Masking the Human Face

The seeds of perestroika were sown in the Prague spring. It was there, 21 years ago, that the socialism of the East first showed the world its human face.

On Tuesday the government of Czechoslovakia will put playwright Vaclav Havel on trial for the crime of remembering that fact.

According to Czech authorities, the 52-year-old writer was guilty of “incitement to a criminal act” and “obstructing public order” when he took part in a demonstration marking the 20th anniversary of the death of Jan Palach, a Prague student who set himself on fire to protest the Soviet invasion that ended his country’s experiment in reform. If convicted, Havel could be imprisoned for 2 1/2 years. Eight of those who joined him in the demonstration--leaders of various independent peace and human-rights groups--are to be tried on other, equally specious, charges.

Havel, Jana Petrova, spokesman for the Independent Peace Assn., and Ota Veverka, leader of the John Lennon Peace Club, have been jailed since their arrest on Jan. 16. They were taken by police on the second of six days of protest in which thousands of Czechs took part. Many of them suffered violence at the hands of the authorities; more than 1,400 were detained and released.

Havel is one of those rare beings in whose spirit courage has arranged a marriage of life and art. Two of his plays, “A Private View” and “Largo Desolato,” have been performed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Times theater critic Dan Sullivan recently described them as “doleful, funny looks at the way people adjust their principles to accommodate the political realities of the moment . . . . Havel’s comedy is that of the tender conscience faced with the tough choice and either making it or backing away.”

Backing away is precisely the accommodation that Havel has refused to make. Three times since 1968 he has endured prison in the cause of human rights. He was an original signer of Charter 77, the citizens’ initiative, and an early member of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted. Last year he signed “Democracy for All,” the manifesto of Czechoslovakia’s new Movement for Civil Liberties. He also serves on his country’s Helsinki Watch Committee.

Despite the relentless official harassment suffered by Havel the activist, Havel the artist has fashioned a unique body of work that is at once fully engaged and yet free of bitterness, propaganda or caricature.

The thugs whose misrule passes for government in Czechoslovakia these days would be ill advised to assume that they can deal with Havel and his courageous colleagues as they will. The West knows and reveres Prague as the city of Kafka and Kundera, of Smetana and Dvorak, of Kosik and Patocka. The small men with the frozen hearts who hold power there should not delude themselves into thinking that they can make Havel a forgotten casualty in what Arthur Miller rightly has called their “war against the imagination.”