HAVEL AT COLUMBIA:

The Examined Life: Analyzing Havel’s Legacy

By Mark Krotov and Elena Lagoutova

Columbia University and Barnard College

 

Organized by Czech Studies at Columbia and The Harriman Institute, “The Examined Life: The Literature and Politics of Václav Havel” was an all-day symposium dedicated to delineating Havel’s substantial contributions to the interwoven realms of literature and politics. The first half of the symposium saw four scholars assessing and interpreting Havel’s written work, though all of them asserted that in Havel’s case, political consciousness could not be separated from the creation of literature.

 

Professor Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, of the University of British Columbia, noted that because “Havel rejected ideology that did not question its own assumptions,” he was hypercritical of his politicized surroundings and used his plays to question and deconstruct the dominant ideological motifs of the Soviet era.

 

Goetz-Stankiewicz also argued that Havel filled his plays with clichés that begged for thorough analysis, a reading that was echoed by Paul Wilson, who found that translating Havel’s letters and essays was exceedingly difficult because of the playwright’s reliance on evasion and obscurity. But Havel only deployed opaque writing when he needed to get around censors because his most powerful works are direct and forceless—Wilson noted that in “Power of the Powerless,” Havel “cut to the core of totalitarianism.”

 

The University of Pennsylvania’s Peter Steiner chose to focus on an altogether different aspect of Havel’s literary work—his visual poetry. Every poem that Steiner presented seemed to conclude with an existential dead end, because as Steiner noted, “the possibility of choice is insufficient—with either option, the truth will be mangled.”

 

Finally, NYU’s Carol Rocamora’s lecture provided an apt conclusion to the morning session as she narrated the efforts of American and British theatre directors to keep Havel’s legacy alive, even as he was trapped in prison.

Panelists in the afternoon session focused on Havel’s legacy, as well, though their comments were tinged with nostalgia for a time when the president was anything but a traditional politician.

 

The first speaker was Martin Palouš, the former Czech Ambassador to the US and the current Czech Ambassador to the UN, who spoke about Havel’s innate ability to understand what his society needed. Havel embraced NGOs that were often seen as threatening and urged his citizens to understand totalitarianism’s origins, rather than erasing the regime from their collective memory. Palouš noted that Havel did not believe in forgetting the past, but sought to undermine a system’s evils by closely scrutinizing its initial ideals.

 

Jiří Pehe, the Director of NYU in Prague and the former Director of the Political Department of Havel’s Presidential Office, spoke about Havel’s transformation from a political dissident to a dissident politician. “You are making a mistake if you mark the beginning of Havel’s entry into politics in 1989,” Pehe said, for most of Havel’s writing has always dealt with politics. That said, Havel was destined to become an unorthodox politician. As president, “he did not play by the rules, because he did not become a politician under normal circumstances.”

 

Petr Pithart, the former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, introduced his remarks by noting that “to be an intellectual and a dissident is natural. To be a dissident and a politician is strange. But to be an intellectual and a politician is truly contradictory.” Havel, the intellectual who became a dissident and then a politician, was used to doubting everything and asking questions that did not always have an answer. Like his politics, his language was never purely rhetorical. He believed that a real question must start without an answer.