OpEdNews - Diary: Dateline Yesterday: Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), by David Remnick

The death of Vaclav Havel comes in a month in which we mark the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Few voices did more to undermine the foundations of the Berlin Wall and the entire edifice of Soviet-imposed totalitarianism than this shy bourgeois, this sly, reticent, playwright and essayist. In a parallel universe, in a luckier realm, Havel would have lived out his life as a Czech epigone of Ionesco and Beckett, a carefree son of privilege, free to write, to pursue his pleasures, to listen to the rock "n roll he loved. Instead, like a living figure from Kafka, he was born to a system where absurdity, not law, ruled; calmly, resolutely, he pursued a life of dissidence, led a revolution, and then assumed a home in the Castle, the seat of power in liberated Prague.

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Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), by The New Yorker Magazine

Even surrounded by the pomp of his office, Havel retained to the end an impish smile, a constant acknowledgement that his power was both an immense responsibility and an equally immense cosmic joke.

Click here to read Remnick's short but moving remembrance of Havel.