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The Embassy and the Consulate of the Czech Republic recently held a commemorative evening in honour of President Vaclav Havel. The programme was introduced by the Honorary Consul General of the Consulate of the Czech Republic for Malta Tonio Casapinta, who ably dwelt at length about the close relations between the two countries, and gave a memorable tribute to Havel. Commemorative addresses were delivered by the Ambassador of the Czech Republic to Malta Petr Burlanek, President Emeritus Dr Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Dr Tonio Borg, and Professor Oliver Friggieri. The following is the speech delivered by Prof. Oliver Friggieri.

The relationship between art, especially literature, and political power has been central to any cultural debate. It has been so at least since Plato, who could even afford to contradict himself so as to embrace two opposite visions of literature, both concerned with either justifying or condemning literature. Both are hugely relevant and have been so, subsequently, till our own times, especially when democracy was lacking. Does God inspire literature and is it morally useful? Does creative imagination constitute a blatant lie? And therefore, is a writer a liar? Should literature unearth the truth even when truth may be harmful? Such issues are permanently topical, and without them there is probably no need for literary expression to exist and to be taken seriously into consideration.

Literature and politics

History amply proves that writers have always played a prominent role especially when issues of freedom and democracy were at stake. The decades between the sixties and the eighties of the 20th century have been exceptionally dramatic in proclaiming how consequential and far-reaching is the message of a writer who may risk all to embrace truth and put it into shape through drama, novels, poetry and whatever words can produce if adequately adoperated. A writer has only words – 'paroli' – and so is God Himself called: verbum, the word, action, a happening, and actually ultimate truth. Incarnation in Christianity is deemed as the transformation of the word of God into human flesh. Writers of the calibre of Vaclav Havel have themselves sought to somehow go through this experience when the signs of the times dictated so.

Vaclav Havel is arguably the most glaring example of such principles put to the test. He has been faithful to himself and to his noble country to the extent of interpreting reality when it was quite difficult to do so. He has proved to the whole world, as various other writers have done in the context of their own local condition, that literature is an institution in itself. It constitutes a point of reference that no political power can ignore or take lightly. The sorrowful conditions Vaclav Havel went through for such a long time are proof of how literature can mould a people's way of thinking, and how change can be brought about even through the dynamic role of literature, especially drama and fiction.

The European

dimension of Prague

The recognition Vaclav Havel was granted in his lifetime is part of the whole moral heritage he left to his noble country. Prague is indeed part of the heart of Europe. Its landscape is as unique as its architecture and artistic patrimony. Havel successfully interpreted the sentiment of his own community, in itself as much as in a specific phase in history. He looked back in time to better understand the present. He aired the views of the average man in the street, in Prague and elsewhere. And one can safely believe that this is the most fruitful effect literature can produce. The most truthful, insightful critics are the common folk, and sentiment is really ripe when collective silence seems to be the order of the day. Havel personified timidity and courage, prudence and determination, thought and action.

His is a story of compromise with silence, eloquent and meaningful. The long disturbing journey he went through from the early sixties up to the late eighties is indicative of a truth which can be defined typical of the question whether art can ever be relevant in political terms. Havel has written words that eventually turned out to be facts. A prisoner has become a president of his country. The word had really become flesh.

Havel, the interpreter

of a nation

Havel has finally resolved the age-long question of whether literature and politics can ever be reconciled. His success as both writer and politician is itself indicative of a distinctive feature of our era. However, the personality of Vaclav Havel is now a symbol which far transcends the known confines of literature and politics. He is a literary writer as much as he has grown into somebody else, much greater and much more pertinent. There is a point wherein verbality and human experience coincide. Havel is an unparalleled example of this. He has managed to express himself to the same degree of expressing the discrete feeling of people at a given point in time. An exceptional achievement indeed, a great step forward towards the realisation of our own self as a single human race.

Vaclav Havel has embodied the anxieties and ideals of a free citizen, a faithful son of both a particular country and a whole planet. His contribution is a decisive step forward towards the realisation of man as a free agent. May his name be always a source of inspiration to us all in our literary and political endeavours.

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