Volume 37, Number 10 · June 14, 1990
The Trial of Alyosha
By Janet Malcolm
Letters to Olga June 1979–September 1982
by Václav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson
Henry Holt, 397 pp., $16.95 (paper)
'I have always stressed the importance of convention in theater,' Václav Havel wrote in 1981. 'I have often realized, and stressed, that where everything is allowed, nothing has the power to surprise.' Letters to Olga, the collection of letters Havel wrote to his wife while serving a four-and-one-half-year prison sentence at hard labor between 1979 and 1983, draws its own immense strength from the fact that almost nothing was allowed the writer. Havel's weekly letter to his wife—the only form of writing permitted him—was ruled by the following singular poetics: it could not be more than four pages long; it had to be written in a legible hand, with nothing crossed out or corrected; there could be no quotation marks or foreign expressions in it; margins were required to be a specific width; and, as for subject matter, it could not touch on any of the actualities of prison life and had to confine itself to 'family matters.' Whether the letter got through or not depended on the whim of an 'absolutist and much feared, half-demented warden' (as Havel later described him to Karel Hvízdala[1] ).
Review, 4293 words
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