{"id":32121,"date":"2015-07-25T04:00:17","date_gmt":"2015-07-25T08:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32121"},"modified":"2020-08-07T09:36:11","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T13:36:11","slug":"a-new-biography-of-vaclav-havel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/07\/25\/a-new-biography-of-vaclav-havel\/","title":{"rendered":"A new biography of V\u00e1clav Havel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel J. Mahoney<\/a> reviews Havel: A Life<\/em>, by Michael Zantovsky:<\/p>\n

Michael Zantovsky has written a remarkable book about a complex and genuinely admirable human being. Zantovsky, a long-time friend and sometime press secretary to V\u00e1clav Havel, went on to become Czech ambassador to Washington and to the Court of St. James in London. He has intimate knowledge of Havel and writes with verve and clarity. He freely admits to \u201cloving\u201d Havel, even as he maintains his critical distance and avoids anything resembling hagiography. Zantovsky is aided in this seemingly impossible task by his experience as a clinical psychologist, which allows him to combine admiration with detachment and remarkable descriptive powers. Unlike so many other critical accounts inspired by suspicion and anti-elitism, his \u201cloving\u201d but measured account leaves Havel\u2019s greatness undiminished.<\/p>\n

As Zantovsky shows, Havel was \u201cone of the more fascinating politicians of the last century\u201d even as he was much more than a politician. He ably explores Havel\u2019s multiple roles as writer, dramatist, moralist, dissident, and anti-totalitarian theoretician. The book also captures Havel\u2019s myriad \u201ccontradictions,\u201d which were never too far from the surface. A born leader who was kind, polite, humorous, and self-effacing, he was also a \u201cbundle of nerves,\u201d prone to depression and self-medication, and to \u201csometimes ill-considered sexual adventures.\u201d Havel\u2019s admirers are obliged to confront that latter point. This moralist did not readily apply moral criteria to affairs of the heart and was sometimes promiscuous in ways that belie conventional morality and religious principles. He seems to have at least partly bought into the radically \u201cindividualist\u201d ethos of the 1960s, at least as regards \u201cpersonal\u201d morality. Zantovsky provides an insightful analysis of the dissident culture of the sixties and seventies, which was in most respects admirable, even as it defended sexual \u201cfreedom\u201d as a venue for individual autonomy in an order dominated by totalitarian repression and the erosion of individuality.<\/p>\n

Sexual indiscretions aside, Havel was an intensely spiritual man who didn\u2019t adhere to any religion. Despite his admiration for Pope John Paul II and his prison friendship with the future cardinal archbishop of Prague, Dominik Duka, he \u201cdid not die a Roman Catholic.\u201d But he respected religion and even attended secret masses in prison. In his voluminous writings and speeches, he upheld a quasi-theistic \u201cconception of being\u201d and an understanding of \u201cresponsibility rooted in the memory of Being.\u201d In Havel\u2019s philosophical conception, everything we do is remembered, \u201crecorded,\u201d by \u201cbeing\u201d itself. This was Havel\u2019s equivalent of immortality; it provided cosmic grounds or support for moral responsibility. These spiritual convictions, bordering on New Age philosophy, were a staple of Havel\u2019s speeches at home and abroad during his years as president first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel J. Mahoney reviews Havel: A Life, by Michael Zantovsky: Michael Zantovsky has written a remarkable book about a complex and genuinely admirable human being. Zantovsky, a long-time friend and sometime press secretary to V\u00e1clav Havel, went on to become Czech ambassador to Washington and to the Court of St. James in London. He has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,62,7,10],"tags":[1391,995,572,506],"class_list":["post-32121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-europe","category-history","category-liberty","tag-biography","tag-czechrepublic","tag-leadership","tag-revolution"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8m5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32121"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59387,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32121\/revisions\/59387"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}