Neklid transcendence. Žánry Václava Havla
The restlessness of transcendence. Václav Havel’s genres

Summary/Abstract: The question of how the diverse forms that comprise Václav Havel’s oeuvre cohere has not yet been raised, or to be more precise, Havel’s genre shifting has been understood up until now in an unproblematic way. In spite of the evident thematic continuity across the genres, we tend to reduce Havel’s cross-genre productivity merely to some kind of formal “exercise”. The aim of this article is to provide an outline of the genres that were of defining importance in Havel’s oeuvre. After this outline, I deal with features of form and orientation shared across the genres. I then demonstrate that in Havel’s case it is not just a matter of genre crossing, but of the need to continually redefine the established rules of almost all the genres in which he engaged. From this we can conclude that Havel’s “restlessness of transcendence” was manifested at multiple levels in his work. The article concludes by considering the consequences of this approach for understanding or reading Havel’s work, as well as for the way that we understand and “read” ourselves.

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