Havel, Václav (väts`läv hävĕl), 1936–, Czech dramatist and essayist, president of Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia (chĕk'ōslōväk`ēə), Czech Československo
..... Click the link for more information. (1989–92) and the Czech Republic Czech Republic, Czech Česká Republika (2005 est. pop. 10,241,000), republic, 29,677 sq mi (78,864 sq km), central Europe. It is bordered by Slovakia on the east, Austria on the south, Germany on the west, and Poland on the north.
..... Click the link for more information. (1993–2003). The most original Czech dramatist to emerge in the 1960s, Havel soon antagonized the political power structure by focusing on the senselessness and absurdity of mechanized, totalitarian society in plays that implicitly criticized the government such as The Garden Party (1963, tr. 1969) and The Memorandum (1965, tr. 1967) and in various essays of the 1960s and 70s. As a leading spokesman for the dissident group Charter 77, he was imprisoned (1979–83) by the Czechoslovak Communist regime, and his plays were banned.

Havel was the principal spokesman for the Civic Forum, an opposition group, when it succeeded in forcing (1989) the Communist party to share power, and he became interim president of Czechoslovakia. He was elected president of Czechoslovakia after the collapse of Communism in 1990 and resigned in 1992 prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, to which he was opposed. He was elected president of the new Czech Republic in 1993 and reelected in 1998. As president he tended toward a social democratic approach to social and economic issues, strongly supporting civil liberties and human rights and an eastward-expanding NATO. He retired from the presidency in 2003. Havel's works include Protocols (essays and poems, 1966), Letters to Olga (1983, tr. 1989), Three Vanek Plays (1990), Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965–1990 (1991), Summer Meditations (1991, tr. 1992), and Selected Plays, 1984–87 (1994).

Bibliography

See interview ed. by P. Wilson, Disturbing the Peace (tr. 1990); biography by M. Simmons (1991); collections of essays on Havel, ed. by J. Vladislav (1986) and M. Goetz-Stankiewicz and P. Carey (1999); study by J. Keane (2000).

Havel, Václav

(born Oct. 5, 1936, Prague, Czech.) Czech playwright and dissident, first president of the Czech Republic (from 1993). He worked in a Prague theatre from 1959 and became resident playwright by 1968. His plays, including The Memorandum (1965), are absurdist, satirical examinations of bureaucratic routines that explore the moral compromises made by those living under totalitarianism. They were banned by the communist authorities, and Havel was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned in the 1970s and '80s. During antigovernment demonstrations in 1989, he became the leading figure in the Civic Forum, a coalition of groups pressing for democratic reforms. The Communist Party capitulated (in the bloodless “Velvet Revolution”) and formed a coalition government with the Civic Forum, and Havel was elected president in 1989. In 1993 he was elected president of the new Czech Republic.