Vaclav Havel

Letters from Prison Vaclav Havel

Milan Simecka was one of the most widely translated dissidents opposing the Communist regime in the former Czechoslovakia. Many of his essays and articles appeared in leading American and British periodicals during the 1970s and 80s, and his book, The Restoration of Order (1984), is considered a brilliant analysis of the communist regimesssssssss neo-Stalinist normalization policy. Simecka was imprisoned from 1981-1982 under Paragraph 98 of the Criminal Code (Subversion of the Republic). His crime: smuggling his texts out of the country to be published abroad. The letters in this volume were written during this stay in prison. In them he was not allowed to mention politics, so he wrote about people and human relations. The selection of letters in this volume, written to his family, form a series of meditations on the nature of existence and articulate a moral philosophy of decency in the face of adversity. They are a timeless document of the freedom of the human spirit when confronted with intolerance and the repression of ideas.