Václav Havel

Also known as Vaclav Havel

Czech statesman, playwright, and former dissident, the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic (1936–2011)

AI overview

Václav Havel was a Czech playwright and political dissident who became a leading voice against communist rule in Czechoslovakia and ultimately served as the country's last president before it split into two nations. His life and work matter because he embodied the power of moral resistance and artistic expression in challenging authoritarian government, and he shaped the political future of Central Europe during a pivotal moment in history.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 5 October 1936
Died: 18 December 2011
Works: 157

Top works

Podoby
pour un monde meilleur
Le rapport dont vous êtes l'objet
Moc bezmocných
Vernisáž

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: Czechia
Active from: 1778
Active to: 1826

Discography

Pastorální partity1980

Discogs

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 192
Total plays: 634

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Nivolumab versus Docetaxel in Advanced Squamous-Cell Non–Small-Cell Lung Cancer
· 2015 · cited 7,003x
Mutational landscape determines sensitivity to PD-1 blockade in non–small cell lung cancer
· 2015 · cited 6,935x
THE DISTRIBUTION AND CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF ULTRACENTRIFUGALLY SEPARATED LIPOPROTEINS IN HUMAN SERUM
· 1955 · cited 6,877x
Crystallographic Computing System JANA2006: General features
· 2014 · cited 4,023x
First-Line Atezolizumab plus Chemotherapy in Extensive-Stage Small-Cell Lung Cancer
· 2018 · cited 3,067x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.”
“Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.”
“True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?”
“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”
“There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them — isn't this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?”
“I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

~38 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Václav Havel ( Czech: [ˈvaːt͡slav ˈɦavɛl] ; 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays and memoirs.

His educational opportunities having been limited by his bourgeois background under the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Havel first rose to prominence as a playwright. In works such as The Garden Party and The Memorandum, Havel used an absurdist style to criticize the Communist system. After participating in the Prague Spring and being blacklisted after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he became more politically active and helped found several dissident initiatives, including Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. His political activities brought him under the surveillance of the StB secret police, and he spent several periods as a political prisoner, the longest of his imprisoned terms being nearly four years, between 1979 and 1983.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Václav Havel” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.