An ambitious portrayal of a turbulent period in the life of the dissident (and later president) Václav Havel, looking at his Faustian pact with the regime and his difficulty in coming to terms with a sense of failure.

Comics

This is not the first time Václav Havel has appeared as a character in Czech comics, nor is this the first comic to explore a particular period of his life. On this occasion, however, the writer Michael Žantovský—also Havel’s friend and later biographer— has chosen a period which, despite all the objectively dramatic external events (surveillance, persecution and imprisonment), was experienced above all as an intensely subjective inner struggle. After writing a letter to President Husák and following the publication of Charter 77, Havel was subjected to gruelling interrogations and repeated house searches. He eventually ended up in pre-trial detention, charged with subversion of the republic and damaging its reputation abroad. It is at this point he made a decision for which he would later reproach himself. Štěpánka Jislová, one of the most prominent and widely translated creators of contemporary Czech comics, frames this essentially documentary drama—which demands the greatest possible accuracy in depicting historical figures—with a markedly stylized prologue and epilogue drawn from Havel’s childhood, thereby strengthening the overall resonance of the story.