Word: czeched
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...publicly criticized Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's policies and rallied British writers to think more politically. She marches for Soviet Jewry. She organizes petitions and badgers officials to help free dissident writers in jails across Europe and Africa. One of these has made history: playwright Vaclav Havel, the new Czech President. For years, from his prison cell, he exchanged letters with Pinter. The couple will visit Havel to share his triumph in February...
...regularly writes to the prisoners: "We may never hear from them but we keep writing, for years." She rejoices that now for the first time Russian writers are in PEN and Czech writers are back in the fold. "It's a labor of Sisyphus," she sighs. "Just as they are let out in Russia, they've increased in Turkey and Kenya...
...months after the 1968 Soviet invasion ended the Prague Spring of intellectual freedom in his homeland, Czech playwright Vaclav Havel joined many of his countrymen lining up at the U.S. embassy in quest of a visa. Like most of those in the queue, he had something to flee from: the hard-line new government wanted him out and had banned his works from production or publication. Unlike most of the others, Havel had someplace to go: three of his plays had won acclaim in the West, and he had been offered both a job at New York City's prestigious...
...outspoken politics and insurrectionist art, he was subjected to discrimination because he was born to wealth. His father was a real estate developer. An even richer uncle owned hotels and the Barrandov movie studios, which remain the center of Czechoslovak filmmaking. One of his English-language translators, Czech emigre Vera Blackwell, has said, "If Czechoslovakia had remained primarily a capitalist society, Vaclav Havel would be just about the richest man in the country." Instead, by the time Havel was a teenager, the communists had dispossessed the family. More painful still, Stalinist rules barred youths of upper-class descent from full...
...PROFILE: Czech man of conscience Vaclav Havel...