Vaclav Havel (October 5, 1936 — December 18, 2011)

Born October 5th, 1936, Vaclav Havel was an influential activist, politician, poet, and playwright. Affected by communist rule from a young age, his father was a restaurateur whose property was confiscated by the communist party. The son of a Bourgeois family, Havel was denied higher education past the age of 15. Eventually, Havel was able to finish high school and even attended university.

In 1959, Havel took a job as a stagehand in Prague and began writing plays alongside Ivan Vyskecil. By 1968, Havel had worked his way to becoming a resident playwright for the Theatre of the Balustrade company. Plays of satirical examination of politics and bureaucracy.

A participant in Prague Spring, Havel paid both a personal and professional price for his activism. His plays were banned from viewing and his passport was confiscated. During the ’70s and ’80s, he was repeatedly arrested and eventually served 4 years in prison (1979-83) for activities he participated in as part of the fight for human rights in Czechoslovakia.

In November 1989, after a series of antigovernmental demonstrations erupted across the country, Havel became a leader of the Civic Forum. This coalition consisted of several non-communist groups in favor of democracy.

In December 1989, the communist party and the Civic Forum came together in a bloodless resolution, commonly known as the “Velvet Revolution”. Havel was elected interim president during the transitional period. Havel became the 10th and last president of Czechoslovakia, the first non-communist leader in Czechoslovakia since 1948. With his strong moral compass and forthright voice, Havel negotiated a peaceful return to open democracy. His leadership continued in July of 1990, as he was re-elected in the first official term of this new era for Czechoslovakia.

Discussion of the division of Czechoslovakia soon began. Opposed to the dissolution of his country, Havel resigned as president in 1992. Czechoslovakia was officially dissolved in 1993. Despite his objections to the separation, Havel was elected as the first Czech Republic president that same year. He went on to be re-elected in 1998 and continued his presidency until he officially step down in 2003.

“Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”

— Vaclav Havel

Among his many honors, Vaclav Havel was the inaugural recipient of Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award for his work in promoting human rights, awarded the Philadelphia Liberty Medal recognizing leadership in the pursuit of freedom, awarded the International Gandhi Peace Prize by the government of India for his contribution towards social, economic and political transformation through non-violence and other Gandhian methods, and recipient of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom for his outstanding contribution towards world peace.

Havel produced his last play in 2008, 20 years after his previous production. The play was called “Odchazeni (Leaving)”, and drew upon his experiences as president. He later directed an adaptation of his last play in 2011. He died later that year at the age of 75.

Written by Kelsey McDade

Editors of Britannica, The, ‘Vaclav Havel’, Britannica, 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vaclav-Havel, (accessed October 4, 2022).

Disturbing the Peace – The Vaclav Havel Library Foundation. (n.d.). Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://www.vhlf.org/havel-quotes/disturbing-the-peace/

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