History and the Gigantic Ginger Cat

The work of Tom Stoppard, who passed away last November, is commonly described as dazzling, clever, and emotionally powerful—all of which is true. And as commentators in right-of-center outlets observed, the man himself happened to be conservative. Stoppard, who was a toddler when his family fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, became particularly interested in the politics of his home country during the 1970s. He wrote an article for the New York Review of Books about Charter 77, a movement that drew attention to the socialist government’s human rights violations, and befriended the poet, dissident, and future president of the Czech Republic Václav Havel; his play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) criticized the Soviet Union for treating dissidents like mentally ill patients; and in his television special Professional Foul (1977), an English philosophy professor visiting Prague experiences totalitarian treatment firsthand. Stoppard returned to Czech socialism in Rock & Roll (2006), tracing the complex relationship between a Marxist Englishman and a Czech dissident from the 1960s to 1990, when Soviet troops began leaving the country.