A heavy desilution
When the filmmakers ask about his bitterness, he says in a humble but dignified tone, like a sober and deliberate articulate person who doesn't want to fool anyone: "Me? I have not lost hope. If I had lost hope, I would not be sitting here. We take hope and we have it, we beg or we get it, but we cannot give hope. I believe that when hope is based on a lie or on self-deception, which is an even worse kind of lie, it is perhaps even more dangerous than terror."
Unusually delicate verses
Yet one can't help feeling that after November 1989, for all his temperament, he was actually still pretty tame. His uncompromising denunciations of an unteachable society appear already at the memorable concert in Prague's Lucerna on 21 January 1990. "The grey of concrete blocks what happiness of panopticon manifestations." "The people around them are stupid." "After a quarter of a century of silence and half a century of fear, we spit on the papach, horrified by our audacity."
"Half propped on an inflatable cushion, I suck hard on a pencil," he could afford to sing at his own expense after openly confronting totalitarian power in his most serious lyrics. In the nineteen-sixties, in concerts (the last before his September emigration), he made such scathing fun of the invading friendly armies that the audience was afraid to laugh. In retrospect, however, we know that what was exceptional about his songs and poetry was not temporality but timelessness: 'It is relatively cheap to hold power: if you intimidate the weak with a mouthful of patriotism or patrimony, you liquidate the strong - the people become a people - and the citizens become a sheepfold.'
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