Václav Havel

Václav Havel was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally. Havel has received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the freedom medal of the Four Freedoms Award, and the Ambassador of Conscience Award and several other distinctions. He was also voted 4th in Prospect magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals. He is a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.

Beginning in the 1960s, his work turned to focus on the politics of Czechoslovakia. After the Prague Spring, he became increasingly active. In 1977, his involvement with the human rights manifesto Charter 77 brought him international fame as the leader of the opposition in Czechoslovakia; it also led to his imprisonment. The 1989 "Velvet Revolution" launched Havel into the presidency. In this role he led Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic to multi-party democracy. His thirteen years in office saw radical change in his nation, including its split with Slovakia, which Havel opposed, its accession into NATO and start of the negotiations for membership in the European Union, which was attained in 2004.

Václav Havel was born in Prague, on 5 October 1936. He grew up in a well-known and wealthy entrepreneurial and intellectual family, which was closely linked to the cultural and political events in Czechoslovakia from the 1920s to the 1940s. His father, Vaclav Maria Havel, was the owner of the suburb Barrandov which was located on the highest point of Prague and of Barrandov film studios. Havel's mother, Bozena Vavreckova, came from a well known family; her father was an ambassador and well-known journalist. Because of Havel's bourgeois history, the Communist regime 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; 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 to study at the Faculty of Economics of Czech Technical University in Prague but dropped out after two years.In 1964, Havel married proletarian Olga Šplíchalová, much to the displeasure of his mother.

Early theater career

The intellectual tradition of his family compelled Václav Havel to pursue the humanitarian values of Czech culture. After military service (1957–59), he worked as a stagehand in Prague (at the Theater On the Balustrade – Divadlo Na zábradlí) and studied drama by correspondence at the Theater 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 Theater of the Absurd, at the Balustrade, it won him international acclaim. It was soon followed by The Memorandum, one of his best known plays, and the The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, all at the Balustrade. In 1968,The Memorandum was also brought to The Public Theater in New York, which helped establish his reputation in the United States. The Public continued to produce his plays over the next years, although after 1968 his plays were banned in his own country, Havel was unable to leave Czechoslovakia to see any foreign performances.

Dissident

During the first week of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Havel provided a commentary on the events on Radio Free Czechoslovakia in Liberec. Following the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 he was banned from the theatre and became more politically active. He was forced to take a job in a brewery, an experience he wrote about in his play Audience. This play, along with two other "Vaněk" plays (so-called because of the recurring character Ferdinand Vaněk, a stand in for Havel), became distributed in samizdat form across Czechoslovakia, and greatly added to Havel's reputation of being a leading revolutionary (several other Czech writers later wrote their own plays featuring Vaněk). This reputation was cemented with the publication of the Charter 77 manifesto, written partially in response to the imprisonment of members of the Czech psychedelic band The Plastic People of the Universe. He also co-founded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted in 1979. His political activities resulted in multiple stays in prison, the longest being four years, and also subjected him to constant government surveillance and questioning. His longest stay in prison, from June 1979 to January 1984, is documented in Letters to Olga, his late wife.

He was also famous for his essays, most particularly for his articulation of “Post-Totalitarianism” (Power of the Powerless), a term used to describe the modern social and political order that enabled people to "live within a lie." In this essay Havel also takes issue with the concept of the 'dissident' as such, arguing that it is mainly a prescription attached to certain practices that are not by their authors categorized as dissident behaviour: one becomes a dissident mainly through interpretation of others. A passionate supporter of non-violent resistance, a role in which he has been compared, by former US President Bill Clinton, to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., he became a leading figure in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the bloodless end to communism in Czechoslovakia.

His motto was "Truth and love must prevail over lies and hate."

President! 

On 29 December 1989, while leader of the Civic Forum, he became president by a unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly. This was an ironic turn of fate for a man who had long insisted that he was uninterested in politics. He joined many dissidents of the period arguing that political change should happen through civic initiatives autonomous from the state, rather than through the state itself. He was awarded the Prize For Freedom of the Liberal Internationalin 1990.

 After the free elections of 1990 he retained the presidency. As one of the first things in office, he issued a wide-ranging amnesty releasing many prisoners. Despite increasing tensions, Havel supported the retention of the federation of the Czechs and the Slovaks during the breakup of Czechoslovakia. On 3 July 1992 the federal parliament did not elect Havel – the only candidate – due to a lack of support from Slovak MPs. The largest party, the Civic Democratic Party, let it be known it would not support any other candidate. After the Slovaks issued their Declaration of Independence, he resigned as president on 20 July, saying he would not preside over the country's breakup.

However, when the Czech Republic was created, he stood for election as president on 26 January 1993, and won. Unlike in Czechoslovakia, he was not the Czech Republic's chief executive. However, owing to his prestige, he still commanded a good deal of moral authority.

Although Havel has been quite popular throughout his career, his popularity abroad surpassed his popularity at home, and he was 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. He had felt that decisions of a corrupt court of the previous regime could not be trusted, and that most in prison had not been fairly tried. Critics claimed that this amnesty raised the crime rate. According to Havel's memoir To the Castle and Back, most of those released had less than a year of their sentence to run. Statistics have not lent clear support to either claim.

In an interview with Karel Hvížďala (also included in To the Castle and Back), Havel stated that he felt 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 Havel. In a transaction arranged 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.

In December 1996 the chain smoking Havel was diagnosed as having lung cancer. The disease reappeared two years later. He later quit smoking. In 1996, Olga, beloved by the Czech people and his wife of 32 years died of cancer. Less than a year later Havel remarried, to actress Dagmar Veškrnová.

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. Havel advocated vigorously for the expansion of the military alliance into Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic.[

Havelwas re-elected president in 1998. He had to undergo a colostomy in Innsbruck when his colon ruptured while on holiday in Austria. Havel left office after his second term as Czech president ended on 2 February 2003; Václav Klaus, one of his greatest political opponents, was elected his successor on 28 February 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.

Post-presidential time

Since 1997, Havel has hosted a conference entitled Forum 2000. In 2005, the former President 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 in human rights.[In November and December 2006, Havel spent eight weeks as a visiting artist in residence at Columbia University. The stay was sponsored by the Columbia Arts Initiative and featured "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 No. 61 launched a Havel Festival, the first complete festival of his plays in various venues throughout New York City, including The Brick Theater and the Ohio Theatre, in celebration of his 70th birthday. Havel's memoir of his experience as President, To the Castle and Back, was published in May 2007. The book mixes an interview in the style of Disturbing the Peace with actual memoranda he sent to his staff with modern diary entries and recollections.

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.

Havel's first new play in over 18 years, Leaving (Odcházení), was published in November 2007, and was to have had its world premiere in June 2008 at the Prague theater Divadlo na Vinohradech, but the theater withdrew it in December as it felt it could not provide the technical support needed to mount the play. The play instead premiered on 22 May 2008 at the Archa Theatre to standing ovations. 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." The play had its English language premiere at the Orange Tree Theatre in London and its American premiere at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. Havel subsequently directed a film version of the play, which premiered in the Czech Republic on 22 March 2011.

Other new works include the short sketch Pět Tet, a modern sequel to Unveiling, and The Pig, or Václav Havel's Hunt for a Pig, which was premiered in Brno at Theatre Goose on a String and had its English language premiere in June 2011 at the 3LD Art & Technology Center in New York, in a production from Untitled Theater Company #61.[

In 2008 Havel became Member of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation, an NGO designed to monitor tolerance in Europe and to prepare practical recommendations on fighting anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia on the continent.

Havel met with U.S. President Barack Obama at the European Union (EU) and United States (US) summit in Prague on 5 April 2009. He had written Obama a letter inviting the president to come to Prague.

Havelis the chair of the International Council of the Human Rights Foundation, and a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Awards

On 4 July 1994, Václav Havel was awarded the PhiladelphiaLiberty Medal. In his acceptance speech, he said: "The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world order. Yet I think it must be anchored in a different place, and in a different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world." In 1997, he was the recipient of the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.

In 2002, he was the third recipient of the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award presented by the Prague Society for International Cooperation. In 2003, he was awarded the International Gandhi Peace Prize, named after Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi by the government of India for his outstanding contribution towards world peace and upholding human rights in most difficult situations through Gandhian means. In 2003, Havel was the inaugural recipient of Amnesty International's Ambassador of Conscience Award for his work in promoting human rights. In 2003, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In January 2008, the Europe-based A Different View cited Havel to be one of the 15 Champions of World Democracy. Other champions mentioned were Nelson Mandela, Lech Wałęsa, and Corazon Aquino. As a former Czech President, Havel is a member of the Club of Madrid. In 2009 he was awarded the Quadriga Award, but decided to return it in 2011 following the announcement of Vladimir Putin as one of the 2011 award recipients. Havelhas also received multiple honorary doctorates from various universities. In 1993, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

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