“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