Václav Havel
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| Václav Havel | |
| Image:Vaclav Havel IMF.jpg
| |
| | |
|---|---|
| In office 2 February, 1993 – 2 February, 2003 | |
| Succeeded by | Václav Klaus |
| | |
| In office 29 December, 1989 – 20 July, 1992 | |
| Preceded by | Gustáv Husák |
Chairman of Civic Forum
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| In office 19 November 1989 – 29 December 1989 | |
| Succeeded by | Jan Urban |
| Born | October 5 1936 Prague, Czechoslovakia |
| Nationality | Template:Country data uk czech |
| Political party | Civic Forum |
| Spouse | Olga Šplíchalová, Dagmar Veškrnová |
| Profession | Politician, Writer |
Václav Havel, GCB, CC, (pronounced [ˈvaːtslaf ˈɦavel]) (born October 5, 1936) is a Czech writer and dramatist. He was the ninth and last President of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993-2003).
Contents |
[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Václav Havel was born in Prague. He grew up in a well-known entrepreneurial and intellectual family, which was closely linked to the cultural and political events in Czechoslovakia from the 1920s to the 1940s. Because of these links the Czech communist government did not allow Havel to study formally after he had completed his required schooling in 1951. In the first part of the 1950s, the young Havel entered into a four-year apprenticeship as a chemical laboratory assistant and simultaneously took evening classes to complete his secondary education (which he did in 1954). For political reasons he was not accepted into any post-secondary school with a humanities program; therefore, he opted to study at the Faculty of Economics of Czech Technical University. He left this program after two years.[citation needed]
[edit] Theatre
The intellectual tradition of his family compelled Václav Havel to pursue the humanitarian values of Czech culture.Date=December 2007 After military service (1957–59) he worked as a stagehand in Prague (at the Theatre On the Balustrade - Divadlo Na zábradlí) and studied drama by correspondence at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU). His first publicly performed full-length play, besides various vaudeville collaborations, was The Garden Party (1963). Presented in a season of Theatre of the Absurd, at the Balustrade, it won him international acclaim. It was soon followed by Memorandum, one of his best known plays. In 1964, Havel married Olga Šplíchalová, to the despair of his mother.[1]
[edit] Entry into political life
Following the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 he was banned from the theatre and became more politically active. This culminated with the publication of the Charter 77 manifesto, written partially in response to the imprisonment of members of the Czech psychedelic band Plastic People of the Universe.[2] His political activities resulted in multiple stays in prison, the longest being four years, and also subjected him to constant government surveillance and harassment.
After his long prison stay he wrote Largo Desolato, a play about a political writer who fears being sent back to prison. He was also famous for his essays, most particularly for his brilliant articulation of "Post-Totalitarianism" (see Power of the Powerless), a term used to describe the modern social and political order that enabled people to "live within a lie."
A passionate supporter of non-violent resistance, a role in which he has been compared, by ex-US President Bill Clinton, to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, he became a leading figure in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the bloodless end to communism in Czechoslovakia. His later opposition to the idea of removing ex-Communists from political life and privileged economic positions raises serious questions about his role in the fall of the Soviet Block. He was even awarded with prestigious The International Gandhi Peace Prize, named after Mahatma Gandhi by the government of India in the year 2003 for his outstanding contribution towards world peace and upholding human rights in most difficult situations through Gandhian means.
[edit] Presidency
On December 29, 1989, as leader of the Civic Forum, he became president by a unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly—an ironic turn of fate for a man who had long insisted that he was uninterested in politics. In this he joined many dissidents of the period, who argued that political change should happen through civic initiatives autonomous from the state, rather than through the state itself. In another move away from the ideals he put forth as a dissident, Havel presided over the privatization of the Czechoslovak economy even though he, like much of the Civic Forum, had previously spoken in support of what is sometimes called a "third way" toward neither Soviet-style socialism nor Western-style capitalism. Western powers approved of this new state of affairs and put pressure on the government to make further changes in the direction of a market capitalist system. In 1990, he was awarded[3] the Prize For Freedom of the Liberal International.
After the free elections of 1990 he retained the presidency. Despite increasing tensions, Havel appeared to have supported the retention of the federation of the Czechs and the Slovaks during the breakup of Czechoslovakia. On July 3 1992 the federal parliament did not elect Havel—the only candidate for presidency—due to a lack of support from Slovak MPs. After the Slovaks issued their Declaration of Independence, he resigned as president on July 20. When the Czech Republic was created, he stood for election as president there on January 26, 1993, and won.
Although Havel has been quite popular throughout his career, his popularity abroad surpassed his popularity at home, and he has been no stranger to controversy and criticism. An extensive general pardon, one of his first acts as a president, was an attempt to both lessen the pressure in overcrowded prisons and release those who may have been falsely imprisoned during the Communist era. It was also based on his feeling that a corrupt court's decisions cannot be trusted, and that most in prison had not been fairly tried.[4] Critics claimed that this amnesty raised the crime rate. However, according to Havel in his most recent memoir To the Castle and Back, the statistics do not support that allegation, especially as most released would have been released within a year.
In an interview with Karel Hvížďala (also included in To the Castle and Back), Havel states that he feels his most important accomplishment as president was the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. This proved quite complicated, as the infrastructure created by the pact was so ingrained in the workings of the countries involved and indeed in their general consciousness. It took two years before the Soviet troops finally fully withdrew from Czechoslovakia.
Following a legal dispute with his sister-in-law, Havel decided to sell his 50% stake in the Lucerna Palace on Wenceslas Square, a legendary dance hall built by his grandfather Václav M. Havel. In a transaction mastered by Marián Čalfa, Havel sold the estate to Václav Junek, a former communist spy in France and leader of soon-to-be-bankrupt conglomerate Chemapol Group, who later openly admitted he bribed politicians of Czech Social Democratic Party.[5]
In December 1996 the chain-smoking Havel was diagnosed as having lung cancer.[6] The disease reappeared two years later. In 1997, less than a year after the death of his wife Olga, who was beloved by the Czech people,[7] Havel married actress Dagmar Veškrnová. That year he was the recipient of the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.
The former political prisoner was instrumental in enabling the transition of NATO from being an anti-Warsaw Pact alliance to its present inclusion of former-Warsaw Pact members, like the Czech Republic. In the interests of his country, he advocated vigorously for the expansion of the military alliance into Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic.[8]
Havel was re-elected president in 1998 and underwent a colostomy when on holiday in Innsbruck. Havel left office after his second term as Czech president ended on February 2, 2003; Václav Klaus, one of his greatest political opponents, was elected his successor on February 28, 2003. Margaret Thatcher writes of the two men in her foreign policy treatise, Statecraft, reserving greater respect for Havel, whose dedication to democracy and defying the Communists earned her admiration.
As former Czech president, Havel is a member of the Club of Madrid.[9]
[edit] Post-presidential career
In 2003, Havel was the inaugural recipient of Amnesty International's Ambassador of Conscience Award for his work in promoting human rights. In 2002, he was the third recipient of the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award presented by the Prague Society for International Cooperation.
In November and December 2006, Havel spent eight weeks as a visiting artist-in-residence at Columbia University. The stay was sponsored by the university's Arts Initiative, and featured "lectures, interviews, conversations, classes, performances, and panels center[ing] on his life and ideas", including a public "conversation" with former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Concurrently, the Untitled Theater Company #61 launched a Havel Festival, the first complete festival of his plays in various venues throughout New York City, in celebration of his 70th birthday.[10]
In May 2007, Havel's memoir of his experiences as President, To the Castle and Back, was released. The book mixes an interview in the style of Disturbing the Peace with actual memos he sent to his staff with modern diary entries and recollections.
On August 4, 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 its attaining international recognition and its membership in the European Theatrical Convention.[11][12]
Havel's first new play "in over 18 years," Leaving (Odchazeni), was scheduled in November 2007 to have its world premiere in June 2008 at the Prague theater Na Vinohradech (at Vinohrady),[13] but the theater has withdrawn it, according to an article posted on the website of Radio Prague on December 14, 2007.[14] Havel based the play on King Lear, by William Shakespeare, and on The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov; "Chancellor Vilém Rieger is the central character of Leaving, who faces a crisis after being removed from political power."[13]
[edit] Works
[edit] Plays
- An Evening with the Family (1960)
- The Garden Party (1963)
- The Memorandum (1965)
- The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968)
- Butterfly on the Antennna (1968)
- Guardian Angel (1968)
- Conspirators (1971)
- The Beggar's Opera (1975)
- Unveiling (1975)
- Mountain Hotel (1976)
- Audience (1978)
- Private View (1978)
- Protest (1978)
- Mistake (1983)
- Largo desolato (1985)
- Temptation (1986)
- Redevelopment (1987)
- Tomorrow (1988)
- Leaving (2007)
[edit] Non-fiction books
- The Power of the Powerless (1985) [Includes 1978 titular essay.]
- Living in Truth (1986)
- Letters to Olga (1988)
- Disturbing the Peace (1991)
- Open Letters (1991)
- Summer Meditations (1992/93)
- Towards a Civil Society (1994)
- The Art of the Impossible (1998)
- To the Castle and Back (2007)
[edit] Cultural allusions and interests
- Havel was a major supporter of the Plastic People of the Universe, becoming a close friend of its members, such as its manager Ivan Martin Jirous and guitarist/vocalist Paul Wilson (who later became Havel's English translator and biographer) and a great fan of the rock band The Velvet Underground, sharing mutual respect with the principal singer-songwriter Lou Reed, and is also a lifelong Frank Zappa fan.[15][16]
- Havel is also a great supporter and fan of jazz and frequented such Prague clubs as Radost FX and the Reduta Jazz Club, where President Bill Clinton played the saxophone when Havel brought him there.[15].</ref>
- The period involving Havel's role in the Velvet Revolution and his ascendancy to the presidency is dramatized in part in the play Rock 'n' Roll, by Czech-born English playwright Tom Stoppard.
[edit] Notes
- ^ David Remnick, "Exit Havel", The New Yorker 10 February, 2003, accessed 29 April, 2007.
- ^ Richie Unterberger, "The Plastic People of the Universe", richieunterberger.com 26 February, 2007, accessed 29 April, 2007.
- ^ Vaclav Havel (1990)
- ^ Havel's New Year's address
- ^ Paul Berman, "The Poet of Democracy and His Burdens", New York Times Magazine 11 May, 1997 (original inc. cover photo), as rpt. in English translation at Newyorske listy (New York Herald), accessed 29 April, 2007.
- ^ "Vaclav Havel: from 'bourgeois reactionary' to president", author not mentioned, Radio Prague (the international service of Czech radio)
- ^ "Vaclav Havel: End of an era" by Richard Allen Greene, BBC News online, 9 October 2003
- ^ Václav Havel, "NATO: The Safeguard of Stability and Peace In the Euro-Atlantic Region", in European Security: Beginning a New Century, eds. General George A. Joulwan & Roger Weissinger-Baylon, papers from the XIIIth NATO Workshop: On Political-Military Decision Making, Warsaw, Poland, 19-23 June 1996.
- ^ According to the (English) version of its official website, The Club of Madrid, is an independent organization dedicated to strengthening democracy around the world by drawing on the unique experience and resources of its Members, which include 66 former heads of state and federal democratic governments.
- ^ Havel at Columbia; "Celebrating the Life and Art of Václav Havel: New York City, October through December 2006".
- ^ "Belarus Free Theatre Meet Vaclav Havel", press release, Belarus Free Theatre, August 13, 2007, accessed August 31, 2007.
- ^ Michael Batiukov, "Belarus 'Free Theatre' is Under Attack by Militia in Minsk, Belarus", American Chronicle, August 22, 2007, accessed August 31, 2007.
- ^ a b Adam Hetrick, "Václav Havel's Leaving May Arrive in American Theatres", Playbill, November 19, 2007, accessed December 21, 2007."
- ^ Daniela Lazarová, "Will It Be Third Time Lucky for Václav Havel's 'Leaving'?", Radio Prague, December 14, 2007, accessed December 21, 2007:
"Leaving" tells the story of a high-ranking politician leaving his post, moving out of his state villa and coming to terms with his new life. The play addresses themes of change, dispossession and the passing of power from one generation to the next. Mr. Havel, who has refuted suggestions that it is autobiographical, first offered it to the National Theatre – Prague’s most prestigious theatre. However the talks broke down over Mr. Havel’s insistence that his actress wife Dagmar should play the lead female role which he said had been written with her in mind. The challenge of producing "Leaving" was then taken up by Prague’s Na Vinohradech theatre, an institution with a history and cast second only to the National Theatre in Prague. But there too things did not go well. On Thursday [December 14, 2007] the theatre backed out of the talks, saying that its limited finances would not allow it to fulfil the technical and budgetary demands of the play's director. Almost immediately the avant-garde oriented Archa Theatre volunteered to host the play and talks started anew. Mr. Havel said that he was hopeful things would go well.
- ^ a b Biographies and bibliographies, "Havel at Columbia: Bibliography: Human Rights Archive", accessed April 29, 2007.
- ^ Sam Beckwith, "Václav Havel & Lou Reed", Prague.tv 24 January, 2005, updated 27 January, 2005, accessed 26 April, 2007.
[edit] References
[edit] Primary sources
- Works by Václav Havel
- Commentaries and Op-eds by Václav Havel (index). Rpt. by Project Syndicate. Accessed December 21, 2007.
- "Excerpts from The Power of the Powerless (1978)", by Václav Havel. ["Excerpts from the Original Electronic Text provided by Bob Moeller, of the University of California, Irvine."]
- "The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World" (Speech). worldtrans.org n.d. Accessed December 21, 2007.
- "Václav Havel: 'We are at the beginning of momentous changes' ". czech.cz (Official website of the Czech Republic), September 10, 2007. Accessed December 21, 2007. [On personal responsibility, freedom and ecological problems].
- Media interviews with Václav Havel
- Warner, Margaret. Online Focus: Newsmaker: Václav Havel". The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. PBS, broadcast May 16, 1997. Accessed December 21, 2007. (NewsHour transcript.)
[edit] Secondary sources
- Bibliography
- "Havel at Columbia: Bibliography: Human Rights Archive. (Featured in relation to Havel's residency.] (See below.)
- Books (Biographies)
- Keane, John. Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts. New York: Basic Books, 2000. ISBN 0465037194. (A sample chapter [in HTML and PDF formats] is linked on the author's website, "Books".)
- Kriseová, Eda. Vaclav Havel. Trans. Caleb Crain. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. ISBN 0312103174.
- Pontuso, James F. Vaclav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Postmodern Age. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. ISBN 0-7425-2256-3.
- Rocamora, Carol. Acts of Courage. New York: Smith & Kraus, 2004. ISBN 1575253445.
- Articles
- Capps, Walter H. "Interpreting Václav Havel". Cross Currents (Association for Religion & Intellectual Life) 47.3 (Fall 1997). Accessed December 21, 2007.
- Dempsey, Judy. "Havel, His Memories and the World", International Herald Tribune 22 October 2004. Accessed December 21, 2007.
- Tucker, Scott. "Capitalism with a Human Face?". The Humanist (American Humanist Association), May 1, 1994, "Our Queer World". Rpt. in High Beam Encyclopedia (an online encyclopedia). Accessed December 21, 2007. ["Vaclav Havel's philosophy and musings."]
- Stanger, Richard L. "Václav Havel: Heir to a Spiritual Legacy". The Christian Century (Christian Century Foundation), April 11, 1990: 368–370. Rpt. in religion-online.org ("with permission"; "prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock"). ["Richard L. Stanger is senior minister at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn, New York."]
- Welch, Matt. "Velvet President", Reason (May 2003). Rpt. in Reason Online. Accessed December 21, 2007.
- Žižek, Slavoj. "Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism". Book review of Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts, by John Keane. The London Review of Books, October 28, 1999. Accessed December 21, 2007.
- Theater festivals
- "Celebrating the Life and Art of Václav Havel" Biography and "timeline" – The Havel Festival: Václav Havel, Untitled Theater Company (untitledtheater.com), in conjunction with the residency of Havel at Columbia.
- Honors, awards and tributes
- "Honours: Order of Canada: Václav Havel" (Citation). gg.ca. Accessed December 21, 2007. (Search facility.)
- Shipsey, Bill. "Václav Havel: Ambassador of Conscience 2003: From Prisoner to President – A Tribute". Amnesty International (October 2003). Accessed December 21, 2007.
- United States "Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Vaclav Havel". The Official Site of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2004). Accessed December 21, 2007.
[edit] External links
- Biography of Václav Havel hosted by Radio Prague.
- Forum 2000 Foundation – Website of conference founded and hosted by Havel annually in Prague since 1997.
- Havel at Columbia: Václav Havel: The Artist, The Citizen, The Residency – Multi-media website developed for Havel's seven-week residency at Columbia University, in Fall 2006; features biographies; timelines; interviews; profiles; and bibliographies (See "References" above).
- "A Revolutionary President" – Feature article posted on Prague tourism website, prague-life.com. ("Prague Czech Republic Travel Guide | All rights reserved © Lifeboat Limited [2005–2007]. UK Registered Company No. 5351515.")
- Václav Havel – Official website (English version)
- Václav Havel "Famous Czechs of the Past Century: Václav Havel" – English version of article featured on the official website of the Czech Republic.
- (Václav) Havel Festival: Celebrating the life and art of Václav Havel, New York City, October through December 2006 - Official website of this festival of all of Havel's works; includes descriptions of all of Havel's plays.
| Presidents of Czechoslovakia | |
|---|---|
| First Republic | Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1918-1935) • Edvard Beneš (1935-1938) |
| Second Republic | Emil Hácha (1938-1939) |
| Government in exile | Edvard Beneš (1940-1945) |
| Transition to Communism | Edvard Beneš (1945-1948) |
| Communist | Edvard Beneš (1948) • Klement Gottwald (1948-1953) • Antonín Zápotocký (1953-1957) • Antonín Novotný (1957-1968) • Ludvík Svoboda (1968-1975) • Gustáv Husák (1975-1989) |
| after the Velvet Revolution | Václav Havel (1989-1992) |
Presidents of the Czech Republic | |
|---|---|
| Václav Havel | Václav Klaus | |
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Havel, Václav |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | President of the Czech Republic |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 5, 1936 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Prague, Czechoslovakia |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
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