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Vaněk Plays
The Vaněk plays are a set of plays in which the character Ferdinand Vaněk is central. Vaněk first appeared in the play ''Audience'' by Václav Havel. He subsequently appeared in three other plays by Havel (''Protest'', ''Unveiling'', and ''Dozens of Cousins''), as well as plays by his friends and colleagues, including Pavel Landovský and Tom Stoppard. Today, the Vaněk plays are among Havel's best-known works. In English, they are principally known through the translations of Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz. Origins Ferdinand Vaněk first appeared in the play ''Audience'' in 1975 as a stand-in for Havel. Vaněk, like Havel, was a dissident playwright, forced to work in a brewery because his writing has been banned by the Czechoslovak Communist regime. In the course of the play, it becomes clear that the brewmaster has been asked to spy on him. A long, rambling, comic dialogue proceeds, in the course of which the brewmaster eventually becomes a sympathetic figure, rather than ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Václav Havel
Václav Havel (; 5 October 193618 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and former dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and then as the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003 and was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs. His educational opportunities having been limited by his bourgeois background, when freedoms were limited by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Havel first rose to prominence as a playwright. In works such as '' The Garden Party'' and ''The Memorandum'', Havel used an absurdist style to criticize the Communist system. After participating in the Prague Spring and being blacklisted after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he became more politically active and helped found several dissident ini ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pavel Landovský
Pavel Landovský (11 September 1936 – 10 October 2014), nicknamed Lanďák, was a Czech actor, playwright, and director. He was a prominent dissident under the communist regime of former Czechoslovakia. Biography Landovský was born in Havlíčkův Brod in 1936, and after finishing his studies at the secondary technical school of mechanical engineering, he tried four times to enter the Faculty of Theatre in Prague, without success. He started his acting career as a supernumerary actor in the regional theatre in Teplice and continued to perform in regional theatres in Šumperk, Klatovy, and Pardubice. The first play that he wrote, ''Hodinový hoteliér'', premiered at the Činoherní klub theatre in Prague on 11 May 1969. In 1971, the communist regime banned him from film and television. He continued acting at Činoherní klub and other theatres. Landovský was one of the initiators of the human rights petition Charter 77 and along with Václav Havel and Ludvík Vaculík, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard (born , 3 July 1937) is a Czech born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. Stoppard was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997. Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright. Stoppard's most prominent plays include ''R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz (born Markéta Götzová; 15 February 1927 – 6 November 2022) was a Canadian scholar and translator, best-known for her work on Czech literature. Born to a German Bohemian mother and a Czech-Jewish father, she won the 1988 Ordo Scriptores Bohemici prize, 2000 Medal of Merit, and 2016 George Theiner Prize. Radio Prague International described her as Life Markéta Götzová was born in Liberec. From 1935 to 1948, she lived in Místek where she studied at a German School. Her father was Jewish and survived Theresienstadt. In 1948, her family emigrated to Toronto. She studied German philology and graduated from University of Toronto, and Columbia University. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the 19th century German novelist Wilhelm Raabe. From 1959, she taught German literature at University of British Columbia, and was best known for her scholarship on samizdat and dissident writers such as Václav Havel. In 1965, she married Polish-born political scie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Czechoslovakia
, rue, Чеськословеньско, , yi, טשעכאסלאוואקיי, , common_name = Czechoslovakia , life_span = 1918–19391945–1992 , p1 = Austria-Hungary , image_p1 = , s1 = Czech Republic , flag_s1 = Flag of the Czech Republic.svg , s2 = Slovakia , flag_s2 = Flag of Slovakia.svg , image_flag = Flag of Czechoslovakia.svg , flag = Flag of Czechoslovakia , flag_type = Flag(1920–1992) , flag_border = Flag of Czechoslovakia , image_coat = Middle coat of arms of Czechoslovakia.svg , symbol_type = Middle coat of arms(1918–1938 and 1945–1961) , image_map = Czechoslovakia location map.svg , image_map_caption = Czechoslovakia during the interwar period and the Cold War , national_motto = , anthems = ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samizdat
Samizdat (russian: самиздат, lit=self-publishing, links=no) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because most typewriters and printing devices required official registration and permission to access. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship. Name origin and variations Etymologically, the word ''samizdat'' derives from ''sam'' (, "self, by oneself") and ''izdat'' (, an abbreviation of , , "publishing house"), and thus means "self-published". The Ukrainian language has a similar term: ''samvydav'' (самвидав), from ''sam'', "self", and ''vydavnytstvo'', "publishing house". A Russian poet Nikolay Glazkov coined a version of the term as a pun in the 1940s when he typed copies of his poems and included the note ''Samsebyaizd ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pavel Kohout
Pavel Kohout (born 20 July 1928) is a Czech and Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet. He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, a Prague Spring participant and dissident in the 1970s until he was not allowed to return from Austria. He was a founding member of the Charter 77 movement. Biography He was still a devoted communist upon graduating from secondary school in 1947, and graduated from Charles University in 1952, with a degree in theater and aesthetics. He then became a member of the Central Committee of the , serving until 1960. It was during this period that he began writing plays and poetry. He was also a member of the . In 1956, he was briefly employed by Czechoslovak Television as a reporter and commentator. From 1963 to 1966, he was the dramaturge at Vinohrady Theatre. While there, he became attracted to the reform movement and resigned from the Union of Writers due to questions concerning his "cultural-political orientation". In 1967, following a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jiří Dienstbier
Jiří Dienstbier (20 April 1937 – 8 January 2011) was a Czech politician and journalist. Born in Kladno, he was one of Czechoslovakia's most respected foreign correspondents before being fired after the Prague Spring. Unable to have a livelihood as a journalist, he worked as a janitor for the next two decades. During this time, he secretly revived the suppressed ''Lidové noviny'' newspaper. After the end of communist rule in 1989, he became the country's first non-Communist foreign minister in four decades, a post he held until 1992. In 2008 he was elected to the Czech Senate for the Kladno region. He died in Prague. Awards and honors In 2000, the Vienna-based International Press Institute named him one of its 50 World Press Freedom Heroes of the past 50 years. In 2013, Dienstbier was posthumously awarded the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award given jointly by the Prague Society for International Cooperation The Prague Society for International Cooperation is a Prague ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rock 'n' Roll (play)
''Rock 'n' Roll'' is a play by British playwright Tom Stoppard that premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2006. Plot summary The play is concerned with the significance of rock and roll in the emergence of the socialist movement in Eastern-Bloc Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Taking place in Cambridge, England and in Prague, the play contrasts the attitudes of a young Czech PhD student and rock music fan, who becomes appalled by the repressive regime in his home country, with those of his British Marxist professor, who unrepentantly continues to believe in the Soviet ideal. The play takes place over several decades, from the late 1960s until 1990, ending with a concert given by the Rolling Stones that year in Prague. Recurrent references are made to a glimpse by one of the main characters of the young Syd Barrett performing ''Golden Hair''. Barrett's physical and mental decline also plays a role in the drama (Barrett ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Einhorn
Edward Einhorn (born September 6, 1970) is an American playwright, theater director, and novelist, noted for the comic absurdism of his drama and the imaginative richness of his literary works. A native of Westfield, New Jersey, Einhorn graduated from Westfield High School, where he was an editor of the student newspaper ''Hi's Eye''. He attended Johns Hopkins University. In 1992 he started the Untitled Theater Company #61 in New York (co-founded with his older brother David Einhorn, who has produced plays for the company). With that company, Edward Einhorn directed T. S. Eliot's ''Sweeney Agonistes'', Eugène Ionesco's ''The Bald Soprano'', Dennis Potter's '' Brimstone and Treacle'', and Richard Foreman's ''My Head Was a Sledgehammer'', among other works. He staged a festival of the complete plays of Eugène Ionesco, a celebration of the total plays of Václav Havel, a calypso musical adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's ''Cat's Cradle'', an adaptation of ''Do Androids Dream of Electri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
