Document: Vaclav Havel. (Ethics - June 1990).(Interview)

President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, is a playwright and a fighter for freedom. It was as a dissident writer that he won the reputation that led to his election as President on 29 December 1989, becoming thereby the symbol of the peaceful revolution that had taken place in his country. * In 1968, after the brutal termination of the "Prague Spring" in which Vaclav Havel had played a leading role, production of his plays was banned in Czechoslovakia, although his trilogy Interview, A Private View and Protest (1975-1976), was staged in many other countries. Because of his human-rights advocacy and resistance to oppression he was arrested several times and spent a total of five years in prison. * The following interview, here published for the first time in its entirety, was conducted on 30 June 1989 in semi-clandestine conditions at Vaclav Havel's home near Prague. We publish it as an exceptional document of its time--the weeks before the banned playwright moved into the centre of the stage.

This conversation is taking place in rather a strange atmosphere. You're under observation, and yet you still speak without taking any special precautions.... Are you, or are you not, free to come and go you please?

-- I've been very isolated until the last few years, but not any longer. The isolation was effective during the 1970s, at a time of widespread social inertia. People seemed to have lost heart, seemed not to believe that social change was possible any more. They had stopped taking an interest in public life, which anyway was systematically stifled. People had withdrawn into themselves, with very little communication between individuals.

It was a period when society became fragmented, when everyone was isolated from everyone else. I was particularly isolated because I belonged to the category of people who, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1968, were to some extent singled out as enemies of the state. It was dangerous to have anything to do with us. I was a banned writer. I couldn't get work anywhere...

Then, little by little, things started to change. Today, the …