Milan Simecka was one of the most widely translated dissidents opposing the Communist regime in the former Czechoslovakia. Many of his essays and articles appeared in leading American and British periodicals during the 1970s and 80s, and his book, The Restoration of Order (1984), is considered a brilliant analysis of the communist regime¹s neo-Stalinist normalization policy. Simecka was imprisoned from 1981-1982 under Paragraph 98 of the Criminal Code (Subversion of the Republic). His crime: smuggling his texts out of the country to be published abroad. The letters in this volume were written during this stay in prison. In them he was not allowed to mention politics, so he wrote about people and human relations. The selection of letters in this volume, written to his family, form a series of meditations on the nature of existence and articulate a moral philosophy of decency in the face of adversity. They are a timeless document of the freedom of the human spirit when confronted with intolerance and the repression of ideas.About the Author: Milan Simecka was born in 1930 in the Czech town of Novy Bohumin. Orphaned by the war, he attended university in Brno on a state stipendium, studying Russian and Czech literature. He moved to Bratislava in 1954 where he taught at the university and then the School of Performing Arts. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Simecka was dismissed from the university and his life became devoted to dissident activities and trying to maintain an independent culture. During the years of Soviet occupation he was prolific in having his articles and essays translated and published abroad. After the revolution in 1989 heheaded the team of Vaclav Havel's presidential advisors, and was given special responsibility for Czech-Slovak relations. He remained at this post until his death in September 1990.