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In the space of a week, three of my intellectual and literary heroes have died: George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris; Christopher Hitchens, the journalist; and Václav Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident and president. Bunched together at the end of 2011, these deaths bring to a close what has been for me a year of nostalgia, not just for people and places, but for ideas and ideals.

In July my wife and I took the kids to Paris for two weeks. Amid the other activities-the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa-I brought them to see Shakespeare and Company, and showed them the room looking out at Notre Dame where I slept for four nights in 1993. As it was then, the store was packed in July with earnest young people, many of them clearly aspiring to a literary expat kind of life. I chuckled, but only because I once was one of them.

“I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life,” said George Whitman, who opened the store in 1951 and later named it after the landmark of Hemingway’s era. When I arrived in 1993, George generously equated being a journalist with being a “writer,” meaning I could sleep upstairs unburdened of the normal requirement to shelve books or work the cash.

George was also intrigued to learn I was living in Prague, where I worked at an English-language newspaper called Prognosis. He asked a favour: an English-language bookstore was opening soon in Prague, the first in the city, and he handed me a stack of paperback classics to take back, to “seed” the new store.

The Globe Bookstore and Café went on to become an expat hub not unlike George’s store in Paris. We Prague expats rolled our eyes at the facile comparisons between our scene and Hemingway’s in the twenties, but I still smile at my small role linking literary, expat Paris to literary, expat Prague.

Then in November, during a trip to New York City, I met up in Brooklyn with some former colleagues from the newspaper in Prague. During a two-hour lunch we reminisced and came to a bittersweet consensus that such an adventure would not be possible today. It had existed for a unique moment, when post-Communist society was opening up so quickly that anyone could go to Prague and do just about anything.

That freedom came infused with the aura of Václav Havel, the playwright whose ideals had helped throw off a totalitarian regime and elevated him to the presidency of his country. Like George Whitman, Havel was also a magnet for young people; we were captivated by his writings on “living in truth.”

In his landmark 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel had spoken of a hypothetical greengrocer who, after years of putting signs in his store window supporting the Communist regime, decides simply to stop-to dissent.

“In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance,” Havel wrote.

“He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. . . . Therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.”

Though serious and resolute, Havel also saw the absurd humour of life under Soviet domination: in his autobiographical play “Audience,” a playwright-dissident, condemned by the regime to work in a brewery, is summoned by the foreman, a not-very-literate fellow who has been asked by the local party boss to file weekly reports on the agitator.

The foreman asks the dissident if he’d mind terribly helping write the reports on himself; when the dissident demurs, saying it would violate his principles, we glimpse the foreman’s tortured soul: “You bloody intellectuals,” he complains. “Fine gentlemen, spouting fine words. You can afford to, because you always come out on top, you’re interesting. . . . What about me? Nobody gives me a hand, nobody is scared of me, nobody writes about me, nobody gives a blind bit of notice what I do.”

It is this generosity, this humanity, this understanding, that brought Czechs into the streets in the tens of thousands to mourn Havel’s death.

Between the deaths of George Whitman and Václav Havel came that of Christopher Hitchens, the British-turned-American journalist and essayist. In his devotion to literature and to truth, there were elements of Whitman and of Havel in him. He, too, was a beacon to young people, generous with his time when dealing with students, interns and admirers.

Like Havel, Hitchens rejected a fixed ideology or dogma. “I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian-on the left and on the right,” he once said. “The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy-the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.”

Havel, too, confounded attempts to label him: having brought down a Communist regime, he was soon lamenting the worst excesses of capitalist, consumerist culture in his country. And like Hitchens, he has often been compared to George Orwell.

The confluence of literature and politics always brings one back to Orwell. At Shakespeare and Company in July, I bought a copy of the new edition of Orwell’s essays, All Art is Propaganda, which includes “The Prevention of Literature,” a warning that writers must avoid sacrificing their freedom to this political cause or that. “A bought mind is a spoiled mind,” Orwell wrote-perhaps the most succinct explanation for why Havel never joined a political party during his years as Czech president.

I am just a reporter, author and storyteller in a small province in Canada, a journalist devoted to covering seemingly prosaic concerns distant from the epic struggles, or literary hot spots, that marked the careers of Whitman, Hitchens and Havel. But lazy thinking and equivocation are universal, as is the need for clear thinking and clear writing.

In this year of nostalgia, the deaths of these three literary heroes reminds me of the importance of living in truth. They remind me, too, that these ideas and ideals must not be the domain of nostalgia, but of daily life.