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Václav Havel (1936-2011 ) |
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Czech playwright and poet, one of the leading intellectual figures and moral forces in Eastern Europe, who was elected President of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic in 1989 and in 1993 President of the newly formed Czech Republic. Václav Havel's role as a public figure somewhat overshadowed his record as a dramatist and political essayist. His work often dealt with absurdities of language and human existence. "There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit." (Havel upon receiving the Open Society Prize awarded by the Central European University in 1999, translated by Paul Wilson) Václav Havel was born into a well-to-do family in Prague. His
father, Václav Maria, owned Prague's cliff-top Barrandov suburb and his
mother, Božena
Havlová, the daughter of an ambassador and journalist, encouraged her
son's intellectual and artistic ambitions. Václav Maria's brother Miloš
became a film mogul, who loved glamour and parties. His homosexuality
was a fairly open secret. At the age of eleven, Havel was sent to
a small private boarding school located at Podĕbrady, about thirty
miles east of Prague. His grades were below the average but he showed a
gift for writing – and onanism in his spare time. "Mr Havel," said Dr
Jahoda, Director of the King George School, to him one day, "it's been
brought to my attetion that you've been immoral with yourself." (Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts by John Keane, 2000, p. 87) While working as a laboratory technician (1951-55), Havel read philosophy and poetry and formed a literary circle called Thirty-Sixers, after the year of its members' birth. Because of his "bourgeois" background he was denied the right to attend university. With the future film director Milos Forman he visited the poet Jaroslav Seifert, who read his first texts. Although Kafka's literary heritage was nearly buried by the authorities, his works deeply influenced Havel. Havel studied at a technical college (1955-57) and served in the Czechoslovak Army (1957-59). Havel had joined Group 42, and after challenging the older generation of writers in their magazine Kveten (May), he was for the first time noticed as a writer. In 1964 Havel married Olga Šplíchalová (1933-1996). They bought a small farm near the Polish border, where the couple was visited by a number of their friends. Havel also had a long-time affair with Pavel Kohout's ex-wife Anna Kohoutová. After Olga's death Havel married in 1997 an actress, the former Dagmar Veskrnova, who has had a good number of roles both in feature films and on TV. In the 1960s Havel made his way in the theater, first as a
stagehand, and then becoming resident writer for the Prague "Theatre on
the Balustrade" from 1960 to 1969. During this time he continued his
education at the Prague Academy of Art. His first play as the dramatic
consultant of the theater Na Zábradlí, The Garden Party (1963),
was a satire of modern bureaucratic routines. This work, challenging
reading for censorship, was a success both at home and abroad. In the footsteps of George Orwell Havel
became interested in language – in the play the protagonist acquires an
"official" language and rises to bureaucratic fame. Havel was
subsequently enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Arts and he graduated
in 1967. A few years earlier he had joined the editorial board of the
literary magazine Tvár, which was soon in conflict with the
conservative Writers' Association. Václav Klaus, who later became
Havel's successor as president of the Czech Republic, contibuted
articles on economics for the magazine. Tvár ceased to appear
in 1969. In the same year Havel's passport was confiscated. His satires
of communist bureaucracy were considered subversive. Nevertheless,
Havel did not consider himself a political campaigner but a politically
minded social person. As time progressed, he fully accepted his leading
role as human rights activist and person of reformist movement. As a playwright Havel used dramatic techniques to make situations or characters seem ridiculous, or as he defined his dramatic goal: to force the audience "to stick his nose into his own misery, into my misery, into our common misery, by way of reminding him that the time has come to do something about it" (The Politics of Tragedy and Democratic Citizenship by Robert C. Pirro, 2011, p. 37) In The Memorandum (1965) he introduced an artificial language that is supposed to allow for greater precision in communication. The absurd attempt results in a complete breakdown of human relationships. Three years later the theme was taken even further in The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968), in which Havel attacked fashionable sociological terminology. In the 1970s Havel wrote a series of one-act plays, Audience (1978), Private View (1978), and Protest (1978), in which the protagonist is a dissident playwright in trouble with the authorities. Most plays from this period are built around the writer Ferdinand Vaněk, who faces the absurd realities of Czech life, where even a dissident could be envied. In Audience the Foreman says to Vaněk: "One fine day you will go back to your actresses, you'll boast about the time you worked here rolling barrels, showing off what a fine big he-man you are – but what about me, eh? What about me? I ain't got nowhere to go back to, have I? Where can I go? Who'll take any notice of me?" Who cares what I do? What has life to offer me? What about my future? ('Audience,' translated by George Theiner, in The Garden Party and Other Plays by Václav Havel, 1993, p. 209) Vaněk plays were banned. The character was a nuisance to the authorities, as fictional characters often do, like Jaroslav Hašek's Švejk had been: Vaněk could not be put under surveillance or arrested, but he was still able to cause disturbance, when the plays were distributed as samizdat publications. Havel supported the Prague Spring reform movement of 1968, though he did not play a major role. After it was crushed by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces in August, Havel took on a more visible role in activism. When Milan Kundera praised his compatriots' passive response to the invasion, Havel urged his readers to act. His letter to the Czech President Gustav Husák - the popular party secretary Alexander Dubcek had been expelled – was not officially censored, and copies of its text spread widely. Havel was a cofounder of the human rights organization Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS). His works were banned by the hard-line government, he was subjected to police harassment and arrests, but the manuscripts circulated privately and were printed in Western Europe. It has been said, that if the Russians invented samizdat, the Czechs made it an art. The term samizdat ("self-publication" in Russian) coined by Nikolai Glazkov in reference to a typewritten, bound copy of his poems, but the word gradually acquired a wider meaning as the "unofficial reproduction of unpublished manuscripts." From the early 1970s, Havel and other authors, such as Ivan Klíma, Pavel Kohout, and Ludvík Vaculík, began to exchange their manuscript, thus establishing the Edice Petlice (The Padlock Edition). By 1980, it consisted of some 200 volumes. Havel's samizdat press Edice Expedice (The Expedition Series) was continued by his wife and his brother while he was in prison. (Good-bye, Samizdat: Twenty Years of Czechoslovak Underground Writing by Markéta Goetz-Stankiewicz, 1992 pp. xvi-xviii) Samizat publishers cooperatad with Czech émigre publishers in the West. Havel's plays did much to bring world attention to the
Czechoslovakian struggle. Theatre was for Havel an area of freedom and
instrument of human liberation. In 1979 he was sentenced to four and a
half years imprisonment for subversion of the republic – he had
collected and published with his colleagues information about police
harassment. Vaculik, who was not put behind bars, got in a quarrel with
Havel and others and became marginalized in the dissident movement.
Because of illness, Havel was released in 1983. While he was in prison,
Olga had an affair with a scenographer, who was over twenty years of her junior.
Their relationship was a shock for Havel, who nevertheless continued
his own affair with Anna Kohoutová and Jitka Vodňanská, a
psychotherapist. Between
the years 1987
and 1989 Havel was a member of the editorial board of the samizdat
newspaper Lidové Noviny, and a regular contributor. A new
period in the development of Havel's dramatic art
started in the 1980s. His plays reflected identity problems and
philosophical moral problems as in Temptation (1986), a modern
reworking of Faust. In Largo desolatio (1985) the hero,
another writer character, finds it difficult to deal with the burdens
imposed on him both by his enemies and by his friends. As an essayist Havel carried on the tradition of democratic and liberal thought. Unlike other dissident intellectuals, Havel had no illusions as to the humane nature of communism or the possibility of its democratization. At the same time, he denounced the Western consumer society - a theme familiar from the writings of the famous Russian Nobel laureate and dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And like Solzhenitsyn, Havel called for moral revival (although not based on Christian values). During the 1970s and 1980s Havel was repeatedly arrested, and Charter 77 and similar groups were isolated from Czechoslovak society. Havel served several years in prison for his dissident activities (1977, 1978-79, 1979-83, 1989). After the communist regime sentenced Havel in 1979 to 4 1/2 years in prison for subversion, he was given the opportunity to emigrate, but he chose imprisonment. In the 1980s Havel became the undisputed unofficial leader of the Czechoslovak human rights movement. Having a news vision of himself, Havel abandoned his alter ego Ferdinand Vaněk. Letters to Olga (1983) was written in a kind of code (they were naturally first read by the wardens and sometimes redacted). "There are parts of it I don't understand myself," Havel later said. (Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie, 2012, p. 235) Shortly after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in November
1989, Havel formed a new opposition group, Civic
Forum, at a meeting in Prague's Magic Lantern theater, but it
was students, who began the "Velvet Revolution." Alexander Dubcek
(1921-92), who had launched a series of reforms in 1968 and was
subsequently expelled from the Presidium, was nominated chairman
of the parliament. Frank Zappa was invited to Prague for Czechoslovakia's
presidential election. Zappa sent his regrets for not attending
and said: "I really support
Havel's idea of establishing a government that has an aesthetic, as
well as economic, ethics. But right now the best thing I can do is to
stay away." (Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story Of Frank Zappa by Neil Slaven, 2003, p. 374) Havel was elected in 1989 by direct popular vote
President of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, following Gustav
Husák, who died in 1991. Husák's Precidency lasted 14 years
– noteworthy, Havel spent in office 14 years, too. One of Havel's
first acts as President was to bring modern art to Prague Castle, his
official residence and office. When Havel traveled to London, he wanted to meet the author
Salman Rushdie, who had been forced into hiding after Iran's spiritual
leader Ayatollah Khomeini had ordered his assassination. Their meeting
at the Czech embassy was cancelled. "I do not trust the place,"
Havel explained on the phone. "There are still many people of old
regime, many strange people wandering about, many colonels." (Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie, 2012, p. 234) Havel's mission was to restore
a healthy democracy in his country, but refused to create a political party to advance this aim. His
"non-political" politics
was met with criticism. According to Havel's friend and translator Paul
Wilson, his "appeal for tolerance [of former Communist Party members]
was admirable and consistent, but it did not offer much of a guide to
action, nor did it match the popular mood. Many people felt the need
for some judical or political mechanism to help root out those who
embodied the old system and were standing in the way of the new." ('Václav Havel in Word and Deed' by Paul Wilson, in Critical Essays on Václav Havel, edited by Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, Phyllis Carey, 1999, p. 25) "The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment," Havel said in his 1990 New Year's speech, which shocked most listeners. "We live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves." (Speeches That Changed the World by Quercus Editions, 2016) Havel promoted reconciliation with Germany, and lobbied for
the Czech's Republic's entry into Nato and the European Union. In his address at the Nato summit on April 23, 1999, Havel
stated: "The fact that a former powerful strategic adversary has
disappeared from the scene does not, however, mean that in the world of
today human lives, human rights, human dignity and the freedom of
nations are no longer in danger. They are, unfortunately, still being
threatened, and collective defence of the democratic states of the
Euro-Atlantic sphere of civilization, therefore, still remains a valid
concept." To his critics, who claimed that he had learned to like power a little too much, Havel said that as soon as his homeland does not need him, "I will with great appetite devote myself to my original profession, and write or even work in some kind of theater.'' (Upheaval in the East; Havel Traces Passage 'From Jail to the Castle'' by Craig R. Whitney, Special To the New York Times, January 12, 1990) Havel's first great defeat was the 1992 break-up of Czechoslovakia. He resigned but was elected president of the new Czech Republic in February 1993. Throughout his terms in office, Havel struggled to find balance between being a president and a counterculture figure. Václav Klaus, who served as prime minister from 1992 to 1997, carried the responsibility of economic reforms of the country. Eventually Wednesday meetings with Klaus, a strong-willed advocate of the free market economy, turned into a nightmarish experience for Havel. When Havel invited Salman Rushdie to the Prague Castle, Klaus accused Havel of risking the country's security concerns. Before stepping down as President, Havel became the target of smear campaigns by the tabloid media and he was criticized by communists. However, he remained for most citizens in his country among the most popular politicians. In 2006 Havel accepted a residency at Columbia University,
where he wrote much of his autobiography, To the Castle and Back (2006).
Havel's first play in nearly 20 years, Leaving (2007), told the
story of Dr. Vilem Rieger, the former chancellor of an unnamed country,
whose world collapses around him after he leaves politics. When mass
demonstrations broke out in Egypt in late January 2011, Havel said in
an interview: "I personally think President [Hosni] Mubarak, who's done a lot for
Egypt, should acknowledge that his time has come and step down right
away." ('Interview: Vaclav Havel Discusses 'Leaving,' Mubarak, And Russia', Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 09, 2011) Havel died of respiratory disease on 18 December, 2011,
at the age of 75, at his country home in Hradecek. A week before
his death, he had met his friend His Holiness the Dalai Lama in
Prague, and signed with him a declaration in support of
dissidents. In a speech at the 13 Annual Forum 2000 Conference (Prague, October 11-13.2009) on Democracy
and Freedom in a Multipolar World, Havel said
that "one of the great mistakes of politics today . . . is the
superimposing of economic interests over everything else, and the fact
that attitudes towards different conflicts and problems in today's
world are being distorted by the misappropriation of those spiritual
values, which form the foundations of our society." ('Opening Remarks - Václav Havel,' in Democracy and Freedom in a Multipolar World, 2009, p. 56) Havel
had a similar message at the Peace, Democracy and Human Rights in Asia
conference in 2011. Due to illness, Havel not able to attend the
roundtable. His speech was read by the executive director of Forum
2000. For further reading: The Dissident Politics in Václav Havel's Vanek Plays: Who is Ferdinand Vanek Anyway? by Carol Strong (2023); Havel by František Emmert (2021); Havel: Unfinished Revolution by David Gilbreath Barton (2020); Reading Václav Havel by David S. Danaher (2015); Havel: A Life by Michael Zantovsky (2014);Václav Havel: duchovní portrét v rámu české kultury 20. století by Martin C. Putna (2011); Acts of Courage: Vaclav Havel's Life in the Theater by Carol Rocamora (2005); Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts by John Keane (2000); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 2, ed. Steven R. Serafin (1999); 'Philosophy and Politics in Václav Havel's Largo Desolato' by A. Thomas, in The Labyrinth of the World (1995); Václav Havel by Eda Kriseová (1993); Contemporary World Writers, ed. Tracey Chevalier (1993); Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel by Martin J. Matusik (1993); The Reluctant President by Michael Simmons (1991); The Power of the Powerless: Citizen against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. J. Keane (1985); The Silenced Theatre by M. Goetz-Stankiewicz (1979) - Note: Havel's collection of letters, Letter to Olga, contains his correspondence to his wife Olga Splíchalová while he was imprisoned from 1979 to 1982, and Disturbing the Peace, which presents his thoughts on life, literature, and polititics. Havel's numerous awards include Obie Award (1968, 1970), Austrian State Prize (1969), Prix Plaisir du Théâtre (1981), Palach Prize (1981), Erasmus Prize (1986), Olof Palme Prize (1989), UNESCO Bolivar Prize (1990), Friedrich-Ebert Foundation Political Book of the Year Award (1990), Malaparte Prize (1990), Legion of Honour Grand Cross (1990), Charlemange Prize (1991), Sonning Prize (1991), Averell Harriman Democracy Award (1991), B'nai B'rith Prize (1991), Freedom Award (1991), Raoul Wallenberg Human Rights Award (1991), Leonhard-Frank-Ring (1992), Indira Gandhi Prize (1993), European Cultural Society Award (1993), Order of the White Eagle (Poland, 1993), Golden Honorary Order of Freedom (Slovenia, 1993). Havel received honorary degrees from over a dozen universities. Suomeksi Havelilta on julkaistu myös teos Asioista kuultuna (1990). See also: other statesman/writers Lennart Meri, Léopold Senghor. Note: The music of Frank Zappa and Lou Reed inspired Havel and other dissidents during their struggle against Soviet rule. During Havel's visit in the United States in 1998 Lou Reed played at the state dinner in the White House at the Czech president's request. Selected works:
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