News & Events

The Death of the Playwright-President: Vaclav Havel (1936–2011)

12.01.2012

Havel's death at age 75 was announced on Dec. 18. The man who wrote absurdist dramas that ridiculed the brutal communist flunkies who ruled his country — indeed, the Soviet bloc — had had severe health problems for years.

Havel was no longer President after the end of his term in 2003. But he remained iconic and relevant, even after reformers and other dissidents — such as Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia and Lech Walesa in Poland — lost their luster.

Havel spent most of his life feeling like an outsider. As a child, he was a shy bookworm embarrassed by his family's real estate fortune. In 1948 Havel became a different kind of pariah when the communists seized power in postwar Czechoslovakia, confiscating his family's property and barring him from high school. Drafted into military service, Havel wrote a rousing drama for his battalion that army officials praised until they took a closer look and realized that this chubby, polite soldier was making fun of them. After the army, he got a job as a stagehand at Prague's Theater on the Balustrade. He wrote acerbic plays that stuck audiences' noses in the ridiculousness of their totalitarian world. These were the relatively relaxed political days leading up to the 1968 Prague Spring, when the communists allowed some criticism. After invading Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, the authorities banned Havel's writings and harassed friends who talked to him. Those were lonely years, but Havel beat back depression and wrote plays, started an underground press and founded the human-rights group Charter 77. That earned him prison time; the longest stretch began in 1979, when Havel received a 4½-year sentence.

When they released him, he kept being Havel and got arrested again; his last arrest came just months before the Velvet Revolution. Havel didn't start the revolution — that happened when police beat unarmed students on Nov. 17, 1989 — but he masterminded it. He told the beaten-down Czechs they could prevail. They believed him and filled Wenceslas Square, giddy with their own courage. And Havel, backed by these people who had rediscovered their backbone, negotiated the communists out of power.

Then he was President, an East European leader utterly unlike the geriatric robots who preceded him. Havel performed the normal duties of Presidents, but to Czechs, his most important role was as a guide, even a talisman. Havel resigned as President of the soon-to-be-defunct Czechoslovakia and returned six months later as President of the newly formed Czech Republic.

Toward the end of his life, Havel hit hard times. His wife died in early 1996, leaving him too lost to even help in planning her funeral. Within a year, doctors had removed half his cancerous right lung.

However, the democratic revolution had not built the civil society he had dreamed of. He himself would leave government after the end of his presidential term in 2003. What he did leave help build, however, was an intellectual renaissance, not just for Czechs and Slovaks but also for the half of Europe that had lived behind the metaphorical Iron Curtain and was desperate to reconnect with the free West after five dehumanizing decades as Soviet satellites. Eastern Europeans had looked to Havel's writing and political activism and heard the voice of 600 years of enlightened humanism.

James O. Jackson, Massimo Calabresi for Time.com

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