Václav Havel, 1936-2011.

The Village Voice gives out theater awards called the Obies (for Off-Broadway), and during the 1980s the Voice’s theater department voted to bestow one of those prizes on the distinguished absurdist Václav Havel, who dwelled in the faraway absurdistan known as the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. In their New York productions, Havel’s plays ran at the Public Theater, and everyone who kept up with the downtown scene knew them well. The plays were splendidly mordant. They were dry, sometimes drier yet, until you could find yourself wondering, as the subway rumbled darkly beneath your seat, “Can life really be so bleak?” The plays were oddly funny, though.

Only, having been awarded the Obie, Havel was unable to make his way to New York to attend the ceremony and bask in applause. There is not the slightest doubt that, given his druthers, Havel would have jumped at the chance to participate in such an event. We know he would have jumped because we know what happened next—namely, that even after he led the Velvet Revolution, and ascended to the presidency of his suddenly ex-communist country, and reaped admiration the world over, and exchanged beatifications with the Dalai Lama, he still boasted of having won an Obie from a New York newspaper called The Village Voice. To be accurate, the Voice awarded him three separate Obies. He was a recidivist.

But he was unable to attend the awards ceremony back in the 1980s because, in those pre-revolutionary days, the Czechoslovak Communist Party kept arresting and re-arresting him, which made him a recidivist of a more conventional and dismal sort. He was incorrigible. He spent more than four years in the communist prisons. There were two weeks in solitary and repeated bouts of pneumonia. By 1983 his health was crumbling, and the authorities, exasperated at their own victim, offered to release him, if only he would request a pardon. But a request would have implied acknowledgment of guilt. He came down with pneumonia again. He could barely breathe, and even then the bastards had no intention of letting an unrepentant man slip from their control. They brought him, handcuffed, in an ambulance to a prison hospital. He ended up in a civilian hospital with superior care only because a Czech exile in Vienna got up an agitation abroad, and the communists were fearful of embarrassment. His lungs never did fully recover.

He smoked cigarettes, too, which may have given him pleasure, but ultimately brought on still graver difficulties. Anyway, the normal everyday air was dreadful in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, visibly atrocious, as if the sky were streaky with crows. By the 1980s, life expectancy was said to be five years less among Czechoslovaks than among the equally industrialized but more hygienic Austrians, who also enjoyed the benefits of democratic liberty. And so the Havel who racked up those many world-historical achievements—as playwright, dissident, orator at Wenceslas Square, recipient of standing ovations from the U.S. Congress, and so on—was, for much of his adult life, a man with damaged lungs and recurrent health problems.

By 1996, in the seventh year of his presidency, a combination of cancer and pneumonia set in. Havel’s staff was dominated by people who, like himself, had evidently never made the upward transition, psychologically speaking, from the harried lowly ranks of persecuted dissidents to the comfortable responsibilities of lofty state power. The staff, in its dissident mentality, had failed to prepare for the most predictable of contingencies, which in Havel’s case was lung disease. The doctors removed half of one of his lungs. The operation led to a new infection. This was not unusual. The infection turned severe. This was a problem. But no one had established a chain of command among the medical experts, and the doctors fell into a feud with one another, Prague clinic versus Prague clinic. A lung ventilator stopped working. The doctors panicked. Havel’s systems were thought to be failing.