The Dissident Politics In V Clav Havel S Vanek Plays

The Dissident Politics in Václav Havel’s Vaněk Plays: Who Is Ferdinand Vaněk Anyway focuses on Ferdinand Vaněk, a semi-autobiographical character created by Václav Havel and featured in a series of nine plays written by Havel himself and three other dissident writers – Pavel Kohout, Pavel Landovský, and Jiří Dienstbier. By exploring the ‘Vaněk experience,’ Carol Strong details a multi-episodic, absurdist journey that provides an ‘insider’s view’ of the challenges facing those daring enough to question the status quo, a view that remains relevant today. Strong’s contention is that the lines found in these plays served as a ‘secret language’ of dissent in Cold War Czechoslovakia, which called the citizenry to contemplate the need for societal reform. As the plays were written at a time when the work of Havel and other dissidents were banned, the plays were never performed publicly, but through clandestine living room performances and the sharing of samizdat scripts the plays found an audience. Select phrases were indeed whispered throughout underground networks and helped forge a sense of oppositional solidarity among potential activists. Strong’s argument is that the ‘Vaněk experience’ metaphorically highlights how official power mechanisms are among the least insidious forms of societal power, as the state must follow predictable patterns of legal jurisprudence. By contrast, non-governmental forms of power – as exercised by one’s fellow citizens through informal social channels – can challenge oppositional actors more because of the personal tone they adopt. Using this approach, Strong presents a timelessly relevant critique of modern society with its consumerist / conformist tendencies.

Vaclav Havel was an iconoclast and philosopher-king, an internationally successful playwright who became a political dissident and then, reluctantly, a president. His pivotal role in the Velvet Revolution, the end of Communism and the birth of a modern, west-facing Czech Republic makes him a key figure of the 20th century. Michael Zantovsky, one of Havel's closest friends, explores his remarkable life."

Vaclav Havel is revered as one of the 20th-century's great playwrights, dissidents, and honest champions of democracy. In this study, John Keane reveals a Havel so far unseen, dramatising the key moments of joy, misery, triumph and tragedy on which his life has turned.

A biography of Vaclav Havel, the dissident Czechoslovak playwright who spent years fighting for freedom of expression and eventually was elected president of a free and independent Czechoslovak republic.

Eight powerful contemporary Czech plays along with four illuminating commentaries by their authors are presented in this volume. The plays are unusual in that all share the same protagonist, the "dissident" writer, Ferdinand Vanek. In Czechoslovakia, these plays can only circulate in faded, dog-eared typescripts. These clandestine "unbooks" have become a vital force in currenc Czech literature. It is especially gratifying, therefore, to present the Vanek plays in a book which will endure. When Vaclav Havel first invented his fictional playwright to entertain his friends in 1975, he had no idea that Vanek would be "taken over" by three of them--all real Czech writers. Between them, Havel, Pavel Kahout, Pavel Landovsky, and Jiri Dienstbier have made what Havel has called the "Vanek principle" into a public property. The plays explore the "realism of the strange," mixing fact and fiction, levity and seriousness. While Vanek says little in the plays, his silence is an eloquent retort to the falsehoods of bureaucratic language and jargon. Vanek has greater freedom than his creators. Havel and Dienstbier continue to live in the Eastern Bloc, while Kohout and Landovsky, both now residents of Vienna, cannot return. Their corporate character, however, has managed to travel all over the world. The Vanek plays have been staged in many European countries as well as the United States. With the exception of the three plays by Havel, these translations have been especially prepared for this volume. The Vanek Plays will be of interest to stduents of contemporary theatre, producers, directors, and anyone concerned with the deep divisions of our modern world and literature's response to it.

The Memorandum is a remarkably witty assault on the madness of "efficiency" peculiar to total bureaucracy. In a large office, and unknown to the Managing Director, a new language called Ptydepe is installed as the official means of inter-office communication

This monograph traces the history of the dissident as a transnational phenomenon, exploring Soviet dissidents in Communist Central Europe from the mid-1960s until 1989. It argues that our understanding of the transnational activist would not be what it is today without the input of Central European oppositionists and ties the term to the global emergence and evolution of human rights. The book examines how we define dissidents and explores the association of political resistance to authoritarian regimes, as well as the impact of domestic and international recognition of the dissident figure. Turning to literature to analyse the meaning and impact of the dissident label, the book also incorporates interviews and primary accounts from former activists. Combining a unique theoretical approach with new empirical material, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary history, politics and culture in Central Europe.