H.E. Václav Havel
Vaclav Havel is one of the best known citizens of the Czech Republic. He became famous as Velvet Revolution, and in December 1989 he was elected President of the Czechoslovakia and later on of the Czech Republic. He was awarded numerous international prizes and honorary doctorates.
Vaclav Havel was born in Prague on October 5, 1936. In 1951 he completed his compulsory schooling. Being the offspring of a prominent Prague businessmen's family, he was barred from pursuing regular studies afterwards. It was at the age of nineteen that he started publishing studies and articles in literary and theater magazines.
Family tradition hasled him toward embracing the humanist values of Czech culture that were suppressed or destroyed in the 1950s. As he was not allowed, due to his family background, to study humanities, he went on to a Technical University where he spent two years. After completing his military service, he worked as a stage hand at the ABC Theater and later, from 1960, in the Theater on the Balustrade. The latter theater produced his first plays, most importantly The Garden Party (1963), a piece representing in an outstanding manner the strong regeneration tendencies prevailing in Czech culture and Czech society in the 1960s which culminated in the so-called Prague Spring of 1968.
At that time Vaclav Havel was taking part in public and cultural life as one of the standard-bearers of the democratic concepts of Czech culture and society. In the second half of the 1960s his next plays, The Memorandum (1965) and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968), were performed.