Conscience in Blue Jeans : DISTURBING THE PEACE A Conversation With Karel Hvizdala <i> by Vaclav Havel translated and with an introduction by Paul Wilson (Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95; 240 pp.) </i>

Of all the wonders of the year just past, the most wondrous has been the rise of the playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel from prison to the presidency of Czechoslovakia. “Disturbing the Peace” explains how this transformation could have come about.

Rather more than a “conversation,” as the subtitle describes it, the book consists of a set of scrupulous and sensitive answers to questions posed through underground mail by a Czech writer in exile, recorded and reworked over the year 1985-1986, when Havel was turning 50.

Basically, it is an autobiography, informal, understated, tentative in judgment--the only sort of memoir the future president could have allowed himself to compose. As such, it was put together at the optimum point in time, when rays of hope were beginning to penetrate the gloom of life under a tyranny and when the future leaders of a free Czechoslovakia had established a network of personal associations ready for quick mobilization if the hour of liberation should strike.

The translator, Paul Wilson, who knows Havel’s country at first hand and whose text reflects his colloquial command of the language, had originally hoped to bring “Disturbing the Peace” up to date by extracting from the author a few reflections on the events of last autumn. Havel refused: “The book has its own architecture . . . and if we were to start adding material . . . it would just keep rising like some strange loaf of Christmas bread.” He was quite right.

Jogging easily from topic to topic, “Disturbing the Peace” pinpoints three formative phases: a privileged childhood, a hands-on start in the theater, and a groping, half-reluctant passage into open dissent.

Young Vaclav’s parents were prosperous--apparently even under the Nazi occupation--but their son “understood . . . as a handicap” the “perks” he enjoyed; he felt cut off from those around him by “an invisible wall”; he felt “alone, inferior, lost, ridiculed.” As a result, he developed “an antagonism toward undeserved privileges, toward unjust social barriers.”

This conviction may have eased the shock when at age 15 his real handicapping began. Denied access to higher education because of his “bourgeois” origin, he went to work, first as a carpenter, then as a laboratory assistant, all the while attending night school and reading voraciously. Eventually he was called up for military service.

Here he found his vocation. He and a friend “decided to do something that required a lot of bravado”; they decided to write a play and, along with other friends, to perform it. On his return to civilian life, Havel signed up as a stagehand in a “liberated” theater, shifting from one odd job to another until he emerged as a playwright who both made people laugh and won their respect.

For him, the theater “became a place for social self-awareness, a vanishing point where all the lines of force of the age” met, “a seismograph of the times, a space, an area of freedom, an instrument of human liberation.” At the same time, “the delight in performance, the rhythm, the pure fun . . . seemed to make . . . learned ideological debates . . . fundamentally inappropriate.” Trapped in the Kafkaesque world of despotism, threatened with “loss of self,” Havel enrolled as a “faithful” heir of the theater of the absurd.

From this point on, struggle against it as he might, his evolution from a mere “curious observer” of Czechoslovakia’s fate toward active participation in--and eventually leader-ship of--dissent appears in retrospect as virtually inevitable.

It began in 1965 (he was just short of 30) when he joined the editorial board of a cultural monthly for young writers, which became his “private school of politics.” Three years later, the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring drove him into unemployment and “internal exile.”

By the mid-1970s, he had sufficiently recharged his batteries to write an open and explosive letter to his country’s Communist president and to play a decisive role in the drafting and circulation of Charter 77. This document, whose signatories included the elite of Czech dissidence, initiated a slow awakening from public torpor; its chaotic but astonishingly efficient working methods prefigured the spectacular success of Civic Forum in the last months of 1989. Charter 77 landed Havel in jail. It also made him famous.

He bore up well under the ordeal of imprisonment, particularly during a subsequent four-year stay. The experience both hardened him and made him more reflective. By the time of his triumphal release in 1983, he had discovered who he was; that discovery constitutes the core of “Disturbing the Peace.”

He belongs, Havel tells us, “to the generation of the Beatles,” heartily endorsing John Lennon’s verdict on the 1970s as not “worth a shit.” By temperament no revolutionary, wary of “diffuse . . . ideological polemics,” he believes in supporting “concrete causes” and in being “prepared to fight for them unswervingly, to the end.” In consequence, he chides the Czech reformers of 1968 for dithering in the face of Soviet threats, and his fellow writer, Milan Kundera, for his “skepticism regarding civic actions that have no immediate hope of being effective” and for refusing “to admit that it occasionally makes sense to risk appearing ridiculous and act bravely.” As for himself, he has “never been a politician”; he has never possessed “the necessary qualities for it.” The events of 1989 were to prove him wrong.

What sort of man emerges from this scattering of judgments? What are we to make of Havel’s oscillation between seriousness and humor, between sense and nonsense? How can we reconcile his playfulness with his profound moral commitment?

Havel’s reply is to tell us that these apparent contradictions “are only two sides of the same coin.” Granting that “it’s difficult to explain,” he argues that “Without the laughter we would simply be unable to do the serious things.” The dramatist of the absurd, we learn, and the steadfast leader in tight situations are one and the same person.

Yet Havel does not leave the matter there. He meticulously lists his “private paradoxes”:

“I have chosen a rather agitated way of life, and I myself am always ruffling the surface somewhere, yet I long for nothing more than peace and quiet. . . . My reputation is that of an eternal rebel and protester, to whom nothing is sacred, and my plays are anything but a picture of peace and harmony. I’m very unsure of myself, almost a neurotic. I tend to panic easily. . . . I’m always masochistically blaming or cursing myself for something; yet I appear to many (and to a degree rightly so!) as someone who is sure of himself, with an enviable equanimity, quiet, levelheaded, persistent, down-to-earth. . . .”

Havel exudes vitality and love of life; he exudes good will: In short, he is a thoroughly admirable person. “Disturbing the Peace” documents with disarming self-irony the path of a man who kept learning on the job until the moment when he had greatness thrust upon him.

In the new perspective opened up by Czechoslovakia’s liberation, portions of “Disturbing the Peace” may strike today’s readers as irrelevant. Despite a helpful glossary, they may get lost in Havel’s account of his relations with literati unknown outside their own country. The interview form entails repetition and an unevenness in presentation. But these are minor cavils. “Disturbing the Peace” is a gem of modest self-revelation by a man skeptical about heroes who in fact became “the conscience of his nation.”

Havel applies the expression not so much to himself as to the traditional role of Czech writers. The exemplar that springs to mind is, of course, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, the founder and “philosopher-king” of Czechoslovakia. But Havel is no Masaryk: He lacks his predecessor’s solemnity; he prefers blue jeans to the trappings of a royal sage.

He is, rather, a complex creature who fascinates his more stolid countrymen. Hence his apparently unshakable popularity. Who but he could have gotten away with condemning the 1945 expulsion of the Sudeten Germans as an act of revenge? Who but he possesses the combination of imagination and statesmanship to launch Czechoslovakia on a course of mediation between East and West? Prague, after all, lies at the very center of Europe, and its unconventional president figures as the first leader from a former satellite nation to speak out--and to be heard--in behalf of a united Europe.

Present reports indicate that after the current elections, he will consent to stay on for another couple of years. Let’s hope so.