In Václav Havel’s play The Garden Party (1963), the parents of Hugo Pludek hope that a meeting with an influential patron in Czech society will guarantee a bright future for their son.
However, the benefactor never shows—he is busy attending the eponymous party hosted by the "Liquidation Bureau." When Hugo goes to the party to find him, he is nowhere to be seen. Instead, Hugo engages in an endless number of meandering and nonsensical conversations with a series of sheeplike bureaucrats.
Hugo adapts to the new environment by adopting the insipid language of the functionaries, eventually earning a spot as head of the "Central Commission for Inauguration and Liquidation." But as he notes in a Hamlet-like soliloquy, he sacrifices something important along the way—his identity:
He who is too much may soon not be at all, and he who—in a certain situation—is able to a certain extent not to be, may in another situation be all the better for that. I don’t know whether you want more to be or not to be, and when you want to be or not to be; but I know I want to be all the time and that’s why all the time I must a little bit not be.
The absurdist rhetoric of Havel’s first major play—inspired by his idol Franz Kafka, the Jewish writer born in Prague—was a hit with a Czech audience all too familiar with the dehumanizing aspects of Soviet-style Communism. But it also revealed what Havel believed was the "metaphysical illness" of modern man, in both the East and the West. Humanity was suffering from a crisis of identity.
Whether thinking through philosophical or personal problems, "Havel turned to writing to sort it out," writes Michael Zantovsky in his new biography, Havel: A Life. Zantovsky is a former spokesman and confidant of Havel’s, and thus is far from a disinterested biographer, but he nonetheless provides an insightful account of the Czech playwright and dissident who inspired one of history’s few nonviolent revolutions.
Havel (1936-2011) developed a fascination with words at a young age. As the appointed chronicler of events at his summer camp in 1948, he would record daily aphorisms such as, "even a word is an action." Havel was designated a "bourgeois element" after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia that year—his father was a wealthy property owner—and denied an elite education.
After a stint in the army, he found a job as a stagehand. It was Havel’s "backstage" entrance to the cultural revolution of the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, driven by an effusion of plays, books, art, and films. The success of The Garden Party catapulted him into rock star status. He frequented parties with stimulating intellectual discussions among artists, accompanied by remarkable quantities of alcohol, drugs, and women.
Although he enjoyed the work-hard-party-hard lifestyle, Havel never felt content with life under the repressive Communist regime. He was subject to numerous interrogations and house searches for signing petitions in support of political prisoners and banned writers. Havel’s "road to Damascus" moment was the sham convictions of members of the underground rock group The Plastic People of the Universe, on charges of "aggravated hooliganism." Some of his contemporaries wondered why he took up the cause of the grungy "hairies." "Havel intuited that the fight must start from there, from the bottom," Zantovsky explains. If rockers were denied freedom of expression, the rest of the artists would be next.
The imprisonment of the Plastics inspired the composition of Charter 77, a document calling on Communist officials to fully respect human rights and civic freedoms. Havel coauthored the charter and imbued it with his moral philosophy, which he more fully developed in the 24,000-word political manifesto "Power of the Powerless" (1978). Communism forces its victims to "divest themselves of their innermost identity," he wrote in the essay, an injustice that individuals must respond to by "living the truth" and reaffirming their independent identities. For Havel, this was not just a civic responsibility, but an existential one.
Havel’s role in the charter movement landed him in jail for almost four years, where he suffered from a number of health problems before the authorities relented and released him. The Communist Party aimed to discredit the charter by imprisoning its main spokesman, but its popularity spread. In November 1989, more than 150,000 demonstrators filled Wenceslas Square in Prague to protest earlier beatings of citizens, some chanting "long live Havel." The nonviolent "Velvet Revolution" forced the entire Party leadership to resign.
While Havel advocated peaceful domestic resistance, he was not opposed to taking up arms to confront evil abroad. During his 13 years as president of Czechoslovakia and then the independent Czech Republic, Havel supported the expansion of NATO and military interventions in Kosovo and, most controversially, Iraq. He never forgot Britain and France’s approval of the Munich Agreement before World War II that ceded his country’s border regions to Nazi Germany. "Our own historical experience has taught us that evil must be confronted rather than appeased," he said in 1999. He held no illusions about the rise of Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia, which he called a "new type of dictatorship" that "weds the worst of Communism with the worst of capitalism."
Zantovsky, a former clinical psychologist, aims to offer an intimate look at Havel's soul. Havel harbored a deep sense of guilt about his "unfairly privileged" upbringing, an inner struggle that he described as the "hidden motor" behind his persistent efforts to resist the regime. He was modest to a fault, and he promoted tolerance and understanding rather than the concept of an "Enemy." Havel overcame his guilt and self-doubt when he accepted the duties of his country’s first post-Soviet leader. His virtues considered, there were simply no other options.
Zantovsky perhaps understates the point when he notes that Havel was "an imperfect man, like the rest of us." Havel’s constant philandering was a source of friction with his loyal wife Olga, including his relationship with a younger woman while Olga was dying of cancer. Zantovsky wanders into the territory of sheer implausibility when he writes that wife-swapping in the dissident community occurred out of "sheer necessity" and was "the result of severely limited contact with the outside world and its sexual opportunities." The author’s deferential tone at times mars what is an otherwise thorough and enjoyable study.
For a man whose words helped topple one of the most oppressive regimes in human history, Havel is surprisingly leery of their power in some of his writings. "It always pays to be suspicious of words and to be wary of them," he asserts in "Words on Words," his 1989 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association. Historical events such as the French Revolution and Communist China’s massacre of students in Tiananmen Square prove that an idealistic cause is easily "transformed into the betrayal of its own good intentions."
The awesome power of words imposes a moral obligation on their composers, he concludes in another metaphysical musing:
Responsibility for and toward words is a task which is intrinsically ethical.
As such, however, it is situated beyond the horizon of the visible world, in that realm wherein dwells the Word that was in the beginning and is not the word of Man.
Although not a deeply religious man himself, Havel believed that modern society was spiritually barren and over-reliant on technological solutions. Europe and the West in general—confronted with declining religiosity at home and multiplying threats abroad—still search for their souls in a post-Cold War world no longer blushing in the initial triumph of western values that brought Havel to power. One expects Havel would still be troubled by humanity’s crisis of identity if he were alive today—and that he would have the courage, and words, to address the crisis.