V o L u m e I : a d

Hatoyama Ichirom. Hatoyama Ichirou Kaikoroku [Autobiography of Hatoyama Ichirou].

Tokyo: Bungeishunjusha, 1957.

Schaller, Michael. Altered States: The United States and Japan since the Occupation.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Czech writer, playwright, philosopher, prominent dissident, last president of

Czechoslovakia (1989–1992), and first president of the Czech Republic

(1993–2003). Václav Havel was born in Prague on 5 October 1936 to a wealthy

Czechoslovakian family that had made its money in the restaurant business.

Following the 1948 communist coup d’état, however, the family lost its enter-

prises, and Havel’s educational opportunities were severely restricted. Denied

the chance to study his true passions of philosophy, history, and cinema, he

received a degree in economics from the Czech University of Technology.

Following military service during 1957–1959, Havel worked as a stage

technician in the Prague theater on the Balustrade, which would later stage his

early plays, including The Garden Party (1963), The Memorandum (1965), and

The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968). These plays won him accolades

both at home and abroad. Havel’s plays, which were squarely grounded

in the theater of the absurd, reflected not only contemporary international

trends but also life under communist totalitarianism. In concert with other

like-minded young intellectuals, Havel coedited Czechoslovakia’s only non-

communist magazine of arts and letters, Tvárh. Following the Warsaw Pact’s

1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia that quashed the Prague Spring, however,

Tvárh was closed down and Havel’s plays were banned.

Havel exhorted his countrymen to resist what he termed “the occupa-

tion” and to move beyond the failed ideas of reformist communism. In 1975

he daringly authored a public letter to Czech President Gustáv Husák pro-

testing the government’s so-called normalization policies. In 1977, Havel

cofounded the Charter 77 movement, which condemned the Czech govern-

ment for failing to heed the 1975 Helsinki Final Act’s conditions for basic

human rights. He was jailed for several months after the Charter 77 recrimi-

nations were made public. In 1978 he penned his seminal essay, The Power

of the Powerless, in which he applied phenomenology to understand how

societies generate and sustain themselves through alienation and ideology, a

totalitarian system that nobody desires or believes in.

The Czech regime subjected Havel to frequent arrests and imprisonment,

including four years of hard labor during 1979–1983. His letters from prison

to his wife Olga were published in late 1982 by the literary critic Jan Lopatka,

who against Havel’s initial wishes preserved the personal aspects of the letters

to depict a human antithesis to the communist depiction of heroes as perfect

caricatures. After his release, Havel moved to his country house in Hrádechek,

where he wrote his semiautobiographical play Largo Desolato (1986). By the

late 1980s, he was meeting frequently with foreign dignitaries and politicians,

and he was allowed to address a demonstration for the first time in December

900

Havel, Václav

Havel, Václav

(1936–)

Havel’s plays, which

were squarely

grounded in the

theater of the absurd,

reflected not only

contemporary

international trends,

but also life under

communist

totalitarianism.

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1988. But he was again jailed in January 1989 for having

provoked antigovernment protests. Following international

outcry over his arrest, he was released in May.

After the student demonstration of 17 November 1989

that put the Velvet Revolution into high gear, Havel re-

turned to Prague as a founder of Civic Forum, which helped

bring down Husák’s government. Havel became the main

speaker in the nightly demonstrations, and on 10 Decem-

ber 1989 he forced the communists’ hand by calling for

free and unfettered national elections. On 29 December

the interim government elected Havel president, and he

proceeded to negotiate with the communists over the trans-

fer of power.

Havel’s government quickly completed the political

transfer of power and negotiated with Soviet President

Mikhail Gorbachev a rapid withdrawal of Soviet troops.

Havel’s administration also commenced Czechoslovakia’s

economic transition to a market economy. The new demo-

cratic parliament reelected Havel president in July 1990.

In 1992 the Slovaks elected a nationalist separatist govern-

ment. Unwilling to supervise the dismantling of the Czech

and Slovak Federation, Havel resigned as the last president

of Czechoslovakia in July 1992. After the 1 January 1993

split of the federation, Havel became the first president of

the Czech Republic later that month. He was narrowly

reelected in January 1998 to another five-year term. As pres-

ident, he attempted to wield power without direct involve-

ment in party politics, which led to conflicts among himself,

the legislature, and the main political parties. In declining health, Havel did

not stand for another presidential term when his tenure expired in 2003.

Aviezer Tucker

See also

Charter 77; Czechoslovakia; Europe, Eastern; Helsinki Final Act; Husák, Gustáv;

Prague Spring

References

Havel, Václav. The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice, Speeches and Writ-

ings, 1990–1996. New York: Fromm International, 1998.

Kriseova, Eda. Václav Havel: The Authorized Biography. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993.

Australian Labour Party politician and prime minister (1983–1991). Born

in Bordertown, Australia, on 9 December 1929 and raised in Perth, Robert

Hawke completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Western

Hawke, Robert

901

Václav Havel is one of Europe’s best-known playwrights

and essayists. He was also a leading political dissident

under the communist government of Czechoslovakia.

During 1993–2003 he was the first president of the Czech

Republic. (Embassy of the Czech Republic/Alan Pajer)

Hawke, Robert

(1929–)

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