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Vaclav Havel once asked, "is not Franz Kafka, one of the most serious and tragic authors of this century, at the same time a humorist?" I think that whoever does not laugh when reading his novels...does not understand them." Havel's 1984 play, "Largo Desolato: A Play in Seven Scenes," presents the comic and hauntingly Kafkaesque world of Professor Leopold, a philosopher who has gotten into "trouble" for expounding on "intellectual hooliganism" in a recent treatise...

Author: By Hugh G. Eakin, | Title: Loeb's 'Largo' Impresses | 7/29/1994 | See Source »

...actress-model who starred in the destruction of Gary Hart's career is getting inadvertent help from a more successful candidate: Vaclav Havel. However, Rice got poor notices for her Virginia performance as a student who offers herself to a professor in the Czech leader's Largo Desolato...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Faint Comeback of the Week | 11/5/1990 | See Source »

...artist, Havel has always been a political prophet, prone to jeremiads. In Largo Desolato, the hero faces unspecified tortures, which he can avert if he changes his name and declares himself not to be the author of his works. Although he ultimately says no, he wavers for a moment, and that is enough to satisfy the state. In Temptation, Havel retells the Faust myth in terms of the ego-driven distortions of truth committed by his compatriots. In the essay The Power of the Powerless, he lambastes an archetypal grocer who places a poster saying WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: VACLAV HAVEL: Dissident To President | 1/8/1990 | See Source »

Havel holds numerous awards and honors for his plays, which include The Garden Party and Largo Desolato; essays The Power of the Powerless; and Letters to Olga, a collection of missives that he wrote to his wife while in prison. Havel's work reflects the struggle of citizens in a totalitarian state. Although he is both produced and published abroad, his work has been banned in Czechoslovakia since 1969 and must circulate underground...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Czechoslovakia Act of Artistic Unfreedom | 3/6/1989 | See Source »

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