Václav Havel's Life Biography
1968
Premiere of The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, a play based on the motif of artificial intelligence that satirizes the “robotization“ of human existence.
1968
Spring sojourn in the USA, where he attends the premiere of The Memorandum in New York, contacts Czech émigré intellectuals, follows his father's pro-American sympathies and is inspired by 1960s US culture (music, the human rights movement, hippies). Soon after his return he takes a trip around Western Europe.
1968
In the summer, before the August invasion, VH quits his post as dramaturge at the Theater on the Balustrade of his own accord. He becomes a freelance writer.
srpen 1968
VH is in Liberec, northern Bohemia when the dramatic events of the August 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops begin. He becomes involved in the civil resistance and writes a series of radio announcements on the need to resist the occupation and on the forms such resistance might take. The texts are read on air by his actor friend Jan Tříska.
1969–70
Following the August occupation he warns against the resignation of society. In the autumn he gets involved in student strikes and studies and evaluates substantively a situation inexorably headed toward another totalitarian state. Like hundreds of other creative people, he is gradually excluded from official culture and becomes a banned author. In January 1969 he becomes involved in a polemic raised by Milan Kundera under the name the Czech Lot; that debate about the meaning of the Prague Spring and the conduct of society played out in arts magazines in 1968–1970. For his involvement in the Ten Points declaration, which rejected the policy of so-called normalisation, he is questioned and accused of preparing to commit the crime of sedition. The investigation is shelved. The dissent era begins.
1970–89
He resides alternatively in Prague and at his cottage in Hrádeček near Trutnov, where for several years he undergoes a crisis as an author and is cut off from world culture. In Czechoslovakia his works are banned. He lives from royalties from his books and plays performed around the world (over 300 productions). His essays are translated and published in prestigious international newspapers. He becomes an internationally respected author and Hrádeček becomes a centre of the unofficial Czech culture and the human rights struggle.
1974–75
He works as an unskilled labourer at the Trutnov Brewery, an experience he reflects on in Audience (1975), in which character of diffident dissident Ferdinand Vaněk makes his first appearance. Other “Vaněk plays“ featuring the “unheroic hero” would later be composed not only by VH himself but also by dissident friends.
