LEAVING THE CASTLE.

The course of power ultimately changes only if there are forces present to oppose it. The Bush Administration, for example, rarely feels the rub of resistance; it is able to justify gratuitous tax breaks, snuggle up to friendly corporations, and fling environmentalism on the slag heap not least because the Democrats--cowed, confused, incoherent--too often end up speaking, when they speak at all, in the helium voice of a Warner Bros. pipsqueak. They hide, hoping that power, in the shape of a self-revealing grotesque (e.g., Trent Lott), will do all the work for them. It's a tactic of vacuous exhaustion, not a strategy of intellectual energy and moral direction.

One of history's prime examples of the potential of political opposition--pure and peaceful, yet historically fierce--played out in the late nineteen-eighties in Eastern Europe, when hundreds of intellectuals, such as George Konrad in Budapest, Adam Michnik in Warsaw, Andrei Sakharov in Moscow, and Vaclav Havel in Prague, who for decades had exemplified Solzhenitsyn's precept to "live not by lies," endured to see an imperium collapse under the weight of its own leaden deceptions. Some of those intellectuals crossed over from the realm of moral example to the practicalities of building a new politics. They became university presidents, diplomats, newspaper editors. Some were elected to their countries' new parliaments. One went to the palace.

That one, of course, was Vaclav Havel. In November, 1989, Havel was still a "dissident playwright," the bluejeaned spokesman of the Civic Forum coalition that opposed the Communist regime; a short while later, with the regime gently toppled, he was the leader of a nascent democratic republic and, a few months after that, its well-tailored President. For the thirteen years since, in a scenario that was part Kafka, part fairy tale (or are they the same?), Havel has lived atop the ramparts of the highest hill in Prague. The spooks who tapped his telephone now guard his person; the bureaucrats who intercepted his mail now distribute his speeches; the castle that may have inspired "The Castle" now houses Kafka's most appreciative reader. Havel has helped create a civil society through the probity of his example (no Czech could forget that, as a dissident, he stayed in his jail cell rather than accept the freedom of coerced emigration) and the clarity of his essays ("The Power of the Powerless," "Beyond the Shock of Freedom"). He had the prophetic moral force of Solzhenitsyn, but he was neither reclusive nor anti-modern; while Solzhenitsyn rejected Western popular culture as the "manure" that flowed east under the Iron Curtain, Havel embraced Beckett and Frank Zappa, Ginsberg and Lou Reed. It was the arrest of a rock group, the Plastic People of the Universe, that had set him, in 1976, on the path of leadership among the dissidents. The arrests, he wrote, were "an attack on life itself." Soon he was involved in drafting the founding document of Czech opposition, Charter 77.

In early February, Havel will live for the first time since childhood as a normal citizen of what in the totalitarian era was a ...