When, to the surprise of western chancelleries, central Europe changed utterly in the autumn and winter of 1989, it was a stocky Czech dramatist lately released from prison who produced the abiding metaphor for what had happened. In 1947, after Yalta and Potsdam, said Václav Havel, who has died aged 75 after a long illness, the clock of history had been stopped in his half of Europe – and now it had started again. Havel's own career might resemble the very incarnation of that metaphor – of the notion it encapsulates of communism as no more than a bracket in history, a long deviation from the onward march of capitalism's permanent revolution.
The son and grandson of wealthy architect-entrepreneurs, and on his mother's side, grandson of a writer who was an ambassador, then a government minister, the young Havel and his family suffered the discomforts of sequestration and class discrimination when the communists took power in 1948. For a time, his father was imprisoned and the family banished from Prague. Václav had to leave school at 15 and was refused higher education.
After five years as a laboratory assistant and a spell of national service in the engineer corps (following Soviet practice, sons of the politically unreliable classes were often trained as sappers, readily expendable in mine-sweeping), he nevertheless made his way into the theatre and the world of literary politics, and wrote clever, politically risky plays in the absurdist manner that won him an international reputation.
After the Soviet invasion that turned the Prague spring of 1968 to long winter, he became a leading dissident, a founder of Charter 77 and Vons (the Czech acronym of Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted), and spent much of his 40s in and out of prison. Finally, he emerged as the effective voice of the crowds that, after 20 years of sullen resentment, at last exploded in Wenceslas Square in the winter of 1989 and, having postered all of freezing Prague with the slogan Havel na Hrad! (Havel to the Castle!), did indeed send him across the river and up the hill to the castle as president of the reborn republic.
A kind of restoration, then? In fact, it was more complicated and more interesting than that, just as Havel's tenancy of the Hradcany Hradcany castle, as well as being a happy ending – triumph after long struggle – was also the beginning of a period when politics became far more complicated. Like his Polish comrade in arms, Adam Michnik, Havel soon registered a mood of unease with the former dissidents turned politicians acting for a public that had mostly not been particularly brave or oppositional, and wanted to forget about "all that" and get on with getting and spending.
Now, struggling with the constraints of a weak form of presidency, Havel found himself at odds with many of the political and economic views of the abrasive, new haute bourgeoisie represented by Václav Klaus and his monetarist government party which had emerged as successor to the decayed regime.
At first it had seemed that the dominant voice emerging in the post-communist era would be a kind of social democracy. Many of Havel's allies in the Civic Forum, the umbrella organisation of opposition, were social democrats who had been among what he used to call the anti-dogmatic wing of the Czech Communist party before the events of August 1968. He himself had never joined the party, and while closer to social democracy than any other form of organised politics, his beliefs drew on a mixture of the political liberalism of Czechoslovakia's prewar philosopher-president Thomas Masaryk and a homespun though long-pondered philosophy of his own, derived from his reading of Edmund Husserl and concerns about the dangers that late 20th-century materialism posed.
But enrichissez-vous was more the European tradition preoccupying his Thatcherite opponents. Havel, they implied, was a foggy-minded, impractical idealist. What he really wanted to do with the clock of history was to put it back – to the early, optimistic days of Masaryk's new Czech democracy. It was not long into Havel's presidency before it became clear that history was not resuming itself in any simple way in the new circumstances in which Czechoslovakia found itself. A division had grown between the free-marketry of Klaus's party and the Slovak emphasis on devolution and more interventionist economic policies. On 1 January 1993, the people of what became the Czech Republic were divorced from their brethren in Slovakia (to Havel's real distress, though there was nothing more he could have done to stop the secession).
What was striking about Havel's life and career is that its contradictions seemed to be the very means by which his life and work hung together with great consistency. Some were more apparent than real, such as the contrasting (as if a falsity was being shrewdly detected) of the deep seriousness of his public, political utterances with the informal gaiety, even glamour, of his refurbishing of the castle above the Vltava.
Within months of his arrival, he had it spectacularly lit at night by Jan Svoboda, Prague's great set designer, and new costumes for the guard were commissioned from the costume designer of Miloš Forman's film Amadeus. The young president scuttled along the endless corridors, zooming on a child's scooter from meeting to meeting, surrounded by vibrant young collaborators from artistic and intellectual life, under walls newly hung with modern paintings. (An early profile described his secretary as "a busty hippy in a skintight, purple mini-dress, with filigreed white stockings, lace-up boots and funkily mismatched earrings". But this, after all, was Bara Stepanova, one of the heroines of the Society for a Merrier Present, a Dadaish troupe given to posing as riot police in the November demonstrations, and threatening the crowd with cucumbers and salamis. When she produced the scooter, Havel, then still secretary-less, hired her on the spot.)
Havel, of course, was staging a different kind of play. He felt instinctively the need to shake the place out of its long gloom and cheer up his depressed compatriots by celebrating with some show and style the overthrow of the dour and philistine satrapy that had preserved their isolation. And it would have been naive to suppose that the author of plays such as The Garden Party and The Memorandum, with their devastating assault on alienated thought and language, would not have something urgent to say about the dangers facing post-industrial societies, in a mode of discourse by then familiar to any reader of the samizdat essays or the Letters to Olga, his reflective writings from prison cast in the form of letters to his wife (the only kind of writing allowed him, once a week).
A more significant contradiction was the effect of a privileged childhood on the way he understood life. When one of the few wartime bombs dropped on Prague damaged their apartment, his family had retreated to Moravia, where "a fat little model child" taken to a village school with village children by his governess first experienced the shame of privileged difference.
Twenty years later, he still recalled the burden of those early "advantages" which produced feelings of inferiority, not superiority. "I longed for equality with others, not because I was some kind of infant social revolutionary, but because I felt separate and excluded ... alone, inferior, ridiculed." And in one of the prison letters, he described how he felt "never quite sure that my inclusion in the world won't turn out to be illusory, fraudulent and temporary". This left him with the gnawing, Kafkaesque -like question: had he perhaps "a fatal flaw that prevents me from merg ing wholly with the order of things"?
The reality of these feelings is evident, and they were regularly reinforced and played upon in the world of work – he had to leave school in the grim year of the show trial and execution of Rudolf Slánský, the purged deputy leader of the first postwar government – and during his national service. He once recalled how at the successful first night of one of his plays in the Vienna Volkstheater in 1968, taking bows on stage to the audience shouting "Havel! Havel!" he had suddenly "an intense feeling that somewhere in the wings ... there was this corporal who had given me a really hard time, and that he was about to shout 'Havel! Havel! Hit the floor! Let's have no more shit from you.'"
This habit of looking at the world "from below", from "outside", was a key to his plays and his acute feeling for the absurd. He acknowledged his love for and debt to Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco – even more to his countryman Kafka, who, he would remind you sternly, was a comic writer, an inspirer of laughter in the dark. But he felt that his own writing was driven primarily by the experience he had described, in an attempt to grapple with that old sense of not being at home in the world.
It developed as he learned about the theatre. When he left the army, he had the good fortune to be taken on as a stagehand at the ABC – a relic of the Liberated Theatre of the 1930s, presided over by his father's friend Jan Werich – and then at the new Theatre on the Balustrade, which was a seedbed of the wave of experiment and innovation that was to flourish in all the arts in Prague in the 1960s. But the real understanding of what he had to do came as he began to take in, in a way that brought its own liberation, the extent to which the painful absurdities of life provided an objective correlative for this personal sense of alienation.
Looking at the plays and the life, it is not always easy to see the difference between imagined fiction and unimaginable fact, art often having a hard time keeping up with "nature" in that time and place. The Memorandum (1965), with its bursts of ptydepe, a pseudo-speech mocking the opaque cant of contemporary officialese, also quotes the notorious instruction of the party boss Antonín Novotný about "not falling on our knees before facts". And what is one to make of the counsel for a co-defendant in his 1979 trial – after Havel set up the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted – who, quite without irony, congratulated the state prosecutor on his case and apologised for having to advance a plea of not guilty? Havel got four and a half years.
"Shyness and courage, both very extreme – that's Havel," his friend Forman once said, though Havel would only admit to having been "a non-coward" in circumstances where he could not avoid choosing between cowardice and what he called non-cowardice. Those disturbing but educative early experiences did not inhibit Havel in his direct encounters with authority. His politics too were formed by "the view from outside". He left his mark on the sensibilities of the cultural commissars from the moment of his literary debut in 1956, when, on the strength of one article published in a new magazine, Kveten, he was invited to take part in a conference held to introduce – and keep an eye on – young authors at the Writers' Union's grand country quarters in the baroque palace of Dobris.
Writing poems in the margins of his laboratory work, Havel had found his way to the table of the banned poet Jiri Kola at the Cafe Slavia, and through him and Jaroslav Seifert had met the reclusive Vladimír Holan, the other great, and rarely published, Czech modernist. In his Kveten article, Havel had asked why the magazine and its young writers were not going to school with the older poets of Group 42 (which had been set up in 1942), why they did not even know their work. Now, blushing but highly articulate (and just as Soviet tanks were rolling through Budapest), the 19-year-old took advantage of this uncensored forum to lambast the assembled literary establishment for its conformity in a speech that dominated the weekend's proceedings.
The establishment duly noted him, long before his success as a playwright. He might even have shamed or encouraged some of that part of it that began to form the "antidogmatic" wing among the party's writers, with whom Havel would have more interesting encounters in the 1960s and which made much of the running during the Prague Spring as advisers and propagandists for Alexander Dubcek, the then party leader, and Josef Smrkovsky, chairman of the national assembly.
Younger than most of them, having missed the immediate postwar moment of naive but genuine enthusiasm for communism, Havel seemed always at a slightly sceptical tangent to that enterprise. His defining time had been 1956, the clarifying moment of what he once called "the pseudo-dialectical tension between dictatorship and the thaw". But after the collapse of all their hopes, in the grey years when, as one of his fellow writers put it, "there was a silence like a swamp" across the land, it was Havel who proved best able to rally them, to judge when the moment had come to go public with a petition or a project such as Charter 77 – and also when to go to prison and not into exile, as he was offered the choice of doing. And when the evident disintegration of the Soviet empire – in Poland, in East Germany, in Moscow itself – made Czechs and Slovaks bold enough to come out en masse into the streets at last, it was Havel, and not the former reform communists, whom they chose to lead them back to democracy.
Installed in the castle, the man who had succeeded Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the minds of western intellectuals as the very type and pattern of literary dissident, became now the most admired of leaders of the newly democratising states. There were times when there was some truth in the jibe that he was a president more popular abroad than at home, but his international standing helped him to lay the foundations of a rapprochement between the Czechs and Germany which would eventually overcome the scars of Munich, the Nazi protectorate and the harshly responsive expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in 1945-46. It also helped to establish his country's place at the head of the queue for entry to Nato and the EU, and to give weight to his wider advocacy of central Europe's special place at the heart, not the edge of Europe, and the Czech lands, once "the spiritual crossroads of Europe", as the place where that heart beat strongest.
More important to him even than this was the attempt to carry the moral clarity and authenticity of the politics of dissidence into the hurly burly of late 20th-century market democracy politics. Nor was this effort directed only at a domestic audience. "Experience of a totalitarian system of the communist type," he once said, "makes emphatically clear one thing which I hope has universal validity: that the prerequisite for everything political is moral. Politics really should be ethics put into practice ... This means taking a moral stand not for practical purposes, in the hope that it will bring political results, but as a matter of principle."
The Masarykian note was struck in his very first address as president, on New Year's Day, 1990: "Let us teach ourselves that politics can be not just the art of the possible, especially if that means the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals and pragmatic manoeuvring, but that it can even be the art of the impossible, namely the art of improving ourselves and the world." Increasingly, he brought together his aspirations for a more humane politics – capitalism with a human face, at least – with hopes for what Europe might be. With the desperately polluted wastelands of industrial north Bohemia to hand and at heart, he challenged the dangerous – and further west, then politically unchallengeable – myth of eternal growth, reminding the west of the dangers of a Europe that continued to be divided, not now by the iron curtain, but between a closed camp jealously guarding its vulnerable prosperity and a group of poor, disunited and less stable countries outside the gates: "One half of a room cannot remain forever warm while the other half is cold."
So far as domestic politics was concerned, the ideological and personal competition between the two Václavs, Havel and Klaus, the prime minister, was not without its comic side. Klaus, who like the vast majority of his compatriots had not been prominent in the opposition until just before the end, was more than a little jealous of Havel's international standing, and both personally and ideologically resentful of the thrust of his "moral politics".
They competed keenly to establish their own descriptions of the new reality. When Havel re-established Masaryk's radio fireside chats with the nation in his weekly Conversations at Lány (the presidential country residence), Klaus quickly arranging a slot for his views of how things were in weekly interviews in the newspaper Lidové Noviny.
One occasion on which their differences surfaced clearly was during the 1994 visit of Chile's former president, and still army chief General Augusto Pinochet to Prague to negotiate an arms deal. Havel recalled in unambiguous terms the bloody record of the general's men after the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende's government, while Klaus and his ministers stuck angrily to the line that this was a private commercial visit by a valuable customer for what (to Havel's continuing regret) was still one of the country's most important export industries. Another was an exchange in broadcasts each of them gave on the fifth anniversary of the "velvet revolution" in November 1994.
Havel, talking to students invited to Hradcany as "a gesture of recognition" of their part in restoring the nation to freedom, told them that while progress had been made in building the political and economic system, too many people thought that "freedom means the right to do anything, or that the market and ethics are mutually exclusive". He was strongly against laissez-faire in this moral dimension of society, he said, being convinced "that to rely on the self-correcting activity of a stabilising and political and economic system is not enough", that it was possible and necessary to do more.
Just two hours after Havel's speech, Klaus put out his counter-blast on the state news agency. The only people, he said, who were disappointed with what had happened since the downfall of communism, were "those ... who have not understood the bases of social phenomena, who have not understood what social processes are and who have not understood who is the actor in these processes". Some people, he said, "would like to take advantage of the end of communism to create something more than a free society. They would like to have not only free men and women here, but better men and women as well. They have the ambition to know how to do it, how to 'better' us, they know what is wrong with all of us and why. Well," he concluded, with a shrewd, low blow, "we have our own experience of this sort of thing."
This heralded a more general and predictable reaction, in the unheroic latter years of the century, against this unfashionably demanding president. It crystallised around his remarriage in January 1997 – less than a year after the death from cancer of Olga, his first wife and mainstay of the prison years – to Dagmar Veškrnová, an attractive and assertive actor almost 20 years his junior. Faced with the evident unpopularity of this move, Havel explained himself simply enough to the nation in another of his Masarykian fireside talks. Olga had been his companion for almost 45 years, he said. "She is, and always will be, an irreplaceable part of my soul. I married Dasa [Dagmar] not to replace Olga but simply because we love each other and want to live together."
But much of the popular press, and a virulent independent television station owned by a political enemy, had a field day. "There is a kind of Havel hunt going on," said a member of the unhappy coalition government that, in 1998, had succeeded Klaus's long parliamentary reign. "He's almost being turned into a dissident again."
The attempt to convert Havel from impossible saint to everyday sinner coincided more or less with the onset of a long series of near fatal illnesses and hospitalisations, involving lung cancer, blood poisoning, pneumonia, spells on a respirator, and abdominal operations which left him for a time with a colostomy bag. "Mr Havel's body reads like a medical textbook," said one of his doctors, describing how, after the president's fifth near-death experience in three years, they were running out of ways of performing tracheotomies on him.
But he survived then, as he survived, just, politically in 1998 when, in spite of his unpopularity with parts of the managerial elite, enough Czechs seemed to feel they still needed the element of reassurance his presence in the president's lodgings provided; there he remained until 2003 when he stepped down. A year later the Czech republic joined the European Union. His memoir of his years as president, To the Castle and Back, was published in 2007.
As to Havel's "idealism" – if that is what one must call serious ecological concern, an abjuring of narrow nationalism and materialism, and an eye on what the market's "hidden hand" is actually up to or capable of – he left us with some reason, in these dangerous early years of the new millennium, to think that the "realist" critique of such preoccupations was itself anachronistic. Who, after all, were the realists of 1989? Not the clever advisers and the experienced, well-intentioned politicians in Bonn, for instance, who were telling me a few months before its fall, that "for the foreseeable future" – that comforting old formulation – the Berlin Wall and other essential structures of the cold war settlement would be remaining in place.
It is hard to think of a better provisional epitaph than that supplied in the midst of his later troubles by Martin Palouš, one of the first signatories of Charter 77: "Havel was the man who was able to stage this miracle play. The sacrifice was to cast himself in the main role."
He is survived by his wife.
