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| Václav Havel |
He grew up in a well-known and wealthy entrepreneurial and intellectual family, which was closely linked to the cultural and political events in Czechoslovakia from the 1920s to the 1940s. His father was the owner of the suburb Barrandov which was located on the highest point of Prague and of Barrandov film studios. Havel's mother came from a well known family; her father was an ambassador and well-known journalist.
Because of Havel's bourgeois history, the Communist regime did not allow Havel to study formally after he had completed his required schooling in 1951. In the first part of the 1950s, the young Havel entered into a four-year apprenticeship as a chemical laboratory assistant and simultaneously took evening classes; he completed his secondary education in 1954. For political reasons, he was not accepted into any post-secondary school with a humanities program; therefore, he opted to study at the Faculty of Economics of Czech Technical University in Prague but dropped out after two years.
Vaclav Havel led a revolution that overturned four decades of communism in his native Czechoslovakia, languished five years in prison, wrote 19 plays, survived nearly drowning, and served 14 years as president — all the while remaining one of his generation’s most nonconformist writers.
Yet while the west has lionized him, in his native Czech Republic, 19 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he remains a source of ambivalence, if not sometimes downright resentment.
Some have argued that Mr. Havel held onto the presidency too long — 13 years — for his claim of being a reluctant president to ring true. Others, like Erik Tabery, a Czech journalist who is writing a book about the Czech presidency, said some Czechs resented Mr. Havel because he held up an uncomfortable mirror to their own history of chronic passivity.
Born into a wealthy, bourgeois family in 1936, Mr. Havel first rose to prominence as a chain-smoking rebel-intellectual in the 1960s. In 1968, when the Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress a democratic blossoming known as the Prague Spring, Mr. Havel denounced the invasion, and his plays were censored.
Mr. Havel is credited with overseeing the smooth transition from communism to liberal capitalism after leading a 10-day Velvet Revolution in 1989, so velvety that not a single bullet was fired. Once elected as the president a newly democratized Czechoslovakia — a role he insists was more duty than aspiration — he linked the country firmly to the West, clearing the way for the Czech Republic to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999, and the European Union five years later.
His star status drew world leaders to Prague, from the Dalai Lama, with whom Mr. Havel meditated for hours, to Bill Clinton, who serenaded him on his saxophone. Calling on the former dissident became a politically redemptive act.
Yet his presidency, which ended in 2003, was marked by a jovial eccentricity that endeared as well as repelled. He invited the Rolling Stones to the imposing Prague castle, the office of the president, covered the side of the castle with a large neon-red heart, hired female body guards — and drove along the castle’s endlessly long corridors in a red pedal scooter. Critics called him a reluctant leader who learned to like power too much.
One of his first big political setbacks came shortly after he took office, when he stubbornly resigned to protest the break up of Czechoslovakia in 1992. The country’s dismemberment into two separate states, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, happened anyway — presaging secessionist movements in other parts of Europe.
Zdroj: en.wikipedia.org, the new york times
