Dragostea la vorbitor
Love in the prison’s visiting room.
Václav Havel,Letters to Olga
Letters to Olga, Václav Havel’s epistolary during his stay in prison from June 1979 to September 1982, offers a more complete image on the writer’s literary work and biography. The letters are an extremely eloquent document concerning the Czechoslovak communist regime, mostly because of what it is not told through them, but one may understand in-between their lines. Subject to successive verifications, always arriving with delays to the addressee, refused whenever the topics approached were not the approved ones, these letters give the imprisoned the illusion of freedom and of socialization with the people outside. We are therefore introduced to a profoundly humane Václav Havel, confronted with fears he tries to dissemble underneath the austere image of a homemaker, a lover preoccupied by the well-being and the domestic comfort of his lady, developing a dissimulatory householder thoroughness and inciting sessions of intellect training and exploring of the self.
