Václav Havel's legacy: what his 90th birthday means today

Today, 5 October, Václav Havel would have turned 90 — the leading Czech playwright, dissident, and first president of post-socialist Czechoslovakia and later Czechia. Almost fifteen years have passed since his death, and an entire generation has grown up in the country without ever experiencing him as head of state or as a public figure.

Yet according to a recent survey by the STEM agency, it is young people today who rate Havel's political legacy most positively. They form their opinions not only from his speeches and actions as president, but also from his plays, essays, and the image that has taken shape in Czech society over the years since.

Havel's ideas decades later

On 19 November 2014, Václav Havel became only the fourth European to have a bust unveiled inside the United States Capitol in Washington. At the time, the name of the Czech, who had died not long before, featured in numerous ceremonial speeches. But since then the US — and indeed the whole world — has been through serious upheavals that sit uneasily with the idealistic principles Havel typically espoused.

“I don't think they've stopped working. Václav Havel's whole life — how a privileged child became an outcast, then for a time in the 1960s a successful playwright, then ended up in prison, and afterwards suddenly, ‘overnight,’ became president — is an incredible story that can inspire a great many people,” says Pavla Niklová, director of the Jewish Museum in Prague, who in 2014–2023 headed the New York-based Václav Havel Library Foundation.

For almost ten years she worked to bring Havel's figure closer to American audiences — staging his plays and organizing an oral history project in which figures from American public life, including several former presidents, shared their memories of him. According to Niklová, Havel's legacy still has much to say to today's young Americans: his essay “The Power of the Powerless” is well known around the world, and dissidents in countries with totalitarian regimes still quote it — “although, unfortunately, the US itself doesn't look its best right now either,” she notes. At the same time, she says, Havel's legacy matters even more to people in Czechia — not least because it is largely thanks to him that the country joined Western structures in the 1990s.

Recalling the first Czech president personally, Niklová describes him as someone who in the 1990s tried to explain and humanize — for instance, in radio addresses from the presidential retreat at Lány — the often turbulent events that Czechoslovakia, and later an independent Czechia, was going through. “And I also admired how wide the range of topics he could speak about was, and his humanity — he never became a fully mechanical politician,” she adds.

The play finished almost half a century later

Václav Havel never finished one of his plays — but now, almost fifteen years after the author's death, it has finally reached an audience. In late September, a cultural center in New York hosted the world premiere, in the form of a staged reading, of the one-act play “Warning,” which Havel began writing during his first imprisonment by the communist regime in 1977. It is one of the so-called “Vaněk plays” — works about the fictional dissident Ferdinand Vaněk — and work on it was completed only almost half a century later.

“I faced a problem like this for the first time in my life. It doesn't happen often,” says director and playwright Jiří Havelka, artistic director of Prague's Dejvice Theatre. It was he who received the manuscript last year — one found in 2014 in the archive of the writer and former dissident Zdeněk Urbánek by his grandson David Dušek. According to Havelka, he tried not to finish Havel's play in a way that would turn it into “what I think he himself would have made of it.”

His goal was, to a certain extent, to “preserve the fragmentary nature” of the text, even while bringing it to the finished form of a staged reading. Czech audiences will be able to judge how well this worked on 23 October, when the national premiere of “Warning” takes place at Prague Castle.

A dialogue with power that doesn't allow it

Discussing the relevance of Havel's plays for today's audiences, Jiří Havelka notes that although most of them are set against the backdrop of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 80s, their main theme is the human being: the individual within a system, and the individual among other people. “I think this is something every generation encounters and learns from its own experience,” the director says. According to him, in “Warning” the central theme is a dialogue with power that doesn't actually allow for dialogue, and the feeling, in the person entering into it, that they somehow need to “win” it.

But even someone convinced they can “win” such a situation can, in the end, deceive themselves, Havelka believes: in his view, the whole period of Havel's first imprisonment in the 1970s led him to a question that was key for him — the need to be suspicious of oneself. “Being suspicious of oneself is, in my opinion, something that works absolutely always and everywhere,” the director concludes.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz