A Biographical Note on Václav Havel

A Biographical Note on Vaclav Havel MICHAL SCHONBERG Living with the elements of the absurd comes naturally to the Czechs. A succession of powerful bureaucratic systems of various political and ideologicalhues , but all sharing a rigidity ofattitude and a pathological self-centredness, has created conditions in which absurd situations and circumstances flourish. Indeed, so ubiquitous and all-pervasive have these conditions become, that they are ever-increasingly confused with the traditionally acceptable and usual norms of behaviour. The absurd has its champions and practitioners everywhere ; nothing and nobody is immune to it. It is found in all the public and private places and situations where sanity has reached itsouter limits, where the fear bred by hopelessness comes into conflict with the people's powerful will to survive. This biographical note is concerned with the great observer and taxonomist of the absurdities of contemporary Czech society, the playwright and theoretician V'clav Havel. Like his two great predecessors in the Czech literature of the absurd, laroslav Ha!ek and Franz Kafka, Vaclav Havel was born in Prague, and his life, much like the lives of the other two, was interrupted by war. But whereas Ha!ek and Kafka lived their early lives under a relatively benevolent form of absolutism and their shortened adulthoods under democratic conditions, Havel spent most ofhis childhood in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and practically all ofhis later life has been spent under Communist rule. He was born on October 5, 1936 into the family of wealthy entrepreneurs. After the Communist take-over in 1948, the family holdings were confiscated, but paradoxically, while the wealth disappeared, its stigma remained. To Havel that meant not being able to enter high school; instead, he became a chemical technician and studied at night. In 1955, because of a good recommendation from his place of work, Havel was accepted into the Faculty of Economics of the Prague Polytechnical Institute. (There is a delightful touch ofthe absurd in the authorities' decision to admit the son of a former millionaire to business school. It must have been felt that some 2 MICHAL SCHONBERG of Ihe family's eOlrepreneurial brilliance may have rubbed off on the son and should be put to use.) Two years later, in another change of political climate, Havel was expelled from the Polytechnic and drafted into the anny. Little is known by outsiders of his two-year military career, save for the fact that as an "unreliable element" he served in a special unit; these units usually contained criminals, troublemakers, and intellectuals. We may, no doubt, assume that as in Ha~ek's case - Havel's appreciation of the absurd and his interest in the consequences of misplaced power were refined by the years in the barracks. Havel sees his early experiences in a positive light. He writes: "It is well known that the absurd and the grotesque dimensions of the world are always seen best from below.'" It was this "view from below," combined with a superior intelligence, and the peculiar condition of being singled out for isolation in a society professing egalitarianism, which provided the impetus for a career in writing. The choice of the specific genre was really the only thing to be decided, and that decision came as aresult of fortunate circumstances when, upon returning to civilian life, Havel got ajob as a stage-hand in Jan Werich's Theatre ABC. It would appear that Havel was once again starting from the bottom, but as the protege of Werich, the most important theatrical personality and intellectual leader of contemporary Czechoslovakia, Havel was destined not to remain "at the bottom" for very long. And indeed, by 1960 he had risen to the position of assistant director with the great (and most neglected) theatre director Alfred Radok; and later on that year he joined the company of the Balustrade Theatre (Divadlo Na ZlIbradli). In the communal milieu of the Balustrade Theatre, Havel worked as a stage-hand, lighting technician, administrator, director, dramaturge, and, most importantly, as the resident playwright. It was here that he was able to gain firsthand experience with the works of the French absurdist playwrights, which, together with the works of Kafka, had the most profound...