* 5. 10. 1936 Prague ✝ 18. 12. 2011 Hradecek
Writer and Dramatist; One of the first Spokesmen for Charter 77; Leading Figure of the Velvet Revolution of 1989; Last President of Czechoslovakia; and First President of the Czech Republic
The Czech-English notebook contains an essay on the last sixteen Letters to Olga (No. 129–144) written by Zdeněk Neubauer in 1984. The publication also includes a contemporary interview with the author about a midsummer trip, Kampademia, letters from prison and letters to prison, about Consolatio philosophiae, Hrádeček, and also about Catholicism, magic mushrooms as well as Tolkien...
„I am a child of the age of conceptual, rather than mystical, thought and therefore my god as well – if I am compelled to speak of him (which I do very unwillingly) – must appear as something terribly abstract, vague and unattractive. But it appears so only to someone I try to tell about him – the experience itself is quite vivid, intimate and particular, perhaps (…) more lively than for someone whose “normal” God is provided with all the appropriate attributes (which oddly enough can alienate more often than drawing one closer). And something else that is typical of my god: he is a master of waiting, and in doing so he frequently unnerves me. It is as though he set up various possibilities around me and then waited silently to see what I would do. (…) His Last Judgment is taking place now, continuously, always – and yet it is always the last: nothing that has happened can ever un-happen, everything remains in the “memory of Being” – and I too remain there – condemned to be with myself till the end of time – just as I am and just as I make myself.“
Václav Havel:
Letters to Olga – essays written in prison, letter, August 7, 1980
