For today’s anniversary of Václav Havel’s death, Kieran Williams makes the case for why Havel’s prison letters are timely reading in our pandemic. -promoted by Laura Belin
In the course of this year I have read a lot about COVID-19, its effects on the human body, and what we might do to treat or halt it. I don’t yet feel ready to read about its other effects, on the psyches of billions of people who have had to adjust their daily lives. The fact is that until it is over, I won’t even understand how it has affected me, let alone everyone else.
That’s why I’ve wanted to turn instead to a record of another person’s experience of existential shock, one that happened far enough in the past that we can treat it as a completed event: Václav Havel’s letters as a political prisoner 40 years ago in communist Czechoslovakia, published as Letters to Olga.
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