Audience: The Vanek Plays
As if that weren’t punishment enough, the once popular writer, one of the flowers of the Prague Spring, was under constant surveillance by the state police, and his employers were given a full account of who this dangerous man was and promised the full blessing of the state for any information they might be able to provide about his extracurricular life: where he went, with whom, what he read. Then his friends were harassed.
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In the years following the Soviet invasion of 1968, all of Czechoslovakia was in a sense under surveillance. A great, gray conformity was forced down the throats of a people that only a few years earlier had been exuberantly forging a new brand of socialism, one that tolerated idiosyncrasy and encouraged creativity. The Soviets, still grappling with the ghost of their psychopathic Man of Steel, would have none of that. Havel recalls in his memoir Disturbing the Peace that with the prisons filled with preinvasion reformers, and Soviet spies everywhere, “the people withdrew into themselves and stopped taking an interest in public affairs. An era of apathy and widespread demoralization began, an era of gray, everyday totalitarian consumerism.”
In Unveiling Havel turns his satiric wit on the complacent middle class, showing us an educated couple–members, perhaps, of the power elite–utterly co-opted by their love of luxury. Like the brewery foreman, they’re clearly uncomfortable with Vanek’s political activism and use their “friendship” to try to win him over to their numbed-out consumerism. “You’re our best friend,” the well-dressed, well-coiffed wife coos at one point in Unveiling. “We like you a lot–you have no idea how happy we’d be for you if your situation finally got resolved somehow.” And in Protest Havel skewers a comfortable hack named Stanek, a mediocrity who makes big money writing for TV but who insists he’s still on Vanek’s side. When Vanek presses him to join in a protest, however, the spineless Stanek provides a thousand reasons why this is not the right time for him to take a stand.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Audience: The Vanek Plays photo by Michael Claypool.
