Pět biografií Václava Havla
Author(s): Miloš Havelka / Language(s): Czech
Issue: 3-4/2015
This review article is concerned with the most important recent books about the
life and works of Václav Havel (1936–2011) as a key fi gure of Czechoslovak and
Czech history in the last fi fty or so years. The books under review are Eda Kriseová,
Václav Havel: Jediný autorizovaný životopis (Prague: Práh, 2014; published in English
as Vaclav Havel: The Authorized Biography, trans. Caleb Crain), Martin C. Putna,
Václav Havel: Duchovní portrét v rámu české kultury 20. století (V. H.: A spiritual
portrait in the context of twentieth-century Czech culture. Prague: Knihovna Václava
Havla, 2011), Daniel Kaiser, Disident: Václav Havel 1936–1989 (Prague and Litomyšl:
Paseka, 2009) and Prezident: Václav Havel (Prague and Litomyšl: Paseka, 2014),
Jiří Suk, Politika jako absurdní drama: Václav Havel v letech 1975–1989 (Politics as
theatre of the absurd: V. H. from 1975 to 1989. Prague and Litomyšl: Paseka, 2013),
and Michael Žantovský, Havel (Prague: Argo, 2014). Havelka seeks to identify not
only the strength and weaknesses of these biographies, but also the discontinuities
and continuities of Havel’s thinking, the successes and failures of his politics,
and the many dimensions of his personality, which the authors have to various
degrees succeeded in conveying. First of all, he summarizes the publications and
puts them into the context of criticism of Havel’s thinking and politics since the
1960s, and especially from the 1990s onward, which has been articulated from
different, often contradictory, intellectual and political positions. He then moves
on to the books under review.
Eda Kriseová, a writer, dissident, and later a colleague of Havel’s at Prague Castle,
calls her biography (essentially a re-edition of the 1991 publication) a ‘dissident
romance’. She portrays Havel as a positive hero of times past and as a model for the
present. Whereas in the early 1990s, according to Havelka, her biography largely
fulfi lled its purpose, which was quickly to familiarize the reader with Havel and his
ideas, considering the needs of the times, it now seems too personal and superfi cial.
In his biography of Havel, the literary historian Martin C. Putna, who for some
time was also the director of the Václav Havel Library in Prague, thoroughly and
sometimes inventively explores the spiritual roots, inspirations, and connections
of Havel’s thinking and attitudes. This enables Putna to make some interesting
links between family tradition and national culture, and between purely individual
horizons and efforts and infl uence on a large part of society. He builds grand interpretations
in his interpretations, and presents them in a readable way, but his
portrait, according to the reviewer, remains too one-sided and fails to show Havel’s
personality in something at least approaching its entirety, from which it be would
then be possible to convincingly explain a number of aspects of his decision-making
and conduct.
The two volumes of the biography by the journalist Daniel Kaiser are, in comparison
with the other works, the largest, in terms of what they cover, but, according to
the reviewer, they are the least straightforward. Kaiser primarily concentrates on
politics, which seems rather one dimensional, and his efforts to achieve objective
completeness and be above the fray, together with his endeavour not to omit anything
important or interesting, collide with his own implicit political convictions.
In the process, he tends simply to describe events and arrange them, disrupting the
narrative with the repetition of some worn-out journalistic platitudes. Nevertheless,
he makes good use of some hitherto neglected or unknown material.
The book by the historian Jiří Suk is not a biography in the true sense of the word.
Rather, it is a penetrating work of history and political science, which does not
over simplify, but instead presents a telling and compelling picture of a politician
in the maelstrom of history. Among the strong points of Suk’s interpretations is
the fact that he structures meanings, often with the help of his own meta-historical
concepts. He puts his fi ndings into new contexts, and usefully takes into account
previously neglected material about the dissidents, which he has found in the fi les
of the State Security Services (Státní bezpečnosti – StB).
In his biography, published in Czech, English (Havel: A Life. London: Atlantic
Books, 2014), and other languages, the former translator, politician, diplomat, and
now director of the Václav Havel Library, Michael Žantovský depicts, according to
the reviewer, Havel’s personality in much more contoured and balanced way than
the previously discussed authors have done. Drawing on his previous experience
as a psychologist, together with an intimate personal knowledge of Havel, Žantovský
has achieved what his predecessors, who were by and large more interested
in politics, did not even really attempt to do – namely, to relate concrete social
and political situations to Havel’s fundamental convictions about life and art and
his intellectual disposition, in order to offer a biographical explanation of Havel’s
political programme.
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