Václav Havel

President of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and Czech Republic (1993–2003)

• Born: October 5, 1936
• Birthplace: Prague, Czechoslovakia
• Died: December 18, 2011
• Place of death: Hradecek, Czech Republic

Playwright, essayist, and political dissident under the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Havel became the last president of Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the first president of the Czech Republic in 1993. He led his new nation from social collectivism into a free-market economy.

Early Life

Václav Havel was born into a well-off middle-class family in Prague shortly before the 1939 German occupation of Czechoslovakia and was heir to family traditions of republicanism and social responsibility of the cultural elite. He grew up in a country partitioned by Germany and, after World War II, was raised in a Communist regime that penalized Havel and his family for their social position and heritage.

Removed from his private school and then not allowed to continue his education beyond the age of sixteen, Havel nonetheless remained intellectually active, leading a literary circle called the Thirty-Sixers for the year of its members’ birth. The group discussed forbidden books and produced their own samizdat (self-published) newsletter, an exercise that Havel would later use in his years as a suppressed playwright and essayist, smuggling his works out of Czechoslovakia for publication.

Havel was a laboratory apprentice in a training program in the 1950s, which possibly informed the background of his later play Temptation (1986). He also completed his secondary education in night classes and enrolled in the economics program at the Czech Technical University because, given his politics and former social standing, he was not permitted to enroll in a humanities program.

Upon completion of military service in 1959, Havel studied drama through a correspondence program with the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He also gained practical knowledge of the theater by working as a stagehand at the Theatre on the Balustrade, an experimental, avant-garde venue. He spent some time as literary manager for the theater and became resident playwright in 1968. His early plays produced at the Balustrade include The Garden Party (1963), The Memorandum (1965), and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968), all heavily influenced by the theater of the absurd.

Life’s Work

Havel’s early theatrical work and his lifelong interest in political philosophy combined to suit his new role as chair of the Czechoslovak Writers Union in 1968. This was also the year of the Prague Spring, a relaxation of hardline communism under the leadership of Alexander Dubček, who sought to liberalize the country and allow freedom of the press. This liberalization was short lived, however; Soviet-led armies of the Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia on August 20–21, 1968, arrested Dubček and his ministers and sent them to Moscow, and began a repressive occupation of Czechoslovakia. As he had found his voice as a dramatist in the theater of protest, so Havel found his voice in protest of the new regime, condemning the occupation and denouncing the new regime of Gustáv Husák. Havel’s protests resulted in his banishment from the theater, the proscription of productions of his works, and his reassignment to work in a brewery.

With characteristic resiliency, Havel continued to write and produce dramatic works clandestinely, self-publishing essays, tapes, and plays to be smuggled out of Czechoslovakia to the West, where they were then published and received with continued acclaim. This activity and his continued protest against human-rights violations by the Communist regime, notably in an open letter to Husák that circulated through the literary underground, did much to shape Havel’s reputation as a dissident both within and outside his country. Havel’s samizdat activity is the subject of Professional Foul, a television script by Czech-born British playwright Tom Stoppard, dedicated to Havel and first broadcast in 1977 to mark Amnesty International’s Prisoner of Conscience Year.

The formation of Charta 77 (Charter 77), a loose association of hundreds of Czech artists and intellectuals of both Marxist and anti-Marxist leanings, in 1977 led to Havel’s arrest, trial for subversion, and suspended sentence. Havel was targeted by the government because he was one of the group’s elected spokespersons. The namesake of the association, a manifesto called Charter 77 that was composed in January of the same year, condemned the Husák regime for violating the human-rights tenets of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. In 1978, Havel again was arrested and tried, but this time he was sentenced to four and a half years of hard labor in prison for his role in the formation of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted earlier that year.

While Havel was imprisoned, the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett dedicated the play Catastrophe (1982) to him. Havel chronicled some of his prison experiences in Letters to Olga; the letters were addressed to his wife, Olga Splichalová, and were published in 1988 after his release. He also continued writing essays, including the extended essay The Power of the Powerless (1985), which was critical of the totalitarian regime. After another term in prison for encouraging and joining in a period of antigovernment protests in early 1989, Havel joined a new political movement that, like Charter 77, united several divergent groups into an organization known as the Civic Forum. Headquartered at the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague, the Civic Forum elected Havel as its spokesperson on the very eve of what would become the Velvet Revolution.

The Velvet Revolution was a nonviolent movement that negotiated an end to Communist control of Czechoslovakia. It turned Havel the dissident into Havel the president of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, a position to which he was elected on December 29, 1989. The following June, in the country's first free elections since just after World War II, Havel was again elected president. Following the country’s breakup into the Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic in January 1993, Havel was elected as the Czech Republic’s first president, a position he held for two five-year terms.

Under Havel’s presidency the Czech Republic moved from a totalitarian state with a socialist economy to a democracy with a Western free-market economy. With the support of US president Bill Clinton, the Czech Republic joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1999 and, under Havel’s guidance and preparation, the European Union (EU) in 2004. Havel’s term as president had ended in 2003.

Havel has received more than twenty-four international awards, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom (2003), the Honorary Companion of the Order of Canada (2004), and the first Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award (2003). Maintaining his passion for protesting violations of human rights, he founded the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba in 2003.

In 2005, Havel and South African bishop Desmond Tutu called upon the United Nations Security Council to act against the military regime in Burma (Myanmar). The following year, just in time for a state visit to Prague by Russian president Vladimir Putin, Havel called for an end to Russian depredations in Chechnya and elsewhere. In 2007, he published To the Castle and Back, a continuation of his earlier autobiographical work Disturbing the Peace (1990).

Havel died at age seventy-five on December 18, 2011, at his home in the Czech village of Hrádecek.

Significance

Havel remains an honored playwright whose work is often performed and studied in literature and theater classes throughout the world. He has also maintained the respect of his fellow theatrical craftsmen and is featured in Stoppard’s play Rock ’n’ Roll (2006), a play set in Cambridge, England, and in Prague.

Remarkably in the history of twentieth-century political dissidence and protest, Havel’s essays, letters, interviews, and speeches proclaim his unwavering dictum of living in the truth. These documents provide a wellspring of philosophical thought, reflecting a courage and optimism that the totalitarian regime could not crush. Notable for his clarity of political thought, he guided the Czech Republic onto the international stage and set an irrevocable course of personal freedom for its citizens. A voice of moral courage who celebrates the power of the powerless, Havel was one of the world’s foremost advocates and commanding voices for the politically and socially oppressed.

Personal Life

In 1964, while working at the Theatre on the Balustrade, Havel met and married Olga Splichalová. She died of cancer in 1996, the same year that Havel had surgery to remove two tumors and half of his lung in an attempt to eradicate his lung cancer. Czech actor Dagmar Havlová-Veskrnová nursed him to health, and they married in 1997.

Bibliography

Bilefsky, Dan, and Jane Perlez. "Vaclav Havel, Former Czech President, Dies at 75." New York Times. New York Times, 18 Dec. 2011. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

Bridges, Peter. “Playwrights, Presidents, and Prague.” Virginia Quarterly Review 79.1 (2003): 97–107. Print.

Havel, Václav. The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Knopf, 1997. Print.

Havel, Václav. Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvízdala. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Knopf, 1990. Print.

Havel, Václav. To the Castle and Back: Reflections on My Strange Life as a Fairy-Tale Hero. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Knopf, 2007. Print.

Keane, John. Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts. New York: Basic, 2000. Print.

Rocamora, Carol. Acts of Courage: Václav Havel’s Life in the Theater. Hanover: Smith, 2005. Print.

Shepherd, Robin E. H. Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution and Beyond. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Print.

Zantovsky, Michael. Havel: A Life. New York: Grove, 2014. Print.