Václav Havel's Life Dissent | 1969–1989
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.
8. dubna 1975
VH writes an open letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák, a critical analysis of normalization which in reality means demoralization and the loss of human identity.
listopad–prosinec 1975
He sets up the samizdat Dispatch Editions, which circulates copies of texts by banned authors. The only attempt at a domestic production of one of Havel's plays, the premiere of The Beggar's Opera, an ironic parable about the symbiosis of the criminal underworld and worldly powers inspired by John Gay’s play, is staged by the Divadlo Na tahu amateur theatre company (directed by Andrej Krob) in Horní Počernice. Those involved, including audience members, are later fired from their jobs and persecuted. It is an event rich in symbolism and significant in the creation of a community of Czech dissidents.
1976
Through Jiří Němec, a former colleague from Tvář magazine, VH becomes closer to the music and cultural underground, in particular the scene’s leader Ivan Martin Jirous (born 1944). When the band The Plastic People of the Universe is put on trial, he organizes protests in their support. In August he joins seven Czech writers and philosophers in writing a letter to the German author Heinrich Böll. In the context of the trial, a community develops that will later form the basis of Charter 77.
9. října 1976
The single-act plays Audience and Unveiling are premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Thanks to its director Achim Benning, a decade begins during which almost all of Havel's plays are staged, one by one, some of them in world premiere.
6. ledna 1977
Publication of Charter 77, the manifesto of a movement demanding the observance of human rights in Czechoslovakia. The Charter unites several hundred activists of diverse ideological backgrounds - democrats, Christians, reform Communists and the underground. VH co-authors the text and becomes one of the Charter's three first spokespersons. He is arrested and held in custody from January to May. In October he receives a suspended sentence for “harming state interests abroad“. Another spokesman, philosopher Jan Patočka (born 1907), who Havel is very close to, dies from exhaustion following police interrogations.
1. října 1977
The third edition of a festival of underground music is held at Hrádeček near Trutnov. Though such a show by banned underground musicians at an unofficial venue was punishable, hundreds attended.
