Václav Havel

Kieran Williams

pp. 156-173

in: Steven Casey, Jonathan Wright (eds), Mental maps in the era of détente and the end of the Cold War 1968–91, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

For Vâclav Havel, 1968 was the year that made him a man of politics. Until then, he had been a successful playwright and outspoken essayist, but was still operating in terms set by the events of a previous tumultuous year, 1956. During the stifled ferment of Czechoslovakia's reaction to that year's events in neighbouring countries, Havel at age 20 had attracted attention with a cultural critique of the Communist establishment. Irreverent towards the officially approved writers of the day, many of whom were only a few years older than himself, he also deplored the embourgeoisement of the masses under socialism, with life's meaning reduced to a pale imitation of Western, consumer, technological society. Exposing the hollowness of this existence through his hit plays The Garden Party (1963) and The Memorandum (1965) while campaigning for reform of the writers' union and the survival of unorthodox periodicals, he was certainly being drawn into what he called političcnost — "perceptiveness of the problems of a person as a member of a human polis".¹ But it was only with changes in the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in January 1968 and the resulting "Prague Spring" that Havel at age 32 began to reframe his cultural critique as a political programme, hone his political skills and work out a conception of responsible leadership.

Cited authors

Havel Vaclav