Lost and Found

Lost and Found: Hidden Notes on My First Incarceration is a unique account of the dramatic events that shaped the history of Czechoslovakia and influenced the life of Václav Havel. This book offers an exclusive insight into the communist regime and Havel’s decision to stand up to it through Charter 77.

In the fall of 1977, Václav Havel wrote a report chronicling his first days following the Charter 77 Declaration, the subsequent investigation, his four-month detention, and a difficult period of self-reflection following his release. He hid the report with a friend and it wasn’t rediscovered until after his death. Fragmentary yet strikingly immediate, the text has been reconstructed and published by the Václav Havel Library, with the English translation appearing on the occasion of the world-renowned intellectual’s ninetieth birthday.

The discovery of this manuscript, decades after it was composed and
then hidden away by the author, is an unusual gift. Havel’s account of
his first extended stay in prison, written down just after his release, has a raw and unmediated quality. It is a phenomenology of the experience of interrogation, a description of a drama at the very center of the totalitarian experience: the Faustian moment of encounter with a real-life Mephistopheles.
— Marci Shore, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
in Toronto, author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution and Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism

Reading this extraordinary, long-lost book I felt as if Václav Havel was again talking to me, over a glass of beer and a cigarette, in his characteristic rumbling and chuckling voice. A raw account of his first imprisonment after the first publication of Charter 77, Lost and Found is full of his characteristic humour (nicknaming the police photographer “Visconti”), his ability to spin philosophical observations out of minute observation of everyday life (yes, even the toilet in his prison cell), and his understanding of the subtle mechanisms of arbitrary power. It also expresses his agonised self-criticism at what he saw as his own moral failure in petitioning the communist authorities for his release. Yet back in 1977 he concludes, “What if precisely because of this shock I will perhaps become a somewhat better version of myself. As a person, as an author, and perhaps even as that ‘fighter for human rights’?” Reader, he did.
Anyone who wants to hear the charming, humorous and profound voice
of one of the greatest Europeans of our time must read this book.
— Timothy Garton Ash, Oxford University, author of The Magic Lantern
and Homelands: A Personal History of Europe