(With echoes of both King Lear and The Cherry Orchard, Vac...)
With echoes of both King Lear and The Cherry Orchard, Vaclav Havel's Leaving addresses the themes of change, dispossession and the transfer of power from one generation to the next.
(From the former president of the Czech Republic comes thi...)
From the former president of the Czech Republic comes this first-hand account of his years in office and the transition to democracy following the fall of Communism.
(Some of the pieces in Open Letters, such as "Dear Dr. Hus...)
Some of the pieces in Open Letters, such as "Dear Dr. Husak" and the essay "The Power of the Powerless," are by now almost legendary for their influence on a generation of Eastern European dissidents; others, such as some of Havel's prison correspondence and his private letter to Alexander Dubcek, appear in English for the first time. All of them bear the unmistakable imprint of Havel's intellectual rigor, moral conviction, and unassuming eloquence, while standing as important additions to the world's literature of conscience.
(In a book written while he was president of Czechoslovaki...)
In a book written while he was president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel combines the same powerful eloquence, moral passion, and abiding wisdom that informed his writing as a dissident and playwright, with a candor unprecedented from one with the broad perspective and infinite responsibility of governing a country.
(Designed as an introduction to emergency management, this...)
Designed as an introduction to emergency management, this book includes pieces on: social, political, and fiscal aspects of risk management; land-use planning and building code enforcement regulations; insurance issues; emergency management systems; and managing natural and manmade disasters.
(This classic farce done in thirty scenes with no chronolo...)
This classic farce done in thirty scenes with no chronological sequence concerns a doctor of philosophy who has a wife, a mistress, and a secretary whose beautiful legs make it difficult for him to concentrate when she is taking dictation.
(The Beggar's Opera is a free-wheeling, highly politicized...)
The Beggar's Opera is a free-wheeling, highly politicized adaptation of John Gay's well-known eighteenth-century work of the same name. The play, reminiscent of Havel's earlier Garden Party and The Memorandum, is up to his best satirical standard.
(In a converted European castle a weekend conference is ta...)
In a converted European castle a weekend conference is taking place. Gathered together is a group of architects, town planners and government officials, and the action of the play concerns itself with the professional, intellectual, ideological and sexual concerns of the participants.
Václav Havel was a Czech statesman, writer and former dissident, who served as the last President of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and then as the first President of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs.
Background
Václav Havel was born on October 5, 1936 in Prague, Czech Republic. His grandfather, Vácslav Havel, a real estate developer, built a famous entertainment complex on Prague's Wenceslas Square. His father, Václav Maria Havel, was the real estate developer behind the suburban Barrandov Terraces, located on the highest point of Prague - next door to which his uncle, Miloš Havel, built one of the largest film studios in Europe. Havel's mother, Božena Vavrečková, also came from an influential family, her father was a Czechoslovak ambassador and a well-known journalist.
Education
Havel's upper-middle-class family background severely limited his chances for formal education under the post-1948 Stalinist regime. However, his family's extensive private library enabled him to educate himself in the classics of world literature and philosophy, many of which were removed from public libraries during the pre-1956 heyday of Czechoslovak Stalinism. While working as a laboratory assistant he attended secondary school in the evenings. He completed his secondary education in 1954. For political reasons, he was not accepted into any post-secondary school with a humanities program, therefore, he opted for studies at the Faculty of Economics of the Czech Technical University in Prague but dropped out after two years.
Career
After finishing his military service (1957-1959), Havel found employment in Prague's theatre world as a stagehand at Prague's Theatre ABC – Divadlo ABC, and then at the Theatre On Balustrade - Divadlo Na zábradlí.
His first own full-length play performed in public, besides various vaudeville collaborations, was The Garden Party (1963). Presented in a series of Theatre of the Absurd, at the Theatre on Balustrade, this play won him international acclaim. The play was soon followed by The Memorandum and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, all at the Theatre on Balustrade. In 1968, The Memorandum was also brought to The Public Theater in New York, which helped to establish Havel's reputation in the United States.
After 1968, Havel's plays were banned from the theatre world in his own country, and he was unable to leave Czechoslovakia to see any foreign performances of his works. During the first week of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Havel assisted the resistance by providing an on-air narrative via Radio Free Czechoslovakia station (at Liberec). Following the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, he was banned from the theatre and became more politically active. He took a job at Krakonoš brewery in Trutnov. Havel co-founded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted in 1979. His political activities resulted in multiple stays in prison, and constant government surveillance and questioning by the secret police.
On 29 December 1989, while he was leader of the Civic Forum, Havel became President of Czechoslovakia by a unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly. He had long insisted that he was not interested in politics and had argued that political change in the country should be induced through autonomous civic initiatives rather than through the official institutions. In 1990, soon after his election, Havel was awarded the Prize For Freedom of the Liberal International.
In 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first free elections in 44 years, resulting in a sweeping victory for Civic Forum and its Slovak counterpart, Public Against Violence.
Despite increasing political tensions between the Czechs and the Slovaks in 1992, Havel supported the retention of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic prior to the dissolution of the country. Havel sought re-election in 1992. Although no other candidate filed, when the vote came on 3 July, he failed to get a majority due to a lack of support from Slovak deputies. The largest Czech political party, the Civic Democratic Party, let it be known that it would not support any other candidate. After the Slovaks issued their Declaration of Independence, he resigned as President on 20 July, saying that he would not preside over the country's breakup.
When the Czech Republic was created as one of two successor states, he stood for election as its first president on 26 January 1993, and won. He did not have nearly the power that he had as president of Czechoslovakia. Although he was nominally the new country's chief executive, the framers of the Constitution of the Czech Republic intended to vest most of the real power in the prime minister.
Havel's popularity abroad surpassed his popularity at home, and he was often the object of controversy and criticism. During his time in office, Havel stated that the expulsion of the indigenous Sudeten German population after World War II was immoral, causing a great controversy at home. He also extended general amnesty as one of his first acts as President, in an attempt to lessen the pressure in overcrowded prisons as well as to release political prisoners and persons who may have been falsely imprisoned during the Communist era. Havel felt that many of the decisions by the previous regime's courts should not be trusted, and that most of those in prison had not received fair trials. However, critics claimed that this amnesty led to a significant increase in the crime rate: the total number of crimes doubled, as did the number of murders. Several of the worst crimes in the history of the Czech criminology were committed by criminals released in this amnesty. Within four years of the Velvet revolution (and following another two amnesties declared by Havel), criminality had more than tripled since 1989.
Havel was re-elected president in 1998. He had to undergo a colostomy in Innsbruck when his colon ruptured while he was on holiday in Austria. Havel left office after his second term as Czech president ended on 2 February 2003.
Beginning in 1997, Havel hosted Forum 2000, an annual conference to "identify the key issues facing civilisation and to explore ways to prevent the escalation of conflicts that have religion, culture or ethnicity as their primary components". In 2005, he occupied the Kluge Chair for Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center of the United States Library of Congress, where he continued his research on human rights. In November and December 2006, Havel spent eight weeks as a visiting artist in residence at Columbia University.
On 4 August 2007, Havel met with members of the Belarus Free Theatre at his summer cottage in the Czech Republic in a show of his continuing support, which has been instrumental in the theatre's attaining international recognition and membership in the European Theatrical Convention.
In 2008, Havel became a Member of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation. He met U.S. President Barack Obama in private before Obama's departure after the end of the European Union (EU) and United States (US) summit in Prague in April 2009. Havel was the chair of the Human Rights Foundation's International Council and a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Havel died on the morning of 18 December 2011, at age 75, at his country home in Hrádeček.
Civic Democratic Alliance supporter (1990-1998), Civic Forum (1989-1991).
Views
Quotations:
"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility."
"Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it".
"Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning."
"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
"I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence."
"Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not."
"You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it."
"Man is not an omnipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility."
Personality
His motto was "Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred." He used it as a sort of compass to guide his entire existence.
Connections
On July 9, 1964, Havel married Olga Šplíchalová. In January 1996, Olga Havlová, his wife of 32 years, died of cancer at 62. In December 1996, Havel who had been a chain smoker for a long time, was diagnosed with lung cancer. The disease reappeared two years later. He quit smoking. In 1997, he remarried, to actress Dagmar Veškrnová.