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ISBN: HB: 9780300204032

Yale University Press

July 2015

256 pp.

21x14 cm

5 colour illus.

HB:
£46,00
QTY:

Uncanny Era

Conversations between Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik

Czech playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel first encountered Polish historian and dissident Adam Michnik in 1978 at a clandestine meeting on a mountaintop along the Polish-Czechoslovak border. This initial meeting of two extraordinary thinkers who "plotted" democracy, and designed an effective peaceful strategy for dismantling authoritarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, resulted in a lifelong friendship and an extraordinary set of bold conversations conducted over the next two post revolutionary decades. Havel, president of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic, and Michnik, editor-in-chief of the largest daily newspaper in the region, provide rare insights into the post-1989 challenges to building new democratic institutions and new habits in the context of an increasingly unsettling political culture. With both dismay and humour, their fascinating exchanges wrestle with the essential question of postrevolutionary life: how does one preserve the revolution's ideals in the real world? At once historically immediate and politically universal, the Havel-Michnik conversations have never before been collected in a single volume in any language.

About the Author

Adam Michnik is editor-in-chief of the Warsaw daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

Writer and dramatist Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) was the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic.

Elzbieta Matynia is professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York City and at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw, Poland.

Reviews

"'An Uncanny Era' is an excellent read, and will have exceptional intellectual and political import" – Ivan Zoltan Denes, Founding President, Istvan Bibo Center for Advanced Studies of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Budapest