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Since 1990 Václav Havel has been for me endlessly fascinating. First, I heard him quoted in a lecture. A few months later I read Disturbing the Peace, which derives from an interview with him in the late 1980s. The clincher came when I read these remarks made to a joint session of the U.S. Congress a few months after his election to the presidency of Czechoslovakia:

The only genuine backbone of all our actions—if they are to be moral—is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.

I was stunned. How long has it been since similar words were spoken by a head of state to a parliamentary body of another country? When did anyone publicly call our nation's politicians to be responsible to anyone but the particular interests of pressure groups or the more appropriate interests of the public? Responsibility to "the order of Being" that can and will judge them and us? Bracing stuff! I was hooked.

As I read more about who this president was and where he had come from, the mystery of his words became both more explicable and more obscure. Here was a man born into the utter confusion and tragedy of a nation under the heel of Hitler's boot, a nation that, when Havel was ready for university, would not allow him an advanced education because he was just a "bourgeois brat." But this brat with ingenuity and drive teamed with others his age in an informal group that called itself the Thirty Sixers (for their birth year), quietly talked radical politics, and hung out with older dissidents. In the army he wrote a humorous play that spoofed the military and delighted his buddies.

He followed up on this spontaneous discovery of ability in drama, became a worker in an "off-broadway" theater in Prague, wrote, directed and performed absurdist plays reflective of Ionesco and Beckett, twitted the state-approved writers, defended writers and musicians unjustly imprisoned, and wrote a brilliant political essay, "The Power of the Powerless," that brought down on him the power of the powerful. He linked himself with major dissident figures like philosopher Jan Patocka, along with whom he drafted Charter 77, calling for the Czech authorities to honor the commitments they had made to human rights.

The increasing volume of his dissident voice landed him in prison on numerous occasions. From there he wrote to his wife what must be his major literary and philosophic accomplishment, Letters to Olga, which, being cleverly cast in obscure syntax and diction, got past the censors, and circulated in samizdat. Havel's fame as both playwright and political gadfly grew at home and abroad so much so that, when the time was ripe (much of that ripeness produced by Havel himself), he became an obvious choice for president of his country. Already an internationally recognized playwright, he quickly launched himself on the international political scene, speaking to parliamentary bodies in Europe and North America and to universities around the world. Without formal university education, he has received numerous awards and honorary degrees.

Since Havel has achieved distinction in all three phases of his life—dramatist, dissident, politician—one might imagine that his life is an open book. Not so. The only previous attempt at a biography is Edá Kriseova's Václav Havel, an "authorized biography" written quickly after Havel became president and at Havel's request; it bears all the marks of both haste and uncritical devotion. Moreover it leans heavily on what Havel himself has already said in Disturbing the Peace, a book based on an interview with Havel before the velvet revolution in 1989. I welcome, therefore, the attempt by John Keane, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy and professor of politics at the University of Westminster, to fill in many of the details of Václav Havel's life and to set that life in the context of recent Eastern European history and the Czech and Slovak culture. In Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts, Keane fills in hundreds of missing details that bring Havel into clearer focus. We learn, for instance, about his family, his father's political views, his mother's love for books, his brother's scientific and philosophic pursuits, and his uncle's eccentric life. And especially for readers like me, we learn about the Czech and Slovak cultural and historical background. Keane gives us a sense of what it was like to live under the erratic totalitarian rule of Nazi thugs; to sense the relief when the Russians liberated Czechoslovakia and then the tragic grief of the quickly imposed Soviet system; to taste the growing freedom that came with the Prague Spring of 1968 and then the utter despair that followed the August appearance of Russian tanks in Prague and the violence that followed. We learn what "normalization" meant when Alexander Dubcek's communism with a human face was quashed.

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January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44