To the Castle and Back: Reflections on My Strange Life as a Fairy-Tale Hero

Chapter One

Washington, April 7, 2005

I've run away. I've run away to America. I've run away for two months, with the whole family; that is, with Dasa and our two boxers, Sugar and her daughter Madlenka. I've run away in the hope that I will find more time and focus to write something. I haven't been president now for two years, and I'm starting to worry about not having been able to write anything that holds together. When people ask me, as they do all the time, if I'm writing something and what I'm writing, I get mildly annoyed and I say that I've already written enough in my life, certainly more than most of my fellow citizens, and that writing isn't a duty one can perform on demand. I'm here as a guest of the Library of Congress, which has given me a very quiet and pleasant room where I can come whenever I want, to do whatever I want. They ask nothing from me in return. It's wonderful. Among other things, I would like to respond to Mr. Hvízdala's questions.
I'd like to start the conversation with a question that touches on the second half of the 1980s, when you became the most famous dissident in Central Europe, or—as John Keane wrote—"a star in the theater of opposition." Do you remember the moment when it first occurred to you that you would have to enter into politics, that your role as a playwright, essayist, and thinker would no longer suffice?

In the first place I'd take issue with the designation "star in the theater of opposition." We did everything we could not to separate ourselves into the "stars" and the others. The better known someone among us became, and thus the better protected from arbitrary repression, the more he tried to come out in defense of those who were less known and therefore more vulnerable. The regime, after all, held to the principle of "divide and conquer." To some they said: "How can you, sir, an educated man respected by everyone, demean yourself by associating with such losers?" To others they said: "Don't get mixed up with those guys; they're a protected species. They're always going to lie their way out of trouble, and they'll go scot-free and leave you to pay the price." It's understandable that in such circumstances we placed a special emphasis on the principle of the equality of everyone who somehow expressed opposition to the regime.

In the second place, you know very well that I have constant doubts about myself, that I blame myself for everything, plausible and implausible, that I'm not very fond of myself. An individual like me finds it very hard to accept, without protest, the claim that he is a "star."

On the other hand, I have to admit that I probably do have a certain ability to bring people together. As someone with a visceral aversion to conflict, tension, and confrontation, especially if they are pointless, and moreover, as someone who hates it when the conversation goes around in circles, I have always tried to contribute to a consensus among people and to find ways to transform a common position into visible action. Perhaps it was these qualities of mine that in the end—without my wanting to or trying to—brought me to the forefront and made me seem, to some, like a "star."

And now, finally, to the nub of your question: I don't think you can find any clear demarcation line in my life separating the time when I did not devote myself to politics from the time when I did. To some degree I have always been concerned with politics or public affairs, and to some degree I have always—even as a "mere" writer—been a political phenomenon. That's the way it works in totalitarian conditions: everything is political, even a rock concert. There were, of course, differences in the nature or the visibility of the political impact my activities had: in the 1960s, that impact was different from what it was in the 1980s. From that point of view, the one genuine watershed in my life was November 1989, when I agreed to become a candidate for the presidency. At that point the issue was no longer just the political impact of what I did; it was a political function, with all that that job entailed. I hesitated until the last minute.
Did the prospect frighten you or entice you?

I found it more frightening than enticing. It was something completely new. I hadn't prepared myself for a presidential role from my schooldays the way American presidents do. I had only a few hours to make a decision that would fundamentally change my life. In the end what probably won me over was the appeal to my sense of responsibility. People told me exactly what I would later often say to others when trying to draw them into politics: you can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it. This appeal, moreover, was accompanied by an attempt to persuade me that my candidacy was the only possible solution in this particular revolutionary situation and that had I—as the central figure in this process—suddenly refused any further engagement, refused to bear the consequences of my own previous actions, it would have turned all our efforts upside down and been a slap in the face to everyone.
What did your wife at the time, Olga, who was known for her sharp judgments, have to say about it?

I have to say that she had unconditionally supported my previous "dissident" activities, but as far as running for president was concerned, she had the same misgivings I did, perhaps even stronger. But in the end she gave me her blessing.
In the mid-1980s, some of your colleagues, immediately after reading our book, Disturbing the Peace, began to suspect that you would enter politics. If I remember correctly, Milan Kundera shared that thought with Václav Belohradsky at the time. I first heard the idea that you ought to become president from Pavel Tigrid, who asked me in early January 1989 what my response to that would be. When did you first learn of these opinions, and what did you think of them?

I'm not surprised that Milan Kundera said that. I think he's always considered me a more political person than I did myself. When Pavel Tigrid wrote in his exile quarterly, Svedectví, that I should be the president, I took it as a joke, as I did later that summer when Adam Michnik said the same thing to me. If I'm not mistaken, it was my friend the rock-and-roller Michael Kocáb who first began to speak in all seriousness, during those revolutionary days, about the need for me to stand for president. In retrospect I seem to have been the very last to have taken the idea seriously.
Washington, April 8, 2005

I remember my previous visits to America. I was here for the first time for six weeks in the spring of 1968. In Prague, the Prague Spring was in blossom and the opportunity to travel came up, and so I immediately took up Joe Papp's invitation to attend the premiere of my play The Memorandum at the Public Theater in New York. At the time I was chairman of the Circle of Independent Writers, which we had set up shortly beforehand to counterbalance the party cell in the still all-powerful Union of Czechoslovak Writers, and I wrote our program on the plane, while drinking whiskey. (It would be worth looking up sometime; I daresay it would still seem relevant today.) There were many rural people on the plane with me, mostly from Slovakia, and many of them were flying for the first time in their lives. They were probably taking advantage of the favorable political climate to visit their rich relatives in America.

The descent into Kennedy Airport at sunset was fascinating. I'll never forget the experience. Someone was waiting for me at the airport and took me directly to a rehearsal of The Memorandum. I couldn't believe my eyes: here I was on the other side of the world, suddenly seeing my play being staged exactly as I had imagined it and the way we had presented it in the Theater on the Balustrade in Prague. People laughed or applauded in the very same places, which particularly surprised me given the fact that the translation was probably not great and there are some things in my plays that are simply untranslatable. After the rehearsal they took me to my hotel and I slept like a log. The next day I looked up my old friend and fellow student Milos Forman and I moved in with Jirí Voskovec, a wonderful man with whom I stayed for the rest of my visit.

The days I spent there were important in my life. The hippie movement was at its height. There were be-ins in Central Park. People were festooned with beads. It was the time of the musical Hair. (Joe had presented it in the Public Theater before my play opened, and because it was so successful it moved to Broadway, where I saw the premiere.) It was the time when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, a period of huge antiwar demonstrations whose inner ethos—powerful but in no way fanatical—I admired; it was also the heyday of psychedelic art. I brought many posters home, and to this day they are hanging in Hradecek. And I brought home the first record of Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground.

My stay in the United States influenced me considerably. After I returned, my friends and I experienced a very joyful, albeit a somewhat nervous, summer, which could not have ended well; on August 21, the Soviet troops arrived. And then, seeing long-haired, bead-festooned young people waving the Czechoslovak flag in front of the Soviet tanks and singing a song that was a favorite among the hippies at the time, "Massachusetts," I had a truly strange sensation. In those circumstances it sounded a bit different from how it had sounded in Central Park, though it had essentially the same ethos: the longing for a free and colorful and poetic world without violence.

The second time I visited A...