Václav Havel

Václav Havel was born into a well-to-do family in Prague. His father owned Prague's cliff-top Barrandov suburb and his mother, Bozena Havlova, the daughter of an ambassador and journalist, encouraged her son's intellectual and artistic ambitions. In his youth he formed a literary circle called Thirty-Sixers, after the year of its members' birth. Because of his 'bourgeois' background he was denied the right to attend university. At the age of fifteen, Havel became interested in poetry. With the future film director Milos Forman he visited the poet Jaroslav Seifert, who read his first texts. Although Kafka's literary heritage was nearly buried by the authorities, his works deeply influenced Havel.

In 1951-55 Havel worked as a laboratory technician. He studied at a technical college (1955-57) and served in the Czechoslovak Army (1957-59). Havel had joined Group 42, and after challenging the older generation of writers in their magazine Kveten (May), he was for the first time noticed as a writer. In 1964 Havel married Olga Šplíchalová (1933-1996). They bought a small farm near the Polish border, where the happy couple was visited by a number of their friends. After his wife's death Havel married an actress, the former Dagmar Veskrnova.

In the 1960s Havel made his way in the theater, first as a stagehand, and then becoming resident writer for the Prague "Theatre on the Balustrade" from 1960 to 1969. During this time he continued his education at the Prague Academy of Art. His first play as the dramatic consultant of the theater Na Zábradlí, The Garden Party (1963), was a satire of modern bureaucratic routines. It was a success both at home and abroad. In the footsteps of George Orwell Havel became interested in language - in the play the protagonist acquires an "official" language and rises to bureaucratic fame. Havel was subsequently enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Arts and he graduated in 1967. A few years earlier he had joined the editorial board of the literary magazine Tvár, which was soon in conflict with the conservative Writers' Association. Václav Klaus, who later became Havel's successor as president of the Czech Republic, contibuted articles on economics for the magazine. Tvár ceased to appear in 1969. In the same year Havel's passport was confiscated because his writings were considered subversive.

As a playwright Havel has used dramatic techniques to make situations or characters seem ridiculous. In The Memorandum (1965) he introduced an artificial language that is supposed to allow for greater precision in communication. The absurd attempt results in a complete breakdown of human relationships. The theme was taken even further in The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968), in which Havel attacked fashionable sociological terminology. Prague Spring was crushed by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces in 1968. In the 1970s Havel wrote a series of one-act plays, Audience (1978), Private View (1978), and Protest (1978), in which the protagonist is a dissident playwright in trouble with the authorities. Most plays from this period are built around the writer Vanék, who faces the absurd realities of Czech life.

Havel's official website (English version)