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As an 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 in his shopwindow to prove himself orthodox and ensure his comfort. Dissecting the web of hypocrisies and self-deceptions that formed the social fabric of communist life, Havel argues for "living within the truth." He writes, "You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society."
If Havel, 53, actually were an enemy of the society in which he grew up, it would be understandable. Long before he was singled out for his outspoken politics and insurrectionist art, he was subjected to discrimination because he was born to wealth. His father was a real estate developer. An even richer uncle owned hotels and the Barrandov movie studios, which remain the center of Czechoslovak filmmaking. One of his English-language translators, Czech emigre Vera Blackwell, has said, "If Czechoslovakia had remained primarily a capitalist society, Vaclav Havel would be just about the richest man in the country." Instead, by the time Havel was a teenager, the communists had dispossessed the family. More painful still, Stalinist rules barred youths of upper-class descent from full-time education beyond early adolescence. Undaunted, Havel took a menial job in a chemical laboratory and went to night school in an attempt to qualify for university study, but his application was rejected time and again. Intrigued by the theater, he signed on as a stagehand.
Finally, talent won out over bureaucracy. Within a few years he worked his way up to literary manager of the Theater on the Balustrade, Prague's principal showcase for the avant-garde. That made him a prominent part of the Prague Spring, which was not just a fleeting season but several years of increasing freedom, ferment and hope. Havel's first script, The Garden Party, a surreal satire of communist pedanticism, was produced at home in 1963 and in at least seven other nations -- in 18 separate theaters in West Germany. British critic Kenneth Tynan lauded the play as "absurdism with deep roots in contemporary anxieties." The perspective in that and subsequent plays often reminded critics of Samuel Beckett, the Irish-born playwright of diminution and despair whose death was announced last week. Havel considered himself a disciple of Beckett's, although his work rarely shared the older writer's paralyzing hopelessness, and Beckett returned the compliment: his 1984 one-act Catastrophe, portraying the inquisition of a dissident, was an explicit tribute.