Vaclav Havel
A Political Tragedy in Six Acts
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
The definitive biography of the playwright who become a president: Vaclav Havel, the final president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the new Czech Republic
Vaclav Havel is revered as one of the 20th-century's great playwrights, dissidents, and honest champions of democracy.
Beginning as a playwright intimately involved in the Prague theatre scene, Havel moved steadily into activism and political dissidence, resulting in imprisonment and culminating in his remarkable election as president in the last days of Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia. He would oversee the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into two modern democracies, and his fourteen-year tenure as president was critical to the development of peace and prosperity in the region.
But who was this man, the president who never sought political power, the playwright who stumbled into high office? In this study, John Keane reveals a Havel so far unseen, dramatising the key moments of joy, misery, triumph and tragedy on which his life has turned.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As a Communist-era dissident, successful playwright and leader of Czechoslovakia's velvet revolution and democratic government, Vaclav Havel is a timely and deserving subject for biography. Unfortunately, while Keane's authorized study fills some gaps, it is not the biography many have been waiting for. For those who seek the basic outline, this volume provides ample (though select) material on Havel's prominent prewar family, his marriages and numerous affairs, and his political and literary activities over the years. But this is, by no means, for the casual reader. It strives to be much more than an ordinary biography, and it doesn't succeed. Its major flaws are that, first, Keane takes an idiosyncratic approach to biography, insisting on viewing Havel as the emblematic 20th-century man, and second, that he has an awkward rhetorical style. Keane offers us the story of Havel's life not as a linear narrative but as a series of tableaux vivants "designed to heighten readers' sense that his actions in the world are understandable as a tragedy." The tragedy is that of a man who "suffered the misfortune of being born into the twentieth century... fate was politics." While to Keane, editor of a collection of Havel's writing and biographer of Tom Paine, this formulation is convincing, many readers will find it too restricting. This exaggerated conceit of writing about Havel as a character in a Shakespearean tragedy, which depends on inflated prose and frequent references to the role of fate, climaxes in a tasteless finale, a macabre rendering of the tragedy's end in Havel's (future) funeral.
