The Prague
Post
Václav Havel, by Stephan Delbos
While former Czech President Václav Havel’s work as a
politician and humanitarian are of paramount importance, his reputation as a
writer must not be overlooked.
Havel’s earliest works,
published largely in samizdat editions, were collections of poetry that first
appeared in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, Havel
counted himself among the avant-garde of Czech literature, along with such
writers and visual artists as Jiří Kolař, who were taking cues from
international movements and pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in
Czech art and literature while questioning the very nature of such
pursuits. Antikody (1964) is a highlight
from this period, containing Havel’s concrete
poems, which consist of both visual and literary elements.
Many of these poems are lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek,
but several contain sharp commentary on the political and social situation in Czechoslovakia
at the time. (Two of these poems have been translated into English and
published in From a Terrace in Prague:
A Prague Poetry Anthology).
Beginning in 1960, Havel
also developed a reputation as a leading Czech playwright. All told, Havel
wrote 22 plays, including “The Garden Party” (1963), “The Beggar’s Opera”
(1975), “Largo Desolato” (1984), and “Leaving” (2007), many of which recast the
horror and absurdity of totalitarian rule through a lens of black comedy and
linguistic pyrotechnics. (A video of another Havel
play, “Audience,” can be viewed here.) While many of these plays were banned in
Czechoslovakia, or shown
only in private gatherings, they were seen more widely in the West,
particularly in the United States,
bringing Havel and Czechoslovak communism into
the public eye.
Were these plays and the early poems all Havel
published, his reputation as a leading Czech writer would be assured. But his
books of correspondence and political essays established him not only as a
serious writer of non-fiction but a public intellectual and social critic
nearly without peer in his home country.
The best-known of these publications is also the first. The
Power of the Powerless (1985) and particularly its title essay (which can be
read here), which Havel wrote in 1978, gave
voice to the the feeling of helplessness that was widespread during the period
of normalization. Dedicating the essay to Czech philosopher Jan Patočka and
alluding to Marx in the opening sentence, “A specter is haunting Eastern
Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent,’” Havel not only
announced his arrival as a serious writer and thinker, but announced the
precipitation of the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, which from 1977
(with the initiation of Charter 77) would not be silenced. It was also in this
essay that Havel articulated the phrase
“Post-totalitarianism,” which he described as the social and political order
that allowed those under communism to “live within a lie.”
In response to these and other dissident activities, Havel
was jailed from 1979 until 1984, a sentence that produced Letters to Olga
(1988), a collection of correspondence with his first wife, in which he further
articulated his philosophy of life and politics. This was Havel’s last work of
non-fiction until Disturbing the Peace (1991) a collection of political essays
on the life and times of post-communist Czechoslovakia.
As could be expected, Havel
wrote little during his presidency, between 1989 and 2003. He returned to the
writing desk shortly thereafter, publishing To the Castle and Back (2007) a
collection of essays covering his tenure as President, and “Leaving” (2007),
his first play in two decades. The play and the subsequent feature film were
released to mixed reviews. In 2009 he published two short plays, “Dozens of
Cousins” and “The Pig, or Václav Havel’s Hunt for a Pig,” both of which were
reworkings of earlier texts.
As a writer and public intellectual who had the opportunity
to put his theories into practice on a national scale, Václav Havel was truly a
rare individual. He leaves large shoes to fill in both literature and politics.
Truth and love must win over lies and hatred