Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts

For more than 30 years, Czechoslovakian playwright Václav Havel courageously asserted the primacy of individual imagination and morality against his homeland's monolithic communist state. After the Velvet Revolution, his fellow citizens rewarded him with the presidency of newly democratic Czechoslovakia, yet political controversy and ill health have dogged him during his decade in power. British historian John Keane's commendably balanced biography provides a full account of the stylistically innovative, politically challenging plays that made Havel's reputation; the pioneering human rights activism expressed in the famous Charter 77 petition; his friendships and quarrels with fellow intellectuals like Milan Kundera; and his skirmishes with the authorities, beginning with a speech defending artistic freedom delivered when he was 20 and culminating in several jail sentences. Readers who prefer biographers to assume an air of lofty objectivity may be put off by Keane's blunt opinions and "cubist" narrative style, but his background as a political historian and as editor of the English-language version of Havel's seminal essay "The Power of the Powerless" gives his judgments considerable weight. Intelligent and probing, Keane's biography reveals a "post-modern president" whose struggles have lessons for triumphant capitalists as well as repentant socialists. --Wendy Smith