COURAGE

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Before 1989, the Czech dramatist and dissident Václav Havel was imprisoned several times for his beliefs and activities, his longest prison term lasting from 1979 to 1983. This period is reflected in Havel’s letters to his wife, later published as “Dopisy Olze” (“Letters to Olga”). Already in prison Václav Havel began to design these letters as a future book and tried to develop within them a more general reflection on human identity and responsibility. Especially after the summer of 1980, Havel’s letters to his wife Olga gradually turned into philosophical essays. On the other hand, the letters from the first year of imprisonment, written from June 1979, contained, besides philosophical, literary and other reflections, also more practical passages, including concrete instructions to Olga concerning their household or Havel’s everyday needs. This is also the case of letter “number 4”, which was written by Václav Havel on 8 July 1979 while in custody in Prague – Ruzyně. In this letter, Václav Havel informed Olga about the letters he had so far received, he described how he had been spending his time in custody and wrote that despite his imprisonment he was “sure of his truth” and did not regret anything. This letter was in an abridged version (without passages about practical matters and specific instructions to Olga) published in “Letters of Olga” issued by the samizdat Expedition Edition in 1983. It has appeared in subsequent samizdat, exile, and after 1989, official editions of “Letters to Olga” as well.

In 1998, this letter, along with 160 other letters from 1979 to 1983 and 11 letters from 1989, was donated by Václav Havel to the Museum of Czech Literature.

The letter, which reached Voice of America radio station in the autumn of 1989, represents an ample critical analysis of the practice of the personality cult adopted by the Ceauşescu family, a phenomenon which reached the limits of the absurd in Romania in the 1980s. The author, an unidentified Romanian citizen who had emigrated to France in the autumn of 1989, succeeded, before his departure from Romania, in capturing the reactions of people in Iaşi to the official visit of the presidential family on 13–15 September 1989. According to his letter, the “masquerade” began several days before the arrival of the Ceauşescu family. The letter ironically recounts the fact that the preparations for the official visit did not take into consideration the shortage of food and the weather. Thus, during the rehearsals, “small children were dressed in national costumes and kept in the cold or in the rain,” while party agitators went through the city with loudspeakers instructing the population to chant “hurrah!” at the passage of the car with the presidential couple. The agitators also encouraged people through the loudspeakers not to give the president any letters, but to give them to their factory managers. The local elite wanted to avoid a situation in which the “most beloved son of the people,” as the president was called at that time, might be disturbed by the population’s complaints. The author of the letter also analysed the role of the nomenklatura in preserving this personality cult, as well as their abusive behaviour. For example, he noticed that the heads of factories represented “a new class of nomenklatura, with discretionary powers.”

In the end, the letter received by the radio station highlights the population’s general discontentment, which was manifest, on the one hand, through various outlets such as humour, and, on the other hand, through spontaneous acts of revolt. As for the jokes about the Ceauşescu couple, the letter described a discussion in a tramway. One of the people observed with irony that the pigs on exhibition in the town centre were very big, but none were as big as Ceauşescu. The absurd of the situation consists in the fact that the exhibition in question was meant to prove the richness of the country’s agriculture while the population suffered from a severe food shortage. As an act of revolt, the author mentioned that the glass windows of the Moldova general store in Iaşi had been covered with graffiti: “Bring down the dictatorship! Bring down Ceauşescu! Bring down communism!” Offering a wealth of details about the population’s state of mind, the letter is a document reflecting the frustration which dominated Romanian society before the collapse of the regime in December 1989.

A letter from director of the Kapsukas State Theatre to Mykolaitis-Putinas, with the writer's answer, in 1960. The head of the theatre asked Mykolaitis-Putinas if he could dramatise his novel 'In the Shadow of the Altars'. The writer refused to give his permission. He wrote openly in his answer that in the process of its dramatisation, the novel might be distorted and deformed according to the ideological norms and official requirements.

In the letter sent to the Commission on Religious Matters of the Vinkovci Municipality, the correspondent Republic Commission interpreted the new circumstances that had arisen in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. The regime adopted new political strategies for lower levels of government and instructed them on how to fight against the oppositional influence of the Catholic Church in a socialist society. “It forces us to create our political strategy and tactics, in other words, clear conceptions with which to successfully and cogently politically counteract the offensive tendencies and actions of the Church in its attempt to infiltrate our socialist society.“

The journal Praxis, whose editorial board consisted of Rudi Supek together with Milan Kangrga, Gajo Petrović, Danko Grlić, Ivan Kuvačić, was published from 1964 to 1974, four times a year in the Croatian language. It also had international editions in English, French and German. Intellectuals gathered around the journal advocated for a neo-Marxist approach to philosophy and sociology. Soon this group was called the Praxis intellectuals (Lešaja 2014: 246), and they promoted a social system which would expand the individual's ability to act freely and creatively. From this standpoint, they criticised capitalism and its understanding of human freedoms and rights which, according to them, leads to alienation. But they also criticised the free market elements which were introduced into the economic system of self-management socialism in Yugoslavia in the mid-1960s and certain other aspects of the Yugoslav socialist system which they considered over-bureaucratized. That is why they often came into conflict with the LCY. The journal was repeatedly attacked and censored by the authorities, its financing was blocked, and even though it was not officially banned, its publishing was disabled by “self-management censorship” (Stipčević 2005: 11-12). Namely, the working people of the Joža Rožanković printing company informed the editorial board of their decision not to provide printing services for the journal anymore. The Rudi Supek Personal Papers in the Croatian State Archives (CSA) contain the letter from Franjo Kalapoš, the manager of the printing company, sent in March 1975, notifying the editorial board of Praxis that the self-management bodies and political organisation of the company made the decision that the journal would no longer be printed. The Praxis editorial board then tried to find another printer, but every single one of them refused to print the journal. That is why the already prepared issue of Praxis (6/1974) was never published. According to Gajo Petrović's testimony, “certain forums even told us not to try too hard, as all the presses received the notification and the workers in all of them were quite in agreement regarding the matter” (Lešaja 2014: 286).