"Few people can say they changed the world," former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs P. J. Crowley tweeted Sunday. "#VaclevHavel was one of those people who created the #Europe we have today."
Havel began as an avant-garde poet, publishing samizdat chapbooks in the 1950s and 1960s. As of 1960, he became a playwright, using black humor to probe the hopelessness of life under totalitarianism. His plays often were banned in Czechoslovakia - but that gave them cachet in Europe and the United States. His growing fame flouted the very censorship his works satirized.
He may have had greatest impact as an essayist, as in his crucial "The Power of the Powerless" of 1978, opening with a sardonic echo of Marx and Engels: "A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called 'dissent.' "
In 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this manipulator of symbols became, often reluctantly, a symbol himself. As of February, he was, as so often in the previous decade, behind bars, where dim-witted communist leaders had once again thrown him. On May 17, bowing to international protest, they released him - or tried to. All Havel had to do, said his captors, was sign a make-nice statement. Brilliantly, he refused. In the comedy the tragedy had become, the regime let him walk, reasoning it was more dangerous to jail poetry than to let it out into the open where you could watch it. Havel passed the next months in the shadowy resistance movement in and around Prague.
