Havel

Havel: A Life by Michael Zantovsky, 517 pages

Vaclav Havel was born into a wealthy, culturally active Czech family in 1936.  After the Second World War, his family background resulted in him being actively discriminated against by the Communist government installed by the victorious Soviets, and the marginalized young man naturally gravitated to the bohemian scene in Bohemia.  A successful career as a playwright developed in tandem with a role as one of the most visible and eloquent dissidents in the Warsaw Pact, a role which repeatedly landed him in prison, but ultimately helped produce the Velvet Revolution by which the Czechoslovakian Communist regime was overthrown.  Reinventing himself as a politician as much out of necessity as choice, Havel became President of the newly free Czechoslovakia, only to have the country split into Czech and Slovak halves beneath him.

Biographer Zantovsky was Havel's friend and sometime spokesman, and his intimate knowledge of his subject is an important asset in dealing with such a complex, and sometimes contradictory, figure.  He does not conceal, although he does try to explain, his friend's shortcomings as a statesman and as a man.  Zantovsky's greatest revelation is the extent to which Havel's philosophy of "living in truth" was the result of his experience as a dissident, rather than the cause, as was his non-dogmatic experiential approach to that truth.  Indeed, in Zantovsky's telling, much of Havel's approach to politics was shaped, not so much by the hubris of the Communist regime, but by his own experiences of humiliation at the hands of that regime, both large and small.  Nothing shines through as clearly as Havel's humility - his awareness, based partially on bitter experience but also on a playwright's instincts, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished alone.