence. Arthur Miller called him "the first surrealist president." Five thousand of America's glitterati gathered at New York's hip Cathedral of Saint John the Divine to inform him of their pleasure at his being one of them. The new celebrity. Flashbulbs popped, and one published photo even had the guest of honor in it. Music flowed—Paul Simon, Dizzy Gillespie, Placido Domingo, Roberta Flack. The podium received a train of speakers. Paul Newman grinned and gushed. Ron Silvers explained to the foreigner that "we" understand, since in our country "we" don't have full freedom, either. Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Susan Sarandon, and who all else spoke of Havel, of themselves and Havel. Everyone spoke except Havel. They spoke of a man who could say, doubtless with no particular event in mind, "I haven't lost my sense of seeing the absurd dimension of things."
This was February 1990, and all Havel had had to do to be welcomed into the ranks of the celebs was to become president of his country. Which, admittedly, he had done in a rather dramatic way, moving from prison to palace, cell to castle, in a matter of months. This was enough to get him a lavish welcome at the nation's other capital, Washington, too, where he got to give a speech to Congress, with a truly foreign accent on morality. In no time, he was installed in the media's shrine du jour as "one of the Ten Most Interesting People in the World," as "the world's ranking political saint." Or, for those preferring caution, "We are getting to be fanatical about (at least, fans of)" him. Havelmania. Vaclav Havel, Superstar.
Now, unquestionably, in this case the popular and the powerful bestowed their kudos on a most worthy recipient. His life story is even more sensational than those who came to it late imagine. His fellow Czech writer, Milan Kundera, who in many ways is his opposite number, said of Havel that "there are cases (very rare) where comparing a life to a work of art is justified." Except, of course, that no realistic novelist would dare touch a plot line such as Havel's. Nor is his the only marvel of improbability. What the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova decades ago called the True Twentieth Century has offered them up in profusion. It is a century marked distinctively by the vast experiment of totalitarianism, with all its depredations of the human spirit, and of those not few souls who resisted. It is also a century from which, at its end, those who are self-absorbed in their plush comforts have averted their gaze and drawn few lessons.
One who comes to Havel through Solzhenitsyn is apt to see something of a rerun in the trajectory of the West's reception. The prison writers come like Lazarus from another planet, if not from the dead, come to tell us all, and we say, "That is not it, at all." Those whom our local deities first lionize they then cast aside. True, the Czech, for being less alien to our sensibilities than the Russian, retains his cranny in as much of a pantheon of heroes as an antiheroic age can manage to maintain. He elicits from us, who have learned just enough to pigeonhole him, not our opprobrium, merely our neglect.
Michael Ignatieff understands. Solzhenitsyn, "the last of the great Russian intellectuals," returns to a homeland with "no time or patience for the moral sage." As for Havel, who acknowledges his indebtedness to Solzhenitsyn, his "voice is fading," too, "and with it the myth he embodies risks being forgotten." With both men, their moral authority was greatest when they stood outside and against illegitimate power. After their plot line climaxes in a certain victory, we send them off into a denouement of eclipse. And with their passing from our range of vision, "a chapter in the intellectual history of Europe may be closing." And closing too soon, too soon.
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