A Czech Playwright’s Years in Prison : LETTERS TO OLGA <i> by Vaclav Havel, translated with an introduction by Paul Wilson (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 397 pp.) </i>

“Show them how a Christian can die,” was one of the cheerful defiances thrown out by the early martyrs; and the example assisted the conversion of many, among them, the man who became St. Paul.

The message of “Letters to Olga” might be: “Show them how a phenomenologist can withstand jail.” Vaclav Havel’s writings from four years in Czechoslovakia’s prisons possess a wit, a serene toughness and a capacity to extract humane sermons from stones that could convert me.

Havel is the best-known Czech playwright, a dissident in his country many years before the Prague Spring, and a leader in the protest movement ever since. He was one of the organizers of Charter 77, the biggest concerted dissident action since 1968, was arrested several times and finally, in 1979, began a prison term that ended in 1983 after his illness brought in appeals from intellectuals around the world.

With no qualifications, I am going to have to touch upon the phenomenology--existentialism, one of its offshoots, is a more accessible term--but first, some notion of the portrait that Havel’s letters to his wife convey.

It is both a man and a generation that discovered a few quiet but lethal answers to all but the most extreme spasms of totalitarian hegemony: Don’t lie; don’t weaken; speak when you can and when you can’t, speak softly and then, in a little while, louder; and finally, know that your own absurdity is nonetheless less absurd than that of your rulers.

The weekly letters range from concrete and minute details about Havel’s prison life and his aches, pains and worries, to pages of abstract thinking about the possibilities of being human in the modern world. There is a whiff of homeliness in the sweeping fault, and there is a touch of transcendence in the details.

We get a wonderful portrait of Olga, even though none of her letters are printed. She is, we gather, reticent, practical-minded and down-to-earth, and the relationship between her and her flamboyant husband seems to fit the expression “tough love.”

Over and over, Havel begs for more letters, and for more details about her daily life. He also issues a stream of minute instructions about what she should be doing. It is both comic and touching--in a way, her activities were the only life he could have--and it would irritate a saint.

As for her failure to satisfy Havel’s epistolary hunger, we understand his need. But bit by bit, we get the feeling that her parsimony is oddly therapeutic, like a diet aimed at keeping a physical inactive person in shape. His hunger for news, we feel, is a source of his nervous energy, even of his vitality. And a crisp playfulness emerges here and there.

He dreams that she has given birth to twins by an American professor. Later, he dreams in revenge, of a series of former girlfriends “who try in all sorts of clever ways to seduce me. (A while ago, for instance, it was Bela. Give her my greetings.)”

We hear about the hemorrhoids and lumbago that kept Havel in frequent pain and an intermittent state of fragility, but he puts it this way: “I can’t shake the feeling that my organism is only functioning on its word of honor, as it were.” There is grace there. Now for the phenomenology.

For three quarters of a century, this has been a major constellation of Western thought, more influential in Europe than in America. Roughly, it holds that philosophical truth is approached by individual apprehension, with no aspect of individual experience or consciousness suppressed or trimmed for the sake of systematic neatness. In that sense, it is extremely loose; but the looseness is balanced by a corollary. If truth is approached from the individual standpoint, then the individual is responsible, permanently and continually, for it. There is no rest in some overarching system or ideology.

In this respect--and it is the respect that has made it so influential in postwar Eastern Europe--it allows the individual to resist state-imposed thinking. But it calls at the same time for an unsparing, moment-by-moment struggle to be yourself and keep your eyes open. Pope John Paul II was trained as a phenomenologist; it could be made for resisting the dehumanizing pressures both of totalitarian states and other, apparently looser, modern societies.

It is a matter of thinking that allows a human being, if he or she has the spirit and stamina for it, to be free in jail. That, more or less, is the definition of Eastern European art and literature over the last decades.

Havel uses a great deal of his prison writing--one letter a week, written under capricious restrictions--to work out his thoughts about the possibilities for the human spirit in a time of dehumanization and mass culture. There is great richness in these sections--whose ideas are relevant in the West as well--though they are hampered by excessive abstraction, and by the difficulties of writing under a prison regime that also included daily manual labor.

Havel, whose lucidity is unsparing, recognizes this. He apologizes for passages that “grind and sweat their clumsy way to conclusions that have long been obvious to clever people.” He is right, in part; the part he is wrong about--including some fascinating thoughts about theater--would of themselves make the “Letters” a treasure, even if one for which some excavating by the reader is still required. The reader is immeasurably helped, incidentally, by Paul Wilson’s translation and by his lucid introduction.