Vaclav Havel Biography and List of Works

President of the Czech Republic, prominent playwright and poet, one of the leading intellectual figures and moral forces in Eastern Europe. Havel's role as a public figure has now somewhat overshadowed his record as a dramatist and political essayist. His works often deal with how the power of language interferes with clear thought.

Havel was born into a well-to-do family in Prague. Because of his 'bourgeois' background he was denied the right to attend university. At the age of fifteen, Havel became interested in poetry. 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 influenced deeply Havel.

In 1951-55 Havel worked as a laboratory technician. He 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 gained first time notice. In the 1960s Havel found his way in the theatre, 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 theatre Na Zábradlí, The Garden Party (1963), was a satire of modern bureaucratic routines. It was a success both at home and abroad. 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 Tvárin, which was soon in conflict with the conservative Writers' Association. The magazine ceased to appear in 1969. In the same year Havel's passport was confiscated because of his writings were considered subversive.

Havel has used in his plays dramatic techniques to make situations or characters seem ridiculous. 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. 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.

In the 1960s Havel satirized the communist bureaucracy and supported the Prague Spring reform movement of 1968. Havel's letter to the Czech President Gustav Husák - the popular party secretary Alexander Dubcek had been expelled - did not lead to official actions, but the copies of its text spread widely. Havel was a co-founder 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, but the manuscripts circulated privately and were printed in Western Europe. Havel's plays did much to bring world attention to the Czechoslovakian struggle. Throughout this period he was subjected to police harassment and arrest. Between the years 1987 and 1989 Havel was member of the editorial board and regular contributor of the samizdat newspaper Lidové Noviny.

A new period in the development of Havel's dramatic art started in the 1980s. His plays reflected indentity problems and philosophical moral problems as in Temptation (1986), a modern reworking of Faust. In Largo desolatio (1985) the hero finds it difficult to deal with the burdens imposed on him by both his enemies and by his friends.

As an essayist Havel has carried on the tradition of democratic and liberal thought. Unlike other dissident writers, Havel had no illusions concerning the humane nature of communism or the possibility of democracy. At the same time, he denounced the egotism of the consumer civilization of Western society - a theme familiar from the writings of Mary McCarthy. Like the famous Russian Nobel writer and dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Havel underlined the moral revival of the individual in the change of the social order.

During the 1970s and 1980s Havel was repeatedly arrested, and he served several years in prison for his dissident activities (1977, 1978-79, 1979-83, 1989). In the 1980s Havel became the undisputed unofficial leader of the Czechoslovak human rights movement. In November 1989 he formed a new opposition group, Civic Forum. Following the fall of communism, Havel was elected by direct popular vote as president of Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, following Gustav Husák. He resigned in 1992 but was elected president of the new Czech Republic in February 1993.Havel has said that as soon as his homeland does not need him, "I will with great appetite devote myself to my original profession."

"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."
(from Havel's address at NATO summit on April 23, 1999)

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. - For further reading: Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 2); Philosophy and Politics in Václav Havel's Largo Desolato by A. Thomas (1995, in The Labyrinth of the World); Václav Havel by Eda Kriseová (1993); Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel by Martin J. Matusik (1993); The Power of the Powerless: Citizen against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. by 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 first wife died in 1996 and in 1997 he married Dagmar Veskrnova.

Autostop, (1961)