Vaclav Havel
Václav Havel was a playwright who spent five years in prison and then became president of the country that had jailed him. Born in Prague in 1936 into a wealthy family, he was barred by the communist government from the education his class disqualified him from, worked as a laboratory technician, took evening classes, and found his way into the theatre as a stagehand. His absurdist plays of the 1960s — The Garden Party, The Memorandum — satirised bureaucratic language and were performed to great success until the Soviet invasion of 1968 ended the Prague Spring and his publication with it. He became a spokesman of Charter 77, the human rights declaration signed by a few hundred people demanding that the government observe the accords it had itself signed at Helsinki. His essay The Power of the Powerless, written in 1978, is the most influential text of Eastern European dissent. Its central image is a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window reading Workers of the world, unite — not because he believes it, but because it signals compliance; and its argument is that the system runs on that daily consent, and that simply living in truth withdraws it. He was imprisoned repeatedly, longest from 1979 to 1983. The Velvet Revolution of November 1989 made him president of Czechoslovakia within seven weeks. He resigned in 1992 rather than preside over the break-up he opposed, and was then elected president of the Czech Republic and served until 2003. He died in 2011. He is the rare case of a moralist who was given power and neither corrupted by it nor destroyed by it.
- Lived: 1936 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: Czech
- Roles: writer, dissident, statesman, head_of_state
