Vendela Vida: ‘The sense of smell is underused in fiction these days’ June 8, 2015 Source: The Globe and Mail / www.theglobeandmail.com / Vendela Vida is the author of several books, including the novels Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers. Vida, who lives in California, is also a founding editor of The Believer magazine. Her latest novel, The Diver’s Clothes Lie …
REVIEW: Memorandum by Vaclav Havel, Lancaster Library May 27, 2015 Source: Lancaster Guardian / www.lancasterguardian.co.uk / ‘Memorandum’, a black comedy by Czech philosopher, politician and playwright Václav Havel, was written and first staged in Communist Prague. It is very much in the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd, alongside the works of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, John Osborne and …
Havel´s essay influences Egyptian political activists -translator May 16, 2015 Source: ČTK / www.ctk.cz / Late Czech president Vaclav Havel´s political essay The Power of the Powerless has markedly influenced political activists in Egypt, Egyptian expert in Czech studies Khalid Biltagi, who translated this work by Havel, told CTK today. Biltagi took part in a discussion about Havel, organised by The Vaclav …
The Moral Revolution in East-Central Europe May 14, 2015 Source: The World Post / By John Feffer / Some of the most powerful critiques of the Communist governments in East-Central Europe were moral. Vaclav Havel, for instance, argued that the regimes, with their propaganda and inequalities and corruption, were built on a foundation of lies. He proposed the alternative of …
Vaclav Havel: author of his country May 4, 2015 Source: The Australian / By Nicolas Rothwell / A dramatist whose life’s course surpassed the wildest theatric plotlines, a dissident condemned by fate to lead his country, a political prisoner turned leader of a peaceful revolution, a romantic and a private, self-doubting man — Vaclav Havel, first president of post-communist …
Vaclav Havel: What He Inspired April 23, 2015 Source: The New York Review of Books / By Paul Wilson / Few people have been better positioned to write about Vaclav Havel than Michael Zantovsky. He had known Havel since the mid-1980s, and was his press secretary, spokesman and adviser for 2 1/2 years, from early 1990 to mid-1992. During …
Is India’s Aam Admi Party no place for intellectuals? April 23, 2015 Source: BBC / By Soutik Biswas, Delhi correspondent / Vaclav Havel, the Czech Republic’s first president after the Velvet Revolution against communist rule, once said that politics needs more intellectuals. “I hear objections,” Havel, a former dissident playwright wrote. “Politicians must be elected; people vote for those who think the way they …
Pakistan’s political leaders as heroes April 14, 2015 Source: The Express Tribune / By Shahid Javed Burki / I will begin this discourse on political leaders as heroes with some admittedly debatable observations. After years of following Pakistan’s halting development as a nation, as a political system, and as an economic entity, I have come to believe that …
Havel’s Specter: On Václav Havel April 9, 2012 Source: The Nation / By Caleb Crain / The Czech playwright’s enduring ideas about politics, truth and human nature. “A specter is haunting Eastern Europe,” the Czech playwright Václav Havel wrote in 1978, “the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’” In echoing the opening salvo of the Communist …
Democracy and the Human Heart February 16, 2012 Source: The New Republic / By Paul Berman / The Village Voice gives out theater awards called the Obies (for Off-Broadway), and during the 1980s the Voice’s theater department voted to bestow one of those prizes on the distinguished absurdist Václav Havel, who dwelled in the faraway absurdistan known as the Czechoslovak …
Living in truth December 31, 2011 Source: The Economist / The unassuming man who taught, through plays and politics, how tyranny may be defied and overcome Had communists not seized power in his homeland in 1948, Vaclav Havel would have been simply a distinguished Central European intellectual. That is how, triumphantly, he ended his career. In …
Mourners in Prague Honor Havel December 23, 2011 Source: The New York Times / By Nicholas Kulish and Katerina Santurova / Mourners filled the historic St. Vitus Cathedral here on Friday and gathered outside by the thousands on a frigid December morning for the funeral Mass of the playwright, dissident and former president Vaclav Havel, an emotional outpouring of affection that largely …
Vaclav Havel, Former Czech President, Dies at 75 December 18, 2011 Source: The New York Times / By Dan Bilefsky and Jane Perlez / Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident whose eloquent dissections of Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and swept Mr. Havel himself into power, died on Sunday. He was …
Havel, Still a Man of Morals and Mischief October 13, 2009 Source: The New York Times / By Alison Smale / PRAGUE — It was supposed to be an interview about the revolutions that overturned communism 20 years ago in Europe. But first, Vaclav Havel had a question. Was it true that President Obama had refused to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington? Mr. Havel is a fan …
Our Moral Footprint September 27, 2007 Source: The New York Times / By Vaclav Havel / OVER the past few years the questions have been asked ever more forcefully whether global climate changes occur in natural cycles or not, to what degree we humans contribute to them, what threats stem from them and what can be …
