It’s a long way from Prague Castle to the rented villa on a leafy street near Washington’s National Zoo where Vaclav Havel, the former philosopher-president of the Czech Republic, shuffles into the living room in slippers and corduroy trousers to throw logs on a fire.

Gone are the heady days when Mr. Havel led the Velvet Revolution that toppled Czechoslovakia’s communist regime, paving the way for the Czech Republic to join NATO and the European Union. After years in office, Mr. Havel stepped down as president in 2003 and is again a solitary writer. He’s using a two-month fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center of the U.S. Library of Congress to write a play, his first new work of theater since the tumultuous days of 1989.

The ex-president pours a small glass of plum brandy for each of his visitors and announces, “Now, I’m ready.”

He passes briefly over his recent memoirs, to be published in English this May under the title, “To the Castle and Back.” Some years ago, Mr. Havel asserted that his memoirs would be a cross between the works of a former American secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and those of hard-drinking American author Charles Bukowski.

He now laughs when reminded of that boast. He says his memoirs turned into a collage of diary notes and official speeches wrapped around interviews with the Czech writer Karel Hvizdala. “It will be less interesting and gripping than either Kissinger or Bukowski,” Mr. Havel says.

More exciting, he says, is his current project, a play “about a politician who loses his power, his position and all of a sudden his world collapses.” He insists the play isn’t about himself, saying he intended to write about the subject “long before I knew that I myself would get into politics.”

If the play’s the thing he’s working on now, Mr. Havel hasn’t given up the battle he enunciated to revolutionaries crowding Prague’s Wenceslas Square in 1989: “Truth and love must triumph over lies and hatred.”

Mr. Havel criticizes the war in Iraq, saying that the official reason for invading Iraq “was dumb — that they had, somewhere under the ground, some weapons which are a danger for the United States. It is nonsense, of course.”

Yet he also says it was necessary to overthrow Saddam Hussein, arguing that “the international community has the right to intervene when human rights are liquidated in such a brutal way.”

That doesn’t entitle “some international policemen” to “do what they want,” he adds. “It is necessary to think very carefully and very responsibly about every case.”

Establishing the outward forms of democracy is less important than “solidarity with human beings,” he says, referring to human freedoms and human dignity — principles that he and fellow activists risked their lives to defend during Czechoslovakia’s communist regime.

The growing power of press and broadcast outlets has weakened the ability of intellectuals to speak truth to their political leaders, Mr. Havel says. Yet that doesn’t excuse anyone for failing to speak out, he adds. “It’s my impression that anyone, anywhere, now can express his view on the situation and that people can enter the public sphere and influence it,” he says.

Mr. Havel voices hope that a younger generation will be able to reshape the world. In his home country, he notes, young people have shaken off the innate fear that afflicts even those barely in their teens when communism expired.

“They don’t have the slightly bent spine, the fear, the attitude that you cannot speak but only whisper — that you have, out of fear, to vote for the official candidates who get 95%,” he says.

The old revolutionary squirms on the sofa. The plum brandy is gone, the fire has burned down to embers, and Mr. Havel himself, at the age of 71, is fighting poor health. Still, he cannot resist issuing one more call to arms.

“Truth and love must triumph over lies and hatred,” he quotes himself, leaning forward to press the point.

“Don’t look at it as a prediction, because it is a big question whether it can ever win. But understand it as an imperative, as a challenge, because the whole self-destructive dimension of modern civilization can be taken on by naming all the issues and by igniting in people an excitement about the future.”

The shy smile returns to his tired face, showing a touch of the rebel that made him both a reluctant hero of the Czechs and a winsome figure who fired the imaginations of a generation of Western supporters.

“The will to do something with the world and to refuse to accept one’s circumstances passively, no matter what they are — that is what is necessary and what needs to continue indefinitely.”