(For Mills, whom I’m happy to say is being proven at least half-wrong, in that I’ve seen a number of nice, posthumous pieces about Vaclav Havel.)

Vaclav Havel died. I’d be lying if I said I knew much more about him than can be found in the lede of his obituary, so read the Wiki article for background.

Apparently, one of Havel’s most important works is a 1978 essay called The Power of the Powerless. Not being much of a dissident myself, I haven’t read it. I thought I’d try to over the next few weeks, but was really disappointed to discover that it’s hard to find a good, readable version of the essay online. 

So I decide to make one. I took this translated version (which appears to have been scanned, poorly OCR’d, and dumped into a crappy HTML page), did a quick cleanup (Havel loved him some emdashes) and spellcheck, and reformatted it with LaTeX. The resulting pdf file is right here. Download away.

I’m sure there are still errors in this quick-and-dirty reformatting, and LaTeX’s built in typefaces are pretty crappy, but I believe the pdf is much more readable than the other sources I’ve found.