In January 1977 the writer, dissident, and future president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, was arrested by the Communist regime for his part in organizing the groundbreaking Czechoslovak human rights initiative, Charter 77. After his release four months later, he wrote a detailed account of his time in detention and then hid it so well that he forgot where it was. In 2014, three years after his death, it was found among the papers of his close friend Zdeněk Urbánek. Paul Wilson’s translation of the report, the first in English, will be published this fall as Lost and Found: Hidden Notes on My First Incarceration . The text below is drawn from that account.

—The Editors

If the Czechoslovak secret police truly understood the events they so carefully monitor, they would have realized long before Charter 77 appeared that something like it was in the works, and they might have avoided the shock that the launch of the Charter gave them.

For Charter 77 didn’t just drop out of a clear blue sky.…