Word: havelent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Havel, born in 1935 and raised in a well-to-do bourgeois family, began as an absurdist playwright in the style of Ionesco or Pinter or Beckett. An attitude of surrealist paranoia turned out to be the right moral optic through which to see the Communist world clearly, and Havel had keen eyesight. Constricted as a playwright, he became a dissident. Imprisoned as a dissident, he became a symbol. Communism was brutal and stupid and corrupt. Havel was Czechoslovakia with brains -- the country's better self, its idealist, its moral philosopher, the visionary of "living in truth." When the Communist...
...When Havel resigned the mostly ceremonial office last week, the ground beneath him was shifting. Czechoslovakia may soon split in two -- the Slovaks in the eastern half of the country breaking off to form an independent state, the Bohemians and Moravians in the Czech lands to the west organizing a faster-moving, more entrepreneurial state that might soon integrate with the European Community. In some ways a breakup would be logical. The Slovaks and those in the Czech lands were pieces of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire knit together in 1918, but they have deep differences of background, outlook...
Some Czechs believe that Havel is too idealistic for politics. But his resignation may prove to be the shrewdest move in the game. He may now help invent a new Czech constitution and then become the first President of the new Czech state, with powers greater than those he has just abandoned...
...case, Havel's moral importance transcends Central European politics. His ideas aim toward formation of a kind of global civil society. The breakup of Czechoslovakia might be a sort of rehearsal for the problems involved in larger rearrangements of the world order. Havel asserts values not often advanced in world politics -- courtesy, good taste, intelligence, decency and, above all, responsibility. He asserted them against the Communist regime. , Anyone who thinks Havel's values are charming but useless in the real world must consider that the Communists are now gone...
INTERVIEW: Vaclav Havel's Future...