The Playwright Who Believed in a City Reborn

In 1979, Václav Havel sat in a Prague prison cell, convicted for the crime of speaking truth under communist rule. Czechoslovakia had endured decades of Soviet occupation. The secret police monitored every conversation. Neighbors informed on neighbors. The very idea of freedom seemed like a fairy tale told by fools. Yet from that cell, Havel wrote essays about what he called "living in truth" — the stubborn insistence that reality would one day reassert itself against the lie.…