On the eve of his 50th birthday, Vaclav Havel looks back on his life in the theatre, the literary politics of his early years and the stagnation that followed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Havel also discusses his part in his country's struggle and the price he paid for this.
B-Format Paperback
Über den Autor Havel Vaclav
![]()
Václav Havel was born in Czechoslovakia in 1936. Among his plays, those best known in the West areThe Garden Party, The Memorandum, Largo Desolato, Temptation, and three one-act plays, Audience,Private View and Protest. He is a founding spokesman of Charter 77 and the author of many influential essays on the nature of totalitarianism and dissent. In 1979 he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for his involvement in the human rights movement. Out of this imprisonment came his book of letters to his wife, Letters to Olga (1981). In November 1989 he helped to found the Civic Forum, the first legal opposition movement in Czechoslovakia in forty years; in December 1989 he was elected President of Czechoslovakia; and in 1994 became the first President of the independent Czech Republic. His memoir, To the Castle and Back, was published in 2007.
