In the endless pile of studies, biography, a monograph and other works about the life, work and creativity of Václav Havel, one of the most significant personalities of our era, which he permanently marked with his literary and political activity, the book by Kieran Williams, a distinguished professor from the American University of Drake (Iowa), an expert in comparative politics (whose expert services are often used by the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and the author of several works on the politics and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe, stands out for its erudition, full knowledge of the people and events he writes about, comprehensive information and above all for its contextual analysis of the culture and spirit of the times in which the great Czech writer, dissident and later President of the Republic actively participated.
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POLITICAL SOBRIETY
Williams thoroughly studied Havel's biography, and it is especially important to point out that, along with numerous works published on the so-called major world languages, as a good connoisseur of the Czech language he also consulted the original material in the writer's native language, so that in his book we find a number of important and seemingly less important pictures and (or) details which, when put together in a mosaic, often show and interpret in a completely new light Vašek's (as the Czechs affectionately call Havel) character and work: Havel's private life (youth, family, relationship with his wife Olga Šplichalova, lovers, friends, and artistic and political doubts, etc.), public activity, dissident days and police persecutions, staged court trials and his behavior "before law and order authorities" while serving several years in prison, until he grew into an unquestionable national political leader and assumed (for two terms) the office of president, first of Czechoslovakia, and after the breakup of the common state (1993) of the Czech Republic, when he profiled himself not only as an intellectual mass on the international level par excellence, but also as a true statesman whose word was carefully followed and listened to in all the world capitals of power. What Tomáš Masaryk meant to the world in the period between the two world wars, the same, and perhaps even more, Václav Havel meant to international politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the communist empire: an unquestionable intellectual and moral authority acquired and confirmed by long-term dissident activity, political courage and sobriety. That these were not empty phrases, Havel testified with his life, in which there were many human weaknesses and inconsistencies, but which never, ever came into collision with his fight for the "common good". And precisely because he did not hide his flaws, but dealt with them in the way that we all do on a daily basis - sometimes successfully, sometimes not - the citizens truly loved Vašek, because they were sure that they could trust him, that he would never betray or sell them, that he would always tell them the truth openly and that he was simply "one of them", just with a little more (or, nevertheless, significantly more) intellectual strength, moral responsibility and statesmanship.
BIOGRAPHY PROBLEMS
Havel's simplicity was never feigned, he was simply like that, he continued to drink beer in his "bierc" and after he became the president of the country, he refused a police escort (although, of course, the secret services had to protect him on duty, against his will), he did not pay attention to his persecutors and torturers, he hung out with the same people from the dissident period, avoiding elites of all kinds, who, after all, he despised since childhood. Namely, between the two world wars, the Havel family belonged to the rich and influential Prague elite and gave prominent names to Czech culture and entrepreneurship (they owned, among other things, the famous film studio "Barrandov", the cult concert and cinema hall "Lucerna" in the center of Prague, etc.), but Vašek felt uncomfortable in front of his school friends and was ashamed of his wealth and privileged position, not wanting to stand out from others in such and such a way. And that sincere modesty adorned him throughout his life, similarly to his brother Ivan, a famous mathematician and member of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts. As Williams writes in his book: "V. Havel's biography created difficulties; in his childhood he was ashamed that he came from a rich family, and at a young age, after the Communist Party seized power, his background blocked his path to education and the profession he regretted to pursue. At the age of twenty, as an already well-known playwright, he began to tell the story of his own life in order to satisfy the curious public, but he did so reluctantly, fearing that the writer, once it begins to be considered worthy of special attention, it loses sight of the world in its real dimensions”. In addition, for the entire time he was engaged in literature, he lived in fear, wondering: if he could, would he manage to express in words what he feels directly and instinctively, and this is what permanently drove him to creativity and constant tension to grasp the meaning and to never give up questioning his own possibilities. In this way, with the help of several spiritual authorities and teachers (philosophers Jan Patočka and Josef Šafařik) whom he admired, but whose ideas he later expanded and developed independently, he created a great work composed of three, let's say, horizons: the immediate environment into which man is "thrown" by his birth and maturation, then the concrete, existential home (family, friends, community), which serves as a hidden framework of life, an inspiration of civic courage and a source of solidarity, and the absolute horizon from which human values and purposes originate. From this arose both his personal strength and the strength of the small Czech and Slovak dissident community (signatories of "Charter 77"), which he led in the "lead years" of communism and, ultimately, with it, won victory over one of the cruelest regimes within the Soviet neo-Stalin empire.
CONSOLATION IN POETRY
Working on extensive, unexplored archival material that includes the first manuscript versions of Havel's plays, as well as a significant part of his correspondence that has not been published to date, K. Williams has written an intriguing as well as a thorough biography of a man who was and remains a symbol of human courage and honesty and for whom we can only regret that he was not crowned with the Nobel Prize (on several occasions he was considered the favorite to win the nomination for both literature and peace), which he more than deserved, but it did not lose its importance and greatness, only the Nobel Foundation was embarrassed, unfortunately not the first and only time.
The book is divided into seven chapters, and in each the author deals exhaustively with those segments of the writer's biography that shaped him as a person, but also as an artist, dissident, political heretic and, finally, a statesman who was admired by the whole world, because he (and) made long-term moves aimed at calming down and solving issues and problems, especially related to Central Europe, which for a whole century and even longer burdened the mutual relations of the peoples of these areas, but above all the relations of Prague with Germany and Russia, countries that throughout history have openly encroached on Czech (and Slovak) territory and committed great evil against the Czech people, especially during the Second World War, i.e. after the establishment of the communist system in Czechoslovakia in 1948 (which lasted until the Velvet Revolution in 1989).
In one of his last diary entries, in the book "Please be brief", Havel recalled Šafařik's stubborn refusal to finish the essay on which he had been working for almost 30 years and which grew to 600 pages over time, and when he finally relented and let it go to print, he died. Havel interpreted it with the words: "Obviously, at the moment when he completed his life's work, his life lost its meaning." To some extent, something similar happened to Havel, Williams claims. Devastated by a serious illness, he found solace in the poetry that he simply devoured in his younger days and constantly returned to the lines of his favorite poet Jiří Wolker: "I am not afraid of death, death is not evil, death is only part of a difficult life/ what is terrible, what is evil, is dying".
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